Minor Mage by T Kingfisher

This book reads far differently for me as a mom now than if I’d read it before my kids were born, but I’d like to think that my younger self would still have appreciated how terrific, how finely crafted this tale of a young wizard on a quest to save his village is.

Oliver is our titular minor mage. He knows all of three spells, learned at the feet of an aging wizard, and one of them is to alleviate his allergy to his own armored familiar, Armadillo. Armadillo has a real name, of course, but one doesn’t go around calling a wizard’s familiar by his real name, so calling him by his species name will have to do. Oliver is also twelve years old, and when his mother, a former adventurer, heads to the next village over to help his older sister with the birth of her first child, he decides he’s going to take the opportunity to travel to the distant Rainblade Mountains in order to bring rain to his drought-stricken village. Unfortunately, a mob of his own villagers interrupt his packing to demand he set off immediately, turning his youthful folly into a much less savoury undertaking. On the plus side, Oliver acknowledges, once his mother gets back she’s going to be much less upset with him than with their fellow villagers.

So off Oliver goes, and over the course of nearly 200 pages, he has adventures that make him think about community and what people owe one another, though in far less abstract terms. His adventures are hair-raising and near fatal, but he learns so much about his capabilities and limitations. He also, unabashedly, misses his mother. Which got me to thinking, as I do every so often, of how few stories talk about good, heroic moms, at least in comparison with dads. For every Not Without My Daughter you have three Taken movies, after all. Not that Mom comes in to save the day here, tho: this is still very much a book about Oliver’s choices and agency. But it was nice to see the loving bond between living mother and child, especially in a fairy tale genre rife with dead or cruel maternal figures.

Tho as in real life, younger readers likely won’t even notice this. They will, however, appreciate not only Oliver’s adventures but also the wit and charm of the writing in general. T Kingfisher blends humor and suspense with just the right touch of gore, underpinning everything with a thoughtful look at how children deal with unreliable adults, as well as with how the idea of adventure rarely lives up to reality. Most importantly, she underscores a lot of things you don’t often find in fairy tales: how it’s okay to be scared sometimes, how it’s okay to miss your mom, how it’s okay to feel bad about making tough choices and, my personal favorite, how it’s okay to not want to be normal. Overall, an outstanding book from an author I’ve long wanted to read, and currently my favorite for the Lodestar Award at the 2020 Hugos.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/07/15/minor-mage-by-t-kingfisher/

An Interview with Tiffani Angus, author of Threading The Labyrinth

Q. Every book has its own story about how it came to be conceived and written as it did. How did Threading The Labyrinth evolve?

A. Way back in 2009, it started as a research proposal for a PhD in Creative Writing. I wanted to study the history of English gardens and write a novel that span 400 years in a garden with an analysis of space and time in gardens in fantasy fiction. I wrote that novel, passed my viva, and then set about trying to publish the book. It underwent some big changes, though, to get it from PhD to bookshelves!

I love multi-generational stories, so I wanted several time periods represented in the novel; there are even some time periods and stories I wanted that didn’t make it to the pages. The stories inside it each evolved individually, set to feature certain gardening styles and some ideas springing from specific things I discovered on my research. For example, Joan the weeding woman was named for two weeding women I found in a record of Hampton Court’s garden laborers from the reign of Henry VIII, and Mary Hill’s aunt Madeline was inspired by the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. It was only when I finished the novel that I realized Toni, the American who comes to England to find her heritage, was—in a very small way—me, an American returning to the land of her ancestors. It was about halfway through writing it that I also realized that it was an adult version of the trope found in a lot of fantasy books for children in which the garden is a time travel device, though in Threading’s case it isn’t as overt. Once I realized that, a lot became clear, so I took it and ran with it!

Q. Do you write with any particular audience in mind? Are there any particular audiences you hope will connect with this story?

A. I teach creative writing, and I honestly don’t believe in “writing for yourself” in the sense of writing but never intending to share it; I think writing for yourself is writing for those people out there like you who are on the lookout for stories about witches or ghosts or interstellar orchids or whatever. So I wrote this because I’ve always loved multi-generational books and historical fiction that is about real people but messes with the history a bit and inserts fantastic elements. I hope this appeals to fantasy readers and historical fiction readers—I think it has enough for both audiences without necessarily alienating either one. Gardeners might like it, too, but hopefully they approach it as fiction and not as written by a professional horticulturist!

Q. It isn’t often that we read a novel like Threading The Labyrinth where gardening is shown to be a form of art, ever evolving and often needing the commitment of generations to perpetuate and expand upon the work of the original creators. How has your own connection to gardening and art influenced your writing of this book?

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/07/14/an-interview-with-tiffani-angus-author-of-threading-the-labyrinth/

Riverland by Fran Wilde

Oh how my heart hurt for the Prine sisters, 7th grader Eleanor and her younger sister Mike! Growing up with an abusive father, Simon, and a mother, Moira, who would prefer to blame them rather than defend them, the girls resort to telling each other stories about magic in order to explain the horrifying circumstances in which they live. On one particularly bad evening, when their developer father breaks a witch ball heirloom they’d inherited from their mother’s Scandinavian forebears, a portal opens up beneath Eleanor’s bed that whisks the girls to Riverland, an odd place that shares a name with the coastal Baltimore development they live in (and, it’s implied, that Simon helped build from land Moira inherited.)

Portal Riverland is a scary place inhabited by birds who tend to the budding dreams and nightmares that grow in the reeds along the banks of the river that dominates the landscape. Things aren’t going so well in Portal Riverland tho, as the nightmares, under the guidance of the monstrous Anassa, are trying to break through the cracks in the tunnels that form the border between Portal Riverland and reality. Eleanor and Mike just want to go home, especially after they’re told that staying past daybreak will trap them there forever. But the girls keep coming back for one reason or another, even as the reality of their abusive family life threatens to escape the confines of their home.

This depiction of abused children feels so achingly honest and personal, as if Fran Wilde is exposing her own wounds (which, it is implied, she is.) Eleanor and Mike are easy to root for, even as their upbringing makes them occasionally awful. Is anyone surprised when they’re casually violent with one another, given what they’ve been shown is acceptable behavior through what their father does to them and their mother? Ms Wilde’s exploration of complicity and blame is haunting, so much so that I wanted to reach out to the two Prine girls and assure them that none of this is their fault. It made my heart hurt as a mom to see parents fail their children as completely as the Prine parents do here.

That said, this book is unfortunately less successful as a fantasy novel. Portal Riverland is meant to be an extended metaphor for what the girls are going through but often feels sloppy and disconnected, which is fine for a personal fable but not so great for mass publication. Also, almost everyone outside of the Prine family is barely more than a stick figure — Aja and Kalliope get particularly short shrift, at odds with the author’s note at the beginning that hopes we will love them — and Pendra, who is probably given the most depth otherwise, is eye-gougingly annoying. Maybe it’s because I was a pretty empathetic, private kid myself whose circle of friends was generally sensitive to each other’s feelings, but her oblivious insistence on having things her way even when it obviously hurt her friend’s feelings made me pretty mad.

I also wish that there had been more of an emphasis on Eleanor learning how to manage her feelings in a healthy way beyond the two sentences James said to her about her anger. Given that Ms Wilde wants this book to be available to any kids going through a similar situation in hopes that it will spur them to get help by telling the truth, I felt that it might have been even more helpful in overtly assuring them that they’re not bad kids simply by virtue of being abused, and that their conditioning is not irreversible. I guess that’s a lot to ask for from any one book, but I would honestly rather have read about that than the half-baked fantasy world the girls find themselves in.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/07/13/riverland-by-fran-wilde/

Deeplight by Frances Hardinge

This may be the most original fantasy novel I’ve read so far this year! I genuinely can’t believe this is billed as a children’s book when it’s so rich and layered and honestly deeply interrogative of personal and political relationships and choices. It’s so much more thoughtful and nuanced than at least 75% of the adult and YA fantasy I’ve ever read in my lifetime, with terrific deaf representation, too. I’m genuinely shocked not to have heard of it before the Lodestar slate for the Hugos came out!

Our protagonist Hark is an orphan on Lady’s Crave, one of the islands that make up the Myriad Archipelago. The Myriad used to worship terrifying monsters from the deep who guarded each island or cluster of same, until several decades ago when the gods began to tear each other apart. Nowadays, there’s a thriving trade in godware, the relics of the dead sea monsters that possess unusual and often coveted properties. Hark is a scavenger and his best friend in the world is Jelt, who’s looked out for him since they were little. As Jelt grows older and harder, however, their relationship begins to sour.

When Jelt guilts Hark into a reckless undertaking that gets Hark arrested, Hark is at first upset, then grateful for the fact that his sentence requires him to stay away from his former associates or face an even worse punishment. But Jelt shows up again with the promise of one last score, and Hark is unable to resist his friend’s bullying tactics. Things go dreadfully awry, setting Hark on a terrible path: either choose to save his friend or to save Myriad.

The blurb calls Deeplight a cross between 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and Frankenstein, and while those influences are obvious in this novel, it’s so much more. The toxic friendship between Hark and Jelt opens Hark up for some real soul-searching, even before he begins to understand as more than instinct the power of and need for storytelling as witness. The truth about the sea monsters, birth to demise, was also really well done, as was the dissection of the usage of fear and the hard choices that had to be taken in order to protect Myriad. Frances Hardinge doesn’t paint in broad, heroic brushstrokes, but carefully takes into account the ramifications — the cold equations, if you will — our characters must accept as being an inescapable part of their work and good intentions. It is both deeply moral and deeply nuanced, and just about one of the smartest, most original things I’ve read all year.

Also, it’s only the second book I’ve read that uses the word “goddery” which is a term/concept I very much love (the first was Roger Levy’s The Rig.) I definitely need to read more of Ms Hardinge. If there’s one thing I’m grateful to the Hugos this year for more than any other, it’s for introducing me to her exceptional work.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/07/10/deeplight-by-frances-hardinge/

From Page To Screen: The Babysitter’s Club by Ann M Martin

Back in the early 90s when these came out, I tried one or two books from The Babysitter’s Club, but figured I was too old for them. My sights were set on solving mysteries with Nancy Drew in college, if I was reading YA/Middle Grade at all. So when the Netflix series came out, I did not at all consider myself the target demographic. Still, one adoring Insta post after another from Cover Critiques had me turning the show on while making dinner one night. And oh, dear reader. I may have been too old to read these books back in the 90s, but I’m definitely the right age to watch this series now.

So the two books that I did read were Keep Out, Claudia! (Book 56 in the series) and, um, something about Kristy training for something athletic and needing to carb load? Anyway, I came in when there were dozens of characters and I felt confused most of the time and, let’s be honest, the Very Special Racism issue read weirdly to me as a teenager. I don’t remember much else about my reactions then but I’ve read enough incisive reviews since to know that this is the kind of book that would make me go “yikes” now. Even at the time, I didn’t think these books were as well or engagingly written as the Sweet Valley High books or the Nancy Drew Case Files that I’d been obsessed with (which yo, I know is a super low bar.)

Thus my reaction to the absolutely charming and really terrific Netflix show has very little to do with childhood nostalgia and everything to do with how great this new production is. They have talented age-appropriate actors for the main characters, with outstanding supporting performances by Alicia Silverstone and Marc Evan Jackson (or grown-up Cher and Captain Holt’s husband, as I automatically think of them.) Each of the first eight episodes is based on the first eight books of the series, with the two-part ender being an amalgam of different books and scenes revolving around summer at Camp Moosehead. It’s both surprisingly faithful to the source material as well as delightfully and sensitively updated for the 21st century. Mary Anne is now biracial and Dawn is Latina, but neither change feels inorganic. There is really great trans and neuroatypical representation, as well. Perhaps the only thing that feels a little less than realistic is how the girls are so consistently loving, supportive and forgiving of one another, but that is aspirational behavior I can get behind! In particular, I love how Dawn weaponizes kindness. She’s such a great character, even if I’m definitely a Mary Anne-Stacey hybrid myself.

This is a great series that anyone who’s ever been a pre-teen girl should watch. Honestly, anyone who enjoys wholesome, lovely G-rated entertainment should check this out (especially if you enjoy the occasional good cry.) Side note: way back in the day I read an article stating that Ann M Martin was married to Michael Crichton, which was an idea I always enjoyed, but apparently the journalist had confused this author with Anne-Marie Martin, whoops!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/07/09/from-page-to-screen-the-babysitters-club-by-ann-m-martin/

This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone

I’m rating this book quite highly even as I found myself oddly detached from it, so I’m chalking this down to a me-problem and not to any fault of the book itself. Okay, maybe there’s a pacing issue once we discover who the seeker is: I get that the authors didn’t want to retread stuff, but you’d think at least the scene where she felt obliged to comfort Red would’ve dwelt a little more on how she was feeling in the moment. Ha, so I guess maybe it is partly the fault of the book.

Anyhoo, it’s a charming idea: two elite soldiers on either side of a war to control the past such that it will lead to their preferred present end up being covert pen pals who fall in love. Red is an Agent for a technophilic cyberfuture, sorta like the Matrix but utopian. Blue works for the Garden, an organic hivemind a la Swamp Thing which can also send its proxies back through time and across the strands and braids of reality, just as Red and her fellow agents can. Don’t feel bad if you read the book and don’t exactly understand what the difference is between the two sides, as I only really figured it out after reading the explanatory note at the end. Oh, jeez, maybe my muted enjoyment really was the book’s fault.

What starts as a battlefield boast turns into a meaningful correspondence between two lonely people who eventually fall in love and decide they’ll go to any lengths to be together. It’s a bit Romeo & Juliet, only better, with more mature protagonists who make smarter choices. I enjoyed reading the desire that burned through the pages of the letters they sent each other, even as I spent way too much time feeling that the authors were being deliberately vague about way too much of the background stuff (see: having to read the extra material for clarity above.) I love it when authors trust their readers to be intelligent enough to catch on without needing lengthy info dumps, but this book felt like I was struggling to catch on to a series of in-jokes and personal references, not helped by the many pop culture references that I did get, which just wound up feeling weirdly gratuitous as a result. It was like being at a party where the cool kids were talking to each other rapid fire about their personal interests, which is fine if you’re part of their inner circle but not very entertaining to anyone else. I’d rather go strike up a conversation with someone who’s actually interested in talking rather than showing off.

Leaving my extended metaphor to return to this novella, however, I’m thinking it needed to be longer, to be explored more, to be less breathlessly romantic and more descriptive of the myriad settings it found itself in. This Is How You Lose The Time War has plenty of charm and tons of brilliant ideas, but it’s also weirdly underwritten for having two acclaimed authors.

This was the last of my reads for the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novella, and I’ll definitely be voting for the novella at this link.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/07/08/this-is-how-you-lose-the-time-war-by-amal-el-mohtar-max-gladstone/

The Voting Booth by Brandy Colbert

A fast, funny, incredibly relevant look at teenagers and voting in today’s America. Marva Sheridan is the kind of responsible straight-A student whose entire life revolves around how she can make a difference. She’s super-focused and organized, to the point where her parents wish she would let loose and just be an irresponsible teenager every once in a while. Her boyfriend Alec is the cutest guy at the private school they attend, and though he’s white, he totally understands and supports her political activism. Or so she thought. Because today is voting day and he’s decided he’s going to sit out the election because he no longer believes in America’s two-party system.

Duke Crenshaw just wants to do his civic duty and get on with his day. His band has their first paying gig tonight, plus he’s got a big test at school, but voting is important to his family, so much so that he’s been pre-registered to vote since he was sixteen. He is thus utterly gobsmacked to discover that he isn’t on the precinct rolls at all. Overachieving Marva steps in to help, launching the two on a day-long journey of conversation, self-discovery and romance.

This was such a terrific book, covering so many aspects of being Black and biracial in America, as well as the many complex issues surrounding voting today. Marva and Duke are adorable both singly and together as they race around their county to ensure that Duke gets to vote. It’s the perfect book to spur the apathetic person in your life to go line up at the polls — tho having myself recently discovered the joys of the mail-in ballot, I cannot help but think it the superior way to have your voice heard and opinion count. Being able to sit at my kitchen table and have a cup of coffee while looking up each candidate and measure, and then only needing to mark my ballot once and mail it in at my leisure was pretty freaking sweet. Trying to eliminate this option instead of spreading it is a particularly evil form of voter suppression.

My only issue with the book itself was the fairly short shrift both Alec and Kendall got in the narrative. I know that part of the appeal of The Voting Booth is that it takes place on a single, defining day, but I felt that Alec’s change from awesome boyfriend to jerkface was way too abrupt. Also, having been in Kendall’s position, I feel that she deserved way more from Duke than whatever the hell he managed to say before the gig. Heroes of romance novels shouldn’t fuck around with people’s feelings like that, ijs.

Clunky romantic speed bumps aside, this was a really great book about young Americans voting. It deserves to be read widely, and will hopefully encourage more civic participation from its readers (psst, fellow Americans here at home, also visit Vote.org to check on your own registration and other voting info ahead of November.)

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/07/07/the-voting-booth-by-brandy-colbert/

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

Look at that gorgeous cover. I want to do up a room of my house with that sort of wallpaper.

And yes, I’m digressing because I want to say something nice about this book before I say something(s) that will likely sound churlish. This is not, by any means, a bad book, but it is basically a primer on colonial thought and philosophy for white girls, or more generously for people privileged enough to have profited off of colonialism while never having to reconcile their nice lives with the suffering inherent in the power structures that have enriched them. I think, perhaps, if I had come to this as a teenager myself, as a nascent political being examining my own relationship with society, with what I’ve been given and what I owe, I would have found this book far more thought-provoking and perhaps less derivative. I know it’s meant to be an homage to the many portal fantasy novels that have enlivened the childhoods of millions, but it felt more like a weird retread of The Journey Of Natty Gann meets A Little Princess with a splash of Marianne Dreams, and I felt that my time would have honestly been better spent re-reading Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series, even the irritating In An Absent Dream. I also cringed at the interview included in the library edition ebook, where Alix E Harrow claims that everyone came to portal fantasies from the 1988 TV miniseries of The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe. I’m hoping she was trying to be funny, because that’s such a bizarre thing to say otherwise.

Even so, this book would have been perfectly fine if it weren’t for the fact that January, our purported heroine, is a total ninny. When bad things happen, she realizes that she’s been conditioned to freeze, and then instead of trying to fight her conditioning, she basically falls back on it as an excuse to not fight back. I don’t need the books I read to be inspirational, but I would also like to feel more than a simmering contempt for the characters I’m reading about. Would 100% have preferred to read a book from the perspective of Jane or Samuel or possibly even Ade or, JFC, even Locke (but definitely not Julian, he sucked.) In all honesty, I feel that January was constructed primarily to advance plot rather than to react to it, which is just bad writing. I expected far better of Ms Harrow after reading her short fiction. And after reading the excerpt of her next book, which felt bizarrely derivative of this book, I’m not sure I’m going to be reading much more of her long form stuff in future.

Oh, I guess I should recap the book itself. In turn of the 20th century Vermont, January Scaller is the young ward of rich Mr Locke, who raises the “oddly colored” girl as a proper American miss while her dark-skinned adventurer father goes gallivanting round the world, bringing treasures back for Locke to either hoard or sell. As she grows, she discovers Doors between our world and other realms, but that powerful forces are attempting to close them. When her father is reported dead while on a business trip, she decides to run away. Adventures ensue. Metaphors abound. January is not very smart and not very sympathetic. More metaphors on how reading is A PORTAL TO OTHER WORLDS, in case you, as a reader, were somehow not already aware of this. Plot twists are telegraphed from at least five chapters away.

This is the kind of book I’m predisposed to enjoying but the execution was just really not great. Maybe if I were younger, less socially conscious and/or less well read. Anyway, that’s two Hugo nominees for Best Novel down. Hopefully, I’ll find one I love in the four to go!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/07/06/the-ten-thousand-doors-of-january-by-alix-e-harrow/

A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan #1) by Arkady Martine

So on the one hand, a tale of courtly intrigue in the dazzling court of a foreign empire as seen through the eyes of a vulnerable young ambassador from a much poorer nation. In space! Based on Aztec-Byzantine history and practices instead of your standard Western Europe-Asian influences!

Mahit Dzmare is from Lsel Station (modeled loosely on Armenia), home to a planetless people anchored in a sector of space next to an important space travel jump point. She’s been in love with the Teixcalaanli Empire since she was a child, memorizing their language and literature and dreaming of one day getting a visa to visit. So when she’s selected as Lsel Station’s next ambassador to Teixcalaan, based not only on her own aptitudes but also on her compatibility with the last ambassador, Yskandar Aghavn, she’s both ecstatic and nervous. It’s one thing to go as a tourist, quite another to go as The Official Representative, especially since no one on Lsel knows exactly what happened to Yskandar to prompt such an urgent summons for a new ambassador from the Teixcalaanli capital. Mahit arrives to find an empire in the throes of a succession struggle and, in the manner of such novels, finds herself a key player in determining the future of Teixcalaan.

For all the sci-fi trappings, this is a surprisingly ordinary tale of diplomatic intrigue. The plot itself isn’t bad. It’s just not, once stripped of the tech stuff, at all unusual, especially if you’re a thriller aficionado like myself. What is unusual and thus of interest to jaded genre readers is the gorgeous, intricate world-building coupled with the incisive eye Arkady Martine brings to, if you’ll excuse the trite late 20th century phrase, cultural imperialism, in all its seductive glory. As a young girl growing up in Malaysia who adored America — and who was very, very lucky to have not only the tempering influence of her native culture but also the countering influence of the British Commonwealth — I felt for Mahit to my core. I understood all the longing for assimilation and, to turn another late 20th century phrase, culture shock of meeting in person what had only been admired from a remove. And this was despite having gone to elementary school on the East Coast for several years before picking up sticks for Southeast Asia. Weirdly, I’ve always felt it easier to adapt to living in Britain, but perhaps that’s because the UK feels less exclusionary when it comes to people who aren’t white natives (but also I’ve only lived in London, however briefly.)

Anyway, my point is that this is a fascinating cultural case study with sci-fi and revolutionary trappings, and is definitely different from anything else currently out on the market. I could have done with about 90% less italics tho. Every other page used italics in the third-person narrative, not to mention within the dialog, making me want to shake an editor.

One Hugo nominee for Best Novel down, five more to go! And they just gave us an extra week for voting, glory be!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/07/03/a-memory-called-empire-teixcalaan-1-by-arkady-martine/

Catfishing on CatNet (CatNet #1) by Naomi Kritzer

This novel ends on a cliffhanger and I desperately want to know what happens next!

Catfishing On CatNet, despite the unwieldy title and weirdly muddy cover, is a cute, deft YA sci-fi thriller set in a near future where CatNet is a sort of social connection site whose members are broken out into groups called Clowders. CatNet is, as we discover within the first few pages of the novel, run by a self-aware AI who loves cat pictures and has a soft spot for the teenagers who come looking for kindred spirits within her virtual chambers.

One of these teenagers is Steph Taylor, whose mother has been moving her from small town to small town since she was old enough to remember. Dana claims that their life on the run is due to a need to elude Steph’s arsonist stalker dad, but now that Steph’s sixteen, she’s tired, not only of their peripatetic lifestyle but also of never forging any meaningful connections with people her age. So CatNet is a godsend to her, a place where she has real friends even if she’s never met them in person and is strictly forbidden from giving away too much identifying information or, worse, ever showing them pictures of herself. As Steph tries to settle down in New Coburg, the latest hamlet Dana has run to, she’s forced to confront her suspicions as to whether her mother is a well woman. The CatNet AI steps in to try to help Steph, but things go horribly awry.

This was a terrific read that champions friendship and diversity in a seamless, excellently paced narrative told from the viewpoints of both Steph and the AI. Our protagonists must work together to find out the truth about their pasts, as well as to escape the dangers of their present, and I was furiously turning the pages to see how it would all shake out. CoCN does resolve its main plot quite well before plunging forward towards the cliffhanger and I cannot wait to find out more! Definitely my favorite of the Lodestar nominees at the Hugo Awards this year so far.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/07/02/catfishing-on-catnet-catnet-1-by-naomi-kritzer/