Jul 01 2020

Dragon Pearl by Yoon Ha Lee

When it comes to children’s books, for me, my most important criteria for judging a volume’s worth lies in whether or not I would give it to my kids to read. The answer in this case is a resounding yes, even as I found it less entertaining for myself due to the same lack of complexity that many kids would embrace as being the lack of a stumbling block to otherwise understanding this very cool universe.

Dragon Pearl is the story of Kim Min, a fox spirit who along with the rest of her family on the dusty, half-terraformed planet of Junjin pretends to be fully human in order to quell any lingering generational mistrust of their species. Fox spirits have a reputation for being deceitful, what with their ability not only to shapeshift but also to Charm the people around them into believing whatever the fox spirits would have them believe. Min’s older brother Jun left to join the Imperial Space Forces so he could see the Thousand Worlds but, as the story opens, an investigator arrives at the Kim homestead, accusing him of desertion in search of the fabled Dragon Pearl. Min knows Jun would never do such a dishonorable thing, and embarks on a quest to find him and prove the truth, using her forbidden powers to help her along the way.

There are several interesting story beats as the novel races along to its conclusion but this is honestly the middle-grade version of your standard space opera, as Min rides her luck in pursuit of her brother. Kids not yet used to having their hearts broken by fiction will love this tale of a spunky heroine who carries the day by virtue of being a good, but not too good person. Fortunately, Dragon Pearl does boast two outstanding aspects that make it a worthwhile read for the more sophisticated reader: the fascinating mythos drawn from Korean culture, as well as the matter-of-fact way non-binary representation is handled. I’m pleased that my kids will be exposed to the normalization of both in the course of this rollicking tale.

And, as always, I’m happy to be reading a new Yoon Ha Lee, even as I shamefacedly admit to not yet having finished his Machineries of Empire trilogy. There are only so many hours in the day! But this was a nice reminder to go do that, as well as a pleasant stopgap to tide me over till I have time to get to Revenant Gun, as Doug has. As this was the first of the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book nominees I was able to read, I’m not sure yet how it’ll fare against the rest of the field, but I’m looking forward to finding out! I would also definitely consider reading more of Min’s ongoing adventures, especially in tandem with my kids.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/07/01/dragon-pearl-by-yoon-ha-lee/

Jun 30 2020

The Wicked + The Divine Vol. 9: Okay by Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, Matt Wilson & Clayton Cowles

Semi-tangent before I get into my review: my 9 year-old and I have taken to saying “okay” to each other in the voice of Princess Daisy from Super Mario Party. It’s a weird in-joke. My kid is the best.

Anyhoo, I had to sit and think about this volume for a while before I could come up with a review for it. Basically, we find out the whole deal with Ananke and Minerva, as several members of the Pantheon make terrible choices and the rest have to either stop them or clean up after them (or, in the case of Baphomet, make the best choices, ilubb!) The Pantheon discover that the only way to beat Ananke is to examine their godhood, leading us back full circle to the first volume’s musings on fame and power.

I wanted to like this. I loved the final issue, knowing that some of our Pantheon get out alive. I love that the book is saying hard work and craft are better than the chaotic energy of getting everything too fast too soon, of dying young and leaving a good-looking corpse. But I think that it sorta cheapens, if that makes sense, the very idea of legend and story, of timelessness and enchantment, by turning this into a cautionary tale of pop idols blessed with fame they didn’t work for. Yes, fame is a fickle thing, anointing at random, but I also found the odd subtext implying that young superstars don’t actually work hard to be off-putting, sneeringly condescending, and downright bizarre from a creative team that has shown great love for the music scene. Entertaining looks easy because it’s supposed to look effortless but, to take just one example, Our Lady Britney Spears busted her ass every single day of her adolescence to sing and dance for us. Oh sure, Britney didn’t burn out within the two years allotted to the members of the Pantheon but I don’t think anyone can look back on the toll her career took on her and think she got out unscathed, or that she didn’t work for every minute of it. Or, to take perhaps a more on the nose example, would anyone argue that Janis Joplin didn’t fucking work? Read this article or Google “Janis Joplin work ethic” if you’re even thinking of trying. I get what Kieron Gillen et. al. were aiming for here but IMO they missed that mark by implying it’s a choice between superstardom and hard graft instead of considering the possibility of both together.

Art was terrific, as usual, and I honestly don’t understand the hate that some readers have directed at guest artists filling in on previous issues. Yes, Jamie McKelvie et. al. are amazing artists but just because something is different doesn’t mean it’s bad. Anyway, controversial, for me, end to a very interesting series. Overall this volume was, to quote its title in whichever voice you prefer, okay. Given the rest of the series, that can’t help but feel a bit like a disappointment.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/06/30/the-wicked-the-divine-vol-9-okay-by-kieron-gillen-jamie-mckelvie-matt-wilson-clayton-cowles/

Jun 29 2020

The Wicked + The Divine Vol. 5-8 by Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, Matt Wilson & Clayton Cowles

Post the stunning story arc of Vols 1-4, our Pantheon has now entered their Imperial Phase, at the height of their powers and looking down at a slow decline towards death. With Ananke out of the picture, the surviving gods are free to do as they please… or is there more afoot than our troubled divinities have realized? After all, Ananke has had millenia in which to perfect her plans. Can one spunky god really have turned the tables on her so easily?

Vol 5 begins with the form of a glossy magazine, where Kieron Gillen roped in a bunch of real live journos to simulate interviews with his fictional gods. The Morrigan, Baal, Woden, Lucifer and Amaterasu all get the treatment, shedding more light into their backgrounds and motivations than before. It’s also a chance to showcase some really terrific fashion art featuring our crew before plunging back into the story proper. Perspehone is busy drowning her sorrows with ill-advised hookups, while the Norns are researching the machine Ananke had had Woden build for her. The Great Darkness emerges as something, er, greater than the metaphor Ananke had spoken of to most of the team. The Pantheon is riven as to what to do next, and two of its members lose control.

In Vol 6, the Pantheon hunts down its rogue members. Woden, Cassandra and Dionysus hatch a plan to finally crack the mystery of Ananke’s machine but betrayal throws a wrench in the works. Cassandra and Persephone figure out Woden’s secret even as more of the Pantheon die, and we discover that another of them is hiding the biggest secret of all.

More secrets are exposed in Vol 7, as the history of the first sisters who fought for dominance are slowly unraveled. Minerva is playing a dangerous game while Baal’s secret is finally exposed. The Morrigan and Baphomet split up for good. Persephone makes a life-altering decision that could fundamentally change the very idea of a Pantheon.

Vol 8 is a break from the main narrative, full of all the past bits and the fun bits that there hadn’t been room for till now. As the series draws to a close with Vol 9, the creative team and their invited guests wanted to finish fleshing out their centuries-spanning world before the dramatic climax. And boy howdy do they succeed. One thing I really dig about Mr Gillen’s collected trades is the absolute wealth of extra material in them. This volume is an entire book of extra material. That would seem fairly wanky but succeeds somehow, mostly because the world is so rich that every single story or short told here helps the overarching arc make more sense. My personal favorite was the one which showed how Baphomet and Dionysus first met. I heart Dio, and I’m still mad about what happened to him.

I kinda don’t want to start reading Vol 9 because I know that’s the very last one, but I’m also burning to find out what happens next/in the end. I definitely have theories as to how the sisters are manifesting through time, but I also readily admit that I am bad with visual clues, and have probably missed a lot of those that indicate the truth. It’s 5 in the morning as I type this and I’m super hungry, but should I stay up to read the last volume or go have some dinner (yes, I keep odd hours) and go to bed? Rather, will I stay up to finish the series despite knowing I should be calling it a night? I think we all know the answer to that question.

Plus also, I rather want a The Wicked + The Divine Christmas sweater now.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/06/29/the-wicked-the-divine-vol-5-8-by-kieron-gillen-jamie-mckelvie-matt-wilson-clayton-cowles/

Jun 28 2020

The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal

Pacing, and the parts of the story not told, shape The Fated Sky the second book in Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronauts series. The Calculating Stars ended with Elma York, the series’ first-person narrator, on her way to the moon. By the beginning of The Fated Sky, there is a colony on the moon with enough resources that they are starting to figure out what to ferment for alcohol, and enough of an economy to produce art objects for sale back on earth; apparently they are exotic enough to command a significant premium. York is an experienced pilot on the earth-to-moon route, and routinely shuttles groups of twenty or so to and from the colony.

The Fated Sky

In a very short time, amidst a planetary catastrophe, travel to the moon has become normal — but that is just the beginning. The Fated Sky is mainly about humanity’s first mission to Mars, a mission designed to land people on the red planet and return them to earth, and more importantly to set the stage for rapid colonization.

The best aspect of the novel is that Kowal never loses sight of spaceflight as a human endeavor. Throughout the book, she has command of the details of living and working in space, what’s heavy, how things smell, what common mistakes nearly everyone new to space makes. But these details are never shown off for their own sake, they’re present in how the people going to space relate to each other and what kinds of problems they have to solve. They also show the mundane things that people tend to overlook, and how quickly that can head toward catastrophe in an environment as unforgiving as space. For example, thinking that it’s ok to let a clothes dryer run unattended leads to a fire, whose potential consequences on a spacecraft hardly need to be spelled out. Sometimes people having foibles leads to the problem, as when condoms disposed in the onboard toilet clog the plumbing. That one’s more gross than catastrophic, but it shows another axis along which things can go wrong.

And quite a bit goes wrong on the first mission to Mars. Smooth sailing wouldn’t make for a very interesting novel, so Kowal dials things up a bit, not implausibly individually but taken together they do make for an unusually eventful voyage. An outbreak of illness, in a way that is both unique to the enclosed environment and all too plausible, tests the crews’ resilience and shows how hard it can be to solve a problem with a limited number of people.

Nor are larger issues left behind on earth. Structural racism is a theme in both novels. Elma is both the beneficiary and someone working to reduce it from a position of privilege, and she finds out how little she can do sometimes, or how little her good intentions matter. Parker, one of the antagonists of the first book, shows new sides to his character in The Fated Sky, becoming more understandable and sympathetic. I wonder if DeBeer, the racist character from South Africa, will also change over the course of the series; that seems unlikely.

I read The Fated Sky when I was in the hospital back in early May, so I remember fewer details than I would like. It’s fast and snappy. Kowal knows when to skip forward to the next interesting events, and when to slow down and focus on a moment of rising tension. She knows how to use small interactions among the characters to show a small society growing in the crews of the Mars mission, so that readers are worried when things go wrong, and gutted when a few things go really wrong. As indeed they do.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/06/28/the-fated-sky-by-mary-robinette-kowal/

Jun 27 2020

Die Schule der Nackten by Ernst Augustin

You have better things to do with your time than read this book, or at least the latter two-thirds of it. The first-person narrator, Alexander, is interesting, and a bit odd in an interesting way. He’s a historian of sorts, unattached to any academic institute, specializing in the ancient Near East: Chaldean studies, Aramaic studies, and much more along those lines. He’s 60, though he thinks he can pass for 50 or perhaps a bit younger. He is alone at this stage of life, and he’s wealthy enough to possess a house in a central Munich neighborhood, a house he has decorated in what he thinks is a beautiful fashion but actually just reveals a peculiar devotion to the color moss green. Alexander is full of himself, and not self-aware enough to realize it. Early in the novel, Augustin is having him on every bit as much as he is portraying him as a sympathetic narrator.

The title translates as The School of the Naked, and the first scene shows what Augustin has in mind. Alexander is on the verge of visiting the nude sunbathing section of one of Munich’s outdoor public swimming pools. Nude sunbathing in Germany is known as FKK, “Freie Körper Kultur,” “Free Body Culture.” The movement started in the late 19th century, grew in the 1920s, was mostly repressed by the Nazis, and returned after the war in both East and West Germany. In Munich, naturists colonized parts of the English Garden, a large park in the center of the city. By the 1970s, two large lawns at the southern end of the English Garden were officially recognized as FKK areas, and were not sealed off — as was customary in many other places — by fences or shrubberies. In the years that followed, Munich (as well as other German cities) established nude areas attached to their outdoor public pools, although these were generally set apart by some sort of visual barrier.

Die Schule der Nackten begins with Alexander standing outside just such a barrier at the fictional Jakobi pool, contemplating entering — there’s a very German sign that says “Entry only allowed without clothing” — and then losing his nerve. After a day at his studies, he returns to the Jakobi, screws up his courage and enters the FKK area. Whereupon he immediately commits a faux pas by getting undressed inside the gate. Worse, he feels that every eye in the place is upon him. With a little more experience — once committed, Alexander becomes a daily visitor — he realizes that what people do is find a place in the FKK area to set down their towel and only then do they take their clothes off. Further, the way people face tends to move with the sun over the course of the day, so the initial impression he had of everyone watching him had everything to do with the sun and nothing at all to do with him. Lack of self-awareness strikes again, and not for the last time.

The next few chapters collect Alexander’s impressions of people and events at the FKK section of the Jakobi pool. Even with no clothes and very little talking, people’s personalities emerge. Cliques and hierarchies form, social structures accrue even in a realm that is theoretically free of all of that. As anyone who has experience with Germans and beaches will already have guessed, there are fierce yet passive-aggressive struggles about the placement of towels in relation to particularly good spots. Alexander — and by extension Augustin — is a careful observer of the small details that add up to impressions, and he makes the observations interesting. There’s the group of octogenarian ladies that he falls in with many afternoons, who have their own area between nursing home and pool, and who converse much more than the other guests. There’s the square-shaped man who has brief anti-social outbursts. The regulars seem to take it in stride, and even know how often he should take his medications to keep things from getting worse. This could have been the foundation for stories of close observation and human foibles.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/06/27/die-schule-der-nackten-by-ernst-augustin/

Jun 26 2020

Die Rumplhanni by Lena Christ

Rural Bavaria at the outbreak of the Great War still moved to the rhythms of nature and the seasons. Village life revolved around the inn, the smithy, and the farms that surrounded both. Generations shared the same house, the young people paired up early and had little choice but to stick together, and families kept their feuds going for decades at a time.

Die Rumplhanni

Lena Christ starts Die Rumplhanni in just such a small setting, opening with a scene of the village smith and his apprentices, following with a scene at the local inn, and then introducing her protagonist Johanna Rumpl, a serving girl (though she is in her early 20s) at the farm next to the inn. The family that owns this farm has been feuding with the innkeepers since time out of mind, probably because someone tricked someone else into marriage but nobody really remembers for sure.

The title of the book comes from the old Bavarian practice of putting someone’s family name before their personal name, and then often shortening the personal name. Joseph Mayer would be Mayer Joseph, or, more likely, “der Mayer Sepp,” with “der” the masculine article in German and “Sepp” the customary nickname for Joseph. Christ tends to write these names as single words, hence “die Rumplhanni” with the feminine article “die” (pronounced “dee”) and “Hanni” as the short form of Johanna. It took me a little while to catch on to this bit of writing style, and also to recall that it was common to refer to people just by the word for their occupation, in male or female form as appropriate.

Names aren’t even the half of it though. Christ writes all of her dialogue in Bavarian dialect, and even for someone who lived there for ten years, it can be rough sledding. She also writes dialogue with a minimum of indications of who is speaking, so I had to go back and count fairly often to get a sense of who was saying what. Bavarian drops a lot of consonants compared with the standard written German that Christ uses for the rest of the text. Except for the times that it drops vowels instead. Here is a bit of dialog between Hanni and a traveling purchasing agent who buys farm products to take to regional markets.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/06/26/die-rumplhanni-by-lena-christ/

Jun 26 2020

The Wicked + The Divine: Vol. 1-4 by Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, Matt Wilson & Clayton Cowles

I had the weirdest visceral reaction after reading the first four volumes of this comic book and that is this: I felt young again, like a 20-something again, all over-sexed and full of energy and the certainty that I’m being misunderstood. Reading The Wicked + The Divine reminded me of waiting outside clubs in the cold, sometimes with groups but more often alone, and the relief of finally getting in and working my way up to the front then dancing and singing and being caught up in the absolute glory of whomever was performing on stage. Few of my friends enjoyed the same acts I loved, and fewer still wanted to come all the way to the front with me and engage in the Dionysian mob. Nowadays, I sit and watch from the sidelines like they used to — getting old is no joke — but I remember only too well the ecstasy of being part of a rapt, moving audience.

Anyway, that’s the buzz I got off these comics, and I suppose I should explain why. Apparently, every ninety years a new pantheon of twelve gods from world mythology is reborn to inspire the people, according to Ananke, the wizened old representative of necessity. She’s the one who wakes the slumbering god from the young adult, and welcomes them to the new world they’re facing. She also breaks the news that they can expect a lifespan of only two years, after which they burn out. In the year 2014, our pantheon choose to inspire as pop stars, based in London. In the first volume, Laura Wilson, a mixed race girl who loves all the pantheon, gets to meet Lucifer up close and personal, right before Luci is thrown in jail for murder. Laura is convinced she didn’t do it, so when the trial goes awry and Ananke is forced to shut down Luci in order to protect humanity, Laura is devastated.

In Vol 2, Inanna shows up to comfort Laura. More than this, he inspires Laura to team up with abrasive investigative reporter Cassandra to find the real killers. At first, Laura is uncomfortable with the fame that the notoriety of involvement with Luci affords. But when Ananke awakens the twelfth god of the pantheon, Laura has to concede that she’d really hoped that her connection with Luci had somehow bestowed her with divinity, too. Of course, this is all before she discovers that Ananke is maybe full of shit, and at least one other member of the pantheon dies.

The third volume finds an array of guest artists taking over for six issues, as Baal recruits Beth, one of Cassandra’s former assistants, to help him find The Morrigan, in hopes she’ll lead him to Baphomet. The Morrigan claims she doesn’t know where he is, and Baal takes out his rage over the deaths of his fellow pantheon members on her before Woden intervenes to take her back to the special cell he’s built to imprison her in Valhalla. We then get an issue each focusing on a separate god, first Tara, then Woden, Amaterasu, The Morrigan + Baphomet, and Sakhmet.

Finally, Vol 4 brings us the return of Persephone, who is ready to burn it all down in pursuit of vengeance. The question is, what happens once you’ve defeated the bad guy, especially when you still don’t know the bad guy’s motives?

If you love mythology like I love mythology, then these books are totally your jam. If you’ve ever had and loved the experience of dancing in a sweaty club, your body and voice in unison with the music, these books are totally your jam (tho you might also need a love of mythology to help you keep tabs on the Who’s Who going on here.) If you love subversive critiques on divinity and stardom, fame and culture, you should absolutely get your hands on these books, because this creative team is absolutely knocking this sociological treatise in the guise of an action comic out of the park. Gosh, even their choices of guest artists was inspired, 100% fitting the tone of each issue they completed. Still tho, Jamie McKelvie’s art is perfect for the topic, and he and Kieron Gillen make for an amazing team. I’ve gushed elsewhere over my love for Matt Wilson’s colors and Clayton Cowles’ lettering, and they’re still in top form here. The challenge, I guess, is in seeing how they sustain this heading towards the Hugo-nominated Vol 9. I’ll be reviewing the next four volumes in another post, then concentrating on the last separately. Stay tuned!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/06/26/the-wicked-the-divine-vol-1-4-by-kieron-gillen-jamie-mckelvie-matt-wilson-clayton-cowles/

Jun 25 2020

Paper Girls Vol. 6 by Brian K. Vaughan, Cliff Chiang, Matthew Wilson & Jared K Fletcher

Oh, it’s over? I don’t want it to be.

So this is the final volume of the time-traveling adventures of four badass paper girls who originally meet as 12 year-olds the morning after Halloween, while delivering newspapers in their small town of Stony Stream, Ohio. After getting shunted through time in four separate directions at the end of Vol 5, they each struggle not only to get back to 1988 but also to solve the existential questions they’ve had to grapple with since first becoming time travelers. The war they’ve accidentally been plunged in the middle of seems to be drawing to a close, but the cessation of hostilities could have unwelcome consequences for our girls, including the possibility of losing the bond they’ve built through their adventures.

This ending was sweet with just a tinge of bitter, as we know what will eventually happen to each girl, tho I don’t think what happens to the real KJ was ever discussed? In all honesty, this volume raised more questions than it answered. What were those fourth-dimensional things? What’s the deal with Wari? And I get that the end of a war can often feel anticlimactic for the generals signing the treaty but I did have a strong “what was even the point of fighting?!” at that scene. Tho, I suppose, that only hammers home the pointlessness of war.

Anyway, I really enjoyed cheering on the girls and their friendship, and while I really want them to have their happily ever afters, I have to take solace in the fact their lives will continue to be lived as awesomely as possible. Tho I thought it was weird and sad that Tiffany would give up on her Arkanoid high score, as if putting aside childish things. It’s okay to have pastimes and goals, and I don’t think setting aside her hobby was going to make her a better person. I know it’s a metaphor for letting go of an obsession that was taking over her life, only I don’t really feel that it was taking over? Plus, she was so close to the end. Oh well, that’s my nerd brain for you.

Overall a good ending to the series, but perhaps not the strongest contender for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story. Oh, and my thoughts on the art, colors and letters are just the same as in the first five volumes: consistently terrific.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/06/25/paper-girls-vol-6-by-brian-k-vaughan-cliff-chiang-matthew-wilson-jared-k-fletcher/

Jun 24 2020

Paper Girls Vol. 1-5 by Brian K. Vaughan, Cliff Chiang, Matthew Wilson & Jared K. Fletcher

Imagine if the D&D-playing nerds of Stranger Things were four badass girls with paper routes, and you’ll get a decent idea of where this comic book series begins. Tho, tbf, this setting feels less Stranger Things than (at least the roleplaying version of) Tales From The Loop, as its 80s setting is of a decidedly more sci-fi bent than fantasy horror.

Anyway, the first book begins the morning after Halloween, when 12 year-old Erin Tieng has to get up at the crack of dawn to deliver newspapers in her small Ohio town of Stony Stream. An unpleasant run-in with entitled teenage jerks still running around from the night before is mercifully brought to a close by the three other female paper girls of their community: tough girl and pioneering paper girl Mac; field hockey stick-wielding KJ, and brainy Tiffany. They adopt Erin into their circle just as things go completely sideways and upside down.

Vol Two finds the girls unsure of whom to trust after KJ disappears and multiple Erins abound. While we learn a little more about the mysterious entities chasing down the Paper Girls, this volume focuses on 12 year-old Erin’s relationship with grown-up Erin, making for both compelling and heart-warming reading.

Vol Three finds the girls thrown back millenia to accidentally encounter the very first time traveler, as we dive into KJ’s psyche. While trying to help a girl from the ancient past, they discover what might be a way to solve the entire problem from the get-go, only to have everything go very wrong in the end.

In Vol 4, the girls are lost in the year 2000, and run into future Tiffany as well as a comic creator who might be one panel short of a strip. The war between the Old Timers and their descendants gets even more heated, as one casualty causes the man in charge to go ballistic. The girls escape Y2K only to find themselves in a far future Cleveland, Ohio in Vol 5, when I finally connect the dots and have a miniature freak out as to whom some of the most important characters actually are.

This is an extremely lively, fast-paced jaunt through space and time, folding scientific concepts and conundrums seamlessly into a whip smart narrative featuring four strong female leads who always read like authentic people. The art is relentlessly terrific, with Cliff Chiang’s clean, muscular lines and impeccable ability to differentiate between even minor characters given room to strut and play. The action is as strong as the emotion, and both perfectly match the scripting. Matthew Wilson’s colors are also superb, bringing to mind the best of Glynis Oliver’s work, tho with much more color blocking to suit the needs/aesthetics of the story. I also haven’t been this impressed by lettering since I was first introduce to Nate Piekos and Blambot via the X-Statix books! I kinda want to take the time to decode Jared K Fletcher’s ciphered script but also I’m lazy and have so much reading to do, so look forward to having it all eventually laid out for me.

This is such a great team putting out a really terrific title and I can’t wait to start the Hugo nominated 6th volume, which will be getting a review page all its own. I’m only sad that it looks as though the sixth might well be the final, but I can totally appreciate choosing a finite number of issues in which to tell a complete story. Given the amount of thought put into these volumes so far, it’s no surprise that the whole thing has been carefully planned from the start, with terrific callbacks in each volume to what might have seemed a throwaway detail in preceding ones. If you can remember living through the 1980s, or if you remember what it was like to be a 12 year-old girl, or even if you just enjoy a kick-ass, intelligent story about time travel, you should absolutely read these books.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/06/24/paper-girls-vol-1-5-by-brian-k-vaughan-cliff-chiang-matthew-wilson-jared-k-fletcher/

Jun 23 2020

In an Absent Dream (Wayward Children #4) by Seanan McGuire

Oh, that was a hot mess.

One reason that the rest of the books in the Wayward Children series have worked for me, despite my misgivings regarding certain of Seanan McGuire’s narrative choices (e.g. the blanket disdain for parents in Every Heart A Doorway, the idolization of The Baker in Beneath The Sugar Sky, the occasional need to soapbox instead of work issues cleverly into the narrative in both. Down Among The Sticks And Bones is perfect tho,) is that the portal worlds the children escape to are fantasy worlds that don’t operate on the logic that ours does. Granted there’s a Virtue-Logic dichotomy to track the scale of exactly how each realm differs, but each has their own internal consistency that rules all doings while on it. Well, had. Because the Goblin Market world introduced in this novella makes absolutely no damn sense at all, which was highly ironic given that it’s supposed to be one of the Logical worlds.

But even before we get to the Goblin Market, I felt both really seen and really irritated by the description of Katharine Lundy, our heroine. Hey, I was that bookish, rule-following child who was perfectly happy alone, but I also had friends who were bookish, rule-following children, and we weren’t boring prigs! We liked each other’s company! I’m still friends with them today! I also had lots of friends who weren’t bookish rule-followers… but this isn’t about me, this is about Ms McGuire writing as if Lundy’s fate was the inevitable one for kids like her. It’s not, and saying so is stupid.

Anyway, poor lonely Lundy finds a portal that leads her to the Goblin Market, a realm with seemingly bizarre rules that were set up in order to maintain Fair Value, the defining characteristic of this world. On the one hand, I thought it was pretty neat that there exists a place with all of five rules to govern your life that winds up being positively utopian. Cheating individuals or not contributing to society means that the realm itself will punish you. Lundy’s dad thinks that this discourages maturity and free will but Lundy’s dad is stupid. Do real world punishments for criminal acts discourage free will, Dad? Fucking hardly.

But the Market isn’t shown to be a good place — despite it being a radically cool concept — but a scary one. Which, yes, but also, what is going on here? Does Ms McGuire want us to like this place? I had zero idea why Lundy, whose grasp on the Fair Value thing often seemed shaky at best, would want to live here. The entire thing with the Wasp Queen and Mockery was ridiculous and unnecessarily off-camera. The bargain Lundy made to restore Moon to humanity made no sense either: if the relationship development the Archivist predicted was “inevitable”, why bother putting it in as a price?! And the way Lundy left Goblin Market at the end was the stupidest thing I’ve ever read in these books. The idea for the Goblin Market was amazing (and also awful in the sense that transactionalist societies always feel one step away from donning jackboots and rounding up the disabled,) but the execution so incredibly nonsensical, for a book about a fantasy realm ruled by logic, that I didn’t know whether this entire thing was supposed to be a weird joke of some kind.

Obviously, this is my least favorite of the series, and at the moment the least favorite of the novellas in contention for the 2020 Hugo Awards. So bad.

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