Mar 05 2021
A genre-bending novel, when done right, can really reshape the way we think about what’s possible both in fiction and in real life. Much like Sara Faring’s The Tenth Girl, this layered blend of literary genres has the reader reconsidering the processes of our everyday existence, what it takes to live in (or buck) the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/03/05/forget-me-not-by-alexandra-oliva/
Feb 07 2021
Nobel laureate, Polish literature, what’s not to like? It turns out that for me the more relevant question was what’s to like? Tokarczuk’s first-person narrator and protagonist, Janina Duszejko lives alone in a small group of houses on a plateau in southern Poland, hard up against the border with the Czech Republic. Most of the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/07/drive-your-plows-over-the-bones-of-the-dead-by-olga-tokarczuk/
Jan 14 2021
Given how prominently the name Agatha Christie is displayed on the cover, I wonder why they don’t just call this Agatha Christie’s… oh actually, I can see why now, nvm. But yes, this is the second novel in Sophie Hannah’s take on the beloved Belgian detective, and I found I liked it less than the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/01/14/closed-casket-new-hercule-poirot-mysteries-2-by-sophie-hannah/
Jan 11 2021
It genuinely felt like this book was written by one person for the first 60% and another for the last 40%. Maybe this has something to do with the book being a reissue from 2015, telling the first chronological story of the Koa Kane Hawaiian Mystery series, and perhaps being updated for 2021. What I …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/01/11/death-of-a-messenger-koa-kane-hawaiian-mystery-1-by-robert-b-mccaw/
Dec 31 2020
How would a sword-and-sorcery author who basically wanted to have a hell of a lot of fun write in the twenty-first century? They’d write like Tamsyn Muir does in Gideon the Ninth, I think. “In the myriadic year of our Lord—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!—Gideon Nav packed …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/12/31/gideon-the-ninth-by-tamsyn-muir/
Nov 10 2020
Y’aaaaall. I’ve read plenty of books with unsympathetic narrators but this is one of the perishing few where I could sympathize with our protagonist even as I lacked any empathy for her. Grace Wright is, in temperament, my exact opposite. She has a fixed idea of how things should be, and reacts poorly when things …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/10/she-lies-close-by-sharon-doering/
Oct 08 2020
Q. Every book has its own story about how it came to be conceived and written as it did. How did She Lies Close evolve? The inspiration for She Lies Close came from my family’s move to a new neighborhood years ago and finding out that a guy down the street was being prosecuted for …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/10/08/an-interview-with-sharon-doering-author-of-she-lies-close/
Sep 29 2020
I absolutely panicked when I read somewhere that the Netflix movie Enola Holmes is based on more than the first novel in the book series, The Case Of The Missing Marquess, so borrowed this to squeeze in between the eleventy billion deadlines I’m facing (I was wrong, btw: the movie is based on only that …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/09/29/the-case-of-the-left-handed-lady-enola-holmes-2-by-nancy-springer/
Sep 08 2020
Embarrassingly, I totally had Robert B Parker mixed up with Richard Stark because of the latter’s Parker novels. I’m starting to wonder whether I do, in fact, read too many books. And, given this title, whether I watch too little TV, as I’ve definitely watched a wee bit of the Stone Cold adaptation but never …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/09/08/robert-b-parkers-fools-paradise-jesse-stone-19-by-mike-lupica/
Aug 26 2020
I’ve probably already nattered on obnoxiously about the fact that I inhaled every published book in Dame Agatha Christie’s oeuvre the year I was thirteen, but that was a seminal event in my life, solidifying my reading habits and eventual, oddly specialized, career path. Two years ago, I was given the opportunity to review the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/08/26/the-monogram-murders-new-hercule-poirot-mysteries-1-by-sophie-hannah/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire