Feb 02 2021
Kid One first fell in love with this book as an elementary school student, a Protestant child living in an Orthodox country enjoying a very Jewish story. And what’s not to like? Hershel of Ostropol wanders into an unnamed Central European village on the first night of Hanukkah expecting celebration and hospitality. Instead, he finds …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/02/hershel-and-the-hanukkah-goblins-written-by-eric-kimmel/
Aug 18 2020
This has been a pretty amazing year for me in terms of discovering five star reads, and this was definitely my latest and probably most personally beloved. So here’s the thing. When I read a book with Muslim rep, I have a habit of asking “if this was a book about believing Christians, how comfortable …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/08/18/all-american-muslim-girl-by-nadine-jolie-courtney/
Aug 07 2020
In contemporary popular literature which takes as its default Christianity as the dominant belief system, there are two main kinds of believer: the kind who want prayers answered and the kind who want to complain bitterly about how God could possibly let such-and-such happen. The two main protagonists of The Cabin At The End Of …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/08/07/the-cabin-at-the-end-of-the-world-by-paul-tremblay/
Aug 04 2020
A slightly belated Selamat Hari Raya Aidiladha! What better way to kick off the season than by, er, reviewing a book about Aidilfitri. Well, technically Ramadan, but since I’d put off ordering this picture book for my kids till I had several novels I wanted to buy in hard copy from my local indie bookstore, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/08/04/lailahs-lunchbox-a-ramadan-story-by-reem-faruqi-lea-lyon/
May 24 2020
Where Jonathan Riley-Smith provided an overview of crusading as a movement over many centuries, Jonathan Phillips looks closely at one particular crusade, with an eye toward answering the question of why an expedition intended to take Jerusalem and other sites in the Holy Land wound up instead besieging, conquering and sacking Constantinople. Apparently this was …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/05/24/the-fourth-crusade-by-jonathan-phillips/
May 16 2020
How could I resist a book that took my alma mater‘s motto as its epigraph? Of course I couldn’t, all the more so because I wanted to read something about knights and journeys and castles, and none of the fantasy that was close at hand was as immediately appealing. The version of Riley-Smith’s book that …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/05/16/the-crusades-by-jonathan-riley-smith/
Mar 19 2020
What a lot of fatuous nonsense. First of all, let’s talk about the marketing for this novel. It’s being touted as the story of a Muslim Indian-American family and sure yes, but also it’s a very specific brand of Muslim, a conservative Shi’ah that’s as bizarre to me, raised a mainstream Sunni Muslim, as the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/03/19/a-place-for-us-by-fatima-farheen-mirza/
Dec 16 2019
One of the problems with the classics is that their motivations can seem so far removed from our everyday lives. Even if the works can stand alone on their artistic merits, there’s often a lot of phobic nonsense distracting to modern-day readers who don’t have the privilege of merely ignoring such in our day-to-day: must …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/12/16/home-fire-by-kamila-shamsie/
Dec 08 2019
Of the predecessor to Seven Surrenders, Too Like the Lightning, I wrote that Palmer directly tackles the problem of how different far-future humans will be from present-day people. As Mycroft Canner, her unreliable narrator, says near that book’s beginning, “You will criticize me, reader, for writing in a style six hundred years removed from the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/12/08/seven-surrenders-by-ada-palmer/
May 27 2019
Imagine my surprise! “Hi, Doug, I don’t comment on my own books usually. But this is Eastertide. Bless Me, Father (5 books and 3 TV series) was a best-seller in its day, the 1970s. I didn’t expect is to be selling as many copies in 2019. And thousands watch the TV series on Youtube each …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/05/27/hoisted-from-comments-father-boyd/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire