Aug 11 2021
In her note at the start of The First Four Books of Poems, Louise Glück writes of her goals before and after The House on Marshland: “After Firstborn, I set myself the task of making poems as single sentences, having found myself trapped in fragments. After The House on Marshland, I tried to wean myself …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/08/11/the-house-on-marshland-by-louise-gluck/
Aug 09 2021
A.K. Larkwood delivers her readers into a deliciously pulpy setting right from the start: “In the deep wilds of the north, there is a Shrine cut into the mountainside. The forest covers these hills like a shroud. This is a quiet country, but the Shrine of the Unspoken One is quieter still. Birds and insects …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/08/09/the-unspoken-name-by-a-k-larkwood/
Aug 08 2021
Naomi Novik opens A Deadly Education with what ought to be a perfect narrative hook: “I decided Orion needed to die after the second time he saved my life.” (p, 3) Who’s speaking? Who’s Orion? Why does the narrator want to kill him? And why the second time he saved the narrator’s life? The narrator …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/08/08/a-deadly-education-by-naomi-novik/
Jul 25 2021
I loved “The City Born Great,” the 2016 short story (and 2017 Hugo finalist) that was the seed of this novel. “The conceit of the story is that great human cities have a life of their own. Maybe that life awakens quickly, maybe it takes centuries or millennia, but at some point the genius loci …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/07/25/the-city-we-became-by-n-k-jemisin/
Jul 24 2021
Isn’t Eastern Standard Tribe a neat title? It sounds so nifty, so cool, so exciting, there must be a lot happening behind it. Doctorow has Art, the first-person narrator of roughly half the chapters, spell things out about halfway through the book. “It’s like this,” I said. “It used to be that the way you …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/07/24/eastern-standard-tribe-by-cory-doctorow/
Jul 12 2021
I wrote in 2015, “One last thing that I liked about The Goblin Emperor is that it didn’t end with an obvious sequel on its way. There are many stories that Addison could set in this world, and they would be a pleasure to read…” The Witness for the Dead is one of those stories, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/07/12/the-witness-for-the-dead-by-katherine-addison/
Jun 26 2021
Let me just say up front that I loved all four main characters in Utopia Avenue and didn’t want anything bad to happen to them ever. It’s a good thing I wasn’t in charge, then, as that would have made for a dull novel. David Mitchell not only had the skill to create people who …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/06/26/utopia-avenue-by-david-mitchell/
Jun 23 2021
Ivan IV, not yet known as the Terrible, ascended to the throne as Grand Prince of Muscovy at the tender age of three. His father, Vasily III, “was a mild-mannered prince, well-liked by the people. Unlike his more famous father, Ivan III, known to history as Ivan the Great, who conquered large territories and fought …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/06/23/ivan-the-terrible-by-robert-payne-and-nikita-romanoff/
Jun 20 2021
It’s funny that Dennis O’Driscoll begins his interview of Seamus Heaney about North by quoting a description of it as “a very oblique and intense book” because I found it not nearly as oblique as Wintering Out or Door Into the Dark. Heaney divided North into two parts, “a first section that has poems full …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/06/20/north-by-seamus-heaney/
Jun 06 2021
Since the last time I looked in on Murderbot, it has become more secure in its freedom and found something like a home among the people of the Preservation Alliance. Preservation, as it is known throughout Network Effect, is something of a post-scarcity utopia, an interstellar polity posed as a counterpoint to Murderbot’s area of …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/06/06/network-effect-by-martha-wells/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire