May 16 2026

Platform Decay by Martha Wells

Here are some of the good bits from the new Murderbot novel, Platform Decay. I’m leaving out context, so I hope no big plot points are revealed.

I looked at Farai, and she said, “They’re looking for rogue SecUnits. Rogue SecUnits are always alone.”
Well, fuck. I hate it when the humans are right. I sent two of my intel drones to cover Naja and Sofi, and we started to walk. (p. 147)

Platform Decay by Martha Wells

Speaking of rogue SecUnits,

I sent: I don’t have a governor module and if you fuck up my retrieval I will fucking tear you apart, now get the hell out of here you asshole. I included a packet with some of my basic codes (fooling weapons scanners, taking control of cameras and drones, the original version of walk-like-a-human, etc.) And find some different clothes! (p. 95)

When things are getting a little feisty:

“SecUnit.” I thought Farai was going to tell me not to use violence, or don’t kill humans who are trying very hard to kill us or something. Mensah’s family had never really understood … anything about me.
Instead, Farai said with grim conviction, “I want you to do whatever you have to to keep those motherless shits away from my daughter.”
Fuck yes. (p. 119)

And while this episode in SecUnit’s life is particularly sweary, or at least seemed that way to me, it hasn’t lost its knack for understatement.

In front of the station, my hauler bot had run into the armored vehicle so successfully, it had decided to repeat the experience several times. (p. 201)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/05/16/platform-decay-by-martha-wells/

May 14 2026

Destiny Ink: Sleepover Surprise by Adeola Sokunbi

This charming chapter book for advancing readers will delight and reassure any kid looking forward to the exciting experience of their very first sleepover!

Alas, my own first sleepover was not a great time. I was seven years old and my best friend was my next door neighbor, who was a grade or two ahead of me. I found her friends confusingly mature — they wanted to talk about boys and kissing and pranks — and they probably thought I was a baby. After we all eventually fell asleep, I woke up with a desperate case of homesickness and had to go home. Later, my best friend told me that I’d ruined her slumber party. We did not remain best friends for long.

Fortunately, Destiny Ink has a much better experience than I did, even tho she and her hamster Fuzzy are both extremely nervous about what’s not only her first sleepover but also her first experience sleeping outdoors. Her best friend Olivia has invited her to come sleep in a tent in Olivia’s backyard. Destiny is excited but also a little scared. It’ll be awfully dark when they go to bed. What if there are monsters?

Destiny decides that what she and Fuzzy need is a little practice, so builds an indoor tent the night before. Imagine her surprise when she discovers a lost monster and his pet rustling around in there after she’s gone to bed! The duo are just as afraid of her as she is, theoretically, of them. Destiny knows that she doesn’t want anyone to feel as scared as she’d once been, so decides to be the perfect sleepover host, even if she’s never actually had a sleepover herself before. Will helping the lost monster in this way adequately prepare her for camping out with Olivia?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/05/14/destiny-ink-sleepover-surprise-by-adeola-sokunbi/

May 13 2026

The Dogs Of Venice by Steven Rowley

Choosing this to read rn was 100% due to my recent coverage of it in the latest Tantalizing Tales column reminding me that it’s a manageably quick, grown-up read. Which is just what I need while my doctors puzzle out what’s been keeping me sick since mid-January, with only occasional bursts of energy that would allow me to resume my normal lifestyle for, at most, four days at a time before coming down with flu-like symptoms all over again (and as I’m currently suffering now.)

It certainly hasn’t been due to travel, as my doctors have inquired of me. All the far-flung climes that I’ve enjoyed since last spring have been visited entirely through books or televised sports. That desire for what seems exotic to me, and my need for something short — as well as a nostalgia for a city that I haven’t visited in several decades — nudged me to read this novella of picking up the pieces when everything you thought you wanted collapses around you.

I’m just going to crib myself for the next bit of description, if you don’t mind (I am a little sick after all; insert Karen from Mean Girls cough here.)

“Our protagonist Paul has spent months planning the perfect romantic holiday in Venice. He’s thus completely blindsided when his marriage of five years abruptly unravels, leaving him heartbroken and alone.

“Hoping that a change of scenery will help heal at least a little of his heartbreak, he decides to take the Venice trip by himself. Soon after arriving, he notices a small, scruffy dog trotting alongside a canal, with all the self-assurance that he himself lacks. When their paths cross again, Paul decides to follow the little dog, in hopes of gaining some insight into the creature’s confident self-sufficiency.

“As Paul journeys amidst the sights, sounds, food and people of Venice, he begins to discover connections that he never thought possible, whether to a dog, a city or — perhaps most importantly — to himself.”

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/05/13/the-dogs-of-venice-by-steven-rowley/

May 12 2026

This Is Who I Am by Rashmi Sirdeshpande & Ruchi Mhasane

As a third culture kid myself, this book means a lot to me, as it beautifully captures and explains the experience of belonging to more than just one place and culture.

Told in the first person, this charmingly illustrated children’s book is essentially the story of author Rashmi Sirdeshpande and her family. Her parents emigrated from Goa, India, to work as doctors in the United Kingdom. Some of the locals were lovely and welcoming, while others were much less so. As she and her younger brother were born and grew up, they would join their parents in traveling back to India to visit family, even as they had otherwise British upbringings.

Sometimes, she would encounter the questions of what she is or where she’s (really) from. These are, ofc, loaded questions, often asked by people who want to categorize you as “other”. The answer is far more complicated than the querents usually expect, too, leading to confusion on all sides. FWIW, I think the best way to ask about a person’s ethnicity or culture is to ask “Are you [nationality]?” because that shows an actual interest in the world around you, and a familiarity with the wider world. That said, I’ll never forget the time some Asian guy walked up to me, all smiles, and asked, “Are you Filipina?” When I replied in the negative, his face dropped into an expression of disgust as he stomped off. Lol, sorry, bro.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/05/12/this-is-who-i-am-by-rashmi-sirdeshpande-ruchi-mhasane/

May 11 2026

A Fishboy Named… Sashimi by Dan Santat

I almost feel bad reading this after the copious amounts of sashimi I had as part of my Mother’s Day dinner last night (but only almost, lol.)

Sashimi is a fish boy who swims out of Barnacle Bay one night looking for refuge… and answers. He figures that infiltrating the local middle school will help: the Lost & Found has everything he needs to stay incognito, and the other kids are about the same size as he is, so he can blend in.

After some awkward introductions, sixth grade teacher Miss Wilcox tells the class’ penultimate new kid Joe to show Sashimi around. Joe has already pegged the even newer comer as being weird, but has enough problems of his own to deal with, what with his lack of friends and, worse, being the target of the school bully.

Sashimi, being entirely new to life on dry land, is fascinated by his surroundings, even as he’s unwilling to let Joe be a punching bag for the local mean kids. As the two tentatively form a friendship, they learn more about the town they live in, as well as the ongoing local quest for the legendary Beast of Barnacle Bay. Will Sashimi finally find the answers he’s looking for, or will he find himself forced to return to the sea empty-handed? Or, worse, will he be trapped onshore by people determined to harm him solely for who he appears to be?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/05/11/a-fishboy-named-sashimi-by-dan-santat/

May 10 2026

A Scandal in Königsberg by Christopher Clark

In its 152 pages of main text, A Scandal in Königsberg gives readers a study in religious weirdness, jealousies within small-city elites, the hazards of mixing church and state, bureaucracies and their tendencies towards compromise regardless of facts, and finally the unknowability of some parts of history. Conversely, it is a testimony to what can be known in intimate detail about events nearly 200 years in the past, at least in a literate and preservation-minded society. Clark introduces the events with this brief prologue:

A Scandal in Königsberg by Christopher Clark

Between 1835 and 1842, scandal tightened around two clergymen in the Baltic port city of Königsberg. It destroyed their reputations, drove them out of their jobs and into prison, and banished them from public life. Their legal exoneration of the most serious charges against them came too late to reverse the damage. I have been thinking about this small vortex of turbulence ever since I happened on the relevant files in the early 1990s. The campaign of denunciations and rumour that took down the Lutheran preachers Johann Ebel and Heinrich Diestel belongs to an age before the advent of paparazzi, radio, television and digital social media, but that is precisely what endows their story with fabular power. Resemblances to present-day persons and situations, though not intended, cannot be ruled out.

Königsberg, known as Kaliningrad since it came under Soviet rule at the end of World War II, is most famous as the home of Immanuel Kant. It is also well known to mathematicians as the site of one of the founding problems of topology. The city had seven bridges that crossed three branches of the Pregel; is it possible to walk a route through the town that crosses each bridge once and only once? And if not, can this be mathematically proven? Königsberg was also the capital of Ducal Prussia, and its Hohenzollern rulers owed fealty to the Polish kings for this territory. Over the course of the 1600s, the Hohenzollern Electors of Brandenburg usurped this authority, eventually proclaiming themselves first Kings in Prussia and then Kings of Prussia.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/05/10/a-scandal-in-konigsberg-by-christopher-clark/

May 09 2026

Ehen in Philippsburg by Martin Walser

At the end of January, I wrote that I was not sure I was going to finish Ehen in Philippsburg (Marriages in Philippsburg). It’s not that the book was bad, as such, it’s just that more than six months had elapsed since I had started reading, and that was a good indicator that the novel was not really holding my attention. I had two main reasons for not consigning it to DNFland. First, and more pragmatically, reading German is a skill, and like every skill, it needs practicing. Second, the Philippsburg was part of the Süddeutsche Zeitung‘s first batch of great novels of the 20th century, and the editors who selected those 50 books for publication in a special edition had a mostly good track record of choosing worthwhile books that I probably would not have picked out on my own. So in the interest of skill and serendipity, after I finished Chevengur (which was two years in the reading) I resolved that I would finish Ehen in Philippsburg in May.

Ehen in Philippsburg by Martin Walser

Truth be told, once I built up a little momentum, it was good reading, maybe even compelling. Back in January, I wrote that Walser’s “lead character is a young man on the make; he catches some lucky breaks, is sweet on his fiancée’s mother, gets business tips from his future father-in-law, and looks like he’s going places in postwar Philippsburg, a fictional city in the southern parts of West Germany.” I could tell from the pacing, though, that the rest of the novel could not continue on the same trajectory, and speculated that there might be a big fall ahead.

I had forgotten that some German books still put their tables of contents at the back of the book, and so I didn’t realize that Walser broke Philippsburg into four parts. Hans Beumann, the young man on the make in the first part, becomes a secondary character in the second and third parts, and returns more or less as the lead character of the fourth. The first section ends with a harrowing account of what happens when Beumann’s fiancée, Anne Volkmann, seeks to have an abortion. She is shuttled from doctor to doctor, some of whom have no intention of helping and indeed pretend to help while simply passing time in the hope that Anne will decide it’s too late to end the pregnancy. Other doctors are too mindful of their reputations and try to send her to someone else. She does finally succeed, and survives the various attempts, but it’s a hard reminder of what criminalizing abortion meant in 1950s West Germany.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/05/09/ehen-in-philippsburg-by-martin-walser/

May 08 2026

Tantalizing Tales — May 2026 — Part Two

Hello, dear readers! This one’s pretty late, as I spent most of the day either in a medical facility or passed out at home. My illness has gotten so bad that I barely even had the energy to read! Hopefully, some of these books I’m about to discuss will help entice me out of this reading slump, starting with two novels publishing next week, before we look back at four shorter reads from 2025.

First up is Robert B Parker’s Booked by Alison Gaylin, as she continues the famed late author’s PI Sunny Randall novels with the thirteenth book in the series. Sunny’s latest client might seem to be little more than an industry in-joke, as a book critic sends a bestselling author on a spiral. World-famous writer Melanie Joan Hall is less than thrilled that the online book influencer known only as Book Babe has given her a scathing one-star review. Ordinarily, Melanie — like all sensible authors — would just brush off a bad review. Unfortunately, her publisher is now threatening to pull all her books due to Book Babe’s outsize influence on social media.

In desperation, Melanie hires Sunny to help her track down Book Babe. Sunny’s investigations uncover a rich history between the two women, as well as a ton of bad blood. When Book Babe suddenly turns up dead, Sunny will have to face the likelihood of her latest client being a murderer. Will she be able to unravel and escape this tangled web of enmity before she becomes the next victim herself?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/05/08/tantalizing-tales-may-2026-part-two/

May 07 2026

Chernobyl, Life, And Other Disasters by Yevgenia Nayberg

It’s so rare to find a memoirist whose art is as engaging as her prose, but Yevgenia Nayberg truly is phenomenal in both fields. You can very much tell that she’s a trained artist, even before she goes into the details of her academic beginnings in this arresting memoir of growing up in Kyiv in the 1980s.

Genya knows from the age of five that she wants to be an artist, just like her animator mother. After she turns eleven, she’s going to apply to the same prestigious art school that her mother went to. Her mother warns her that the school’s unofficial quota system — where Jews can only ever make up 1% of the student body — means that Genya will have to work at least twice as hard as everyone else to get in. When Genya realizes that this mostly means private art classes with two other students whose company she enjoys tho, it becomes even less of a burden than anticipated. But when strange news comes out of nearby Chernobyl and multiple people, including her art tutor, pack up and leave the area, will Genya’s dream of following in her mother’s footsteps be stopped in its tracks by forces that not even the strong-willed youngster can overcome?

Told with the wry humor of a kid intelligent enough to see through many, but not all, of the things that adults tell her in order to make life ostensibly easier, this is a terrific portrayal of what it was like to grow up Jewish and quietly iconoclastic in Soviet Ukraine. Genya’s battles begin when she fights to be seen as a little girl instead of the boy her mother not so secretly wishes she was, and continue as she grows older and refuses to be anyone but herself. Her struggle for self-determination in a system designed to make her biddable and quiet is compelling, even in seemingly small rebellions like getting the better of her obnoxious cousin Masha.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/05/07/chernobyl-life-and-other-disasters-by-yevgenia-nayberg/

May 06 2026

Hello, Beautiful by Traci N Todd & Loveis Wise

I adore Loveis Wise’s work, which moved me to tears in the astonishing What I Must Tell The World, a children’s biography of Lorraine Hansberry. I wasn’t quite as moved here, but their art is spectacular throughout, in a book about encouraging young children to feel their feelings and embrace their entire selves.

Hello, Beautiful depicts a mixed race child with their parents and Black grandmother. The adults form a close-knit unit who nurture and raise the baby together. Over the course of the book’s pages, said baby is exhorted to be their own person no matter the highs and lows that life may throw at them. Inner strength is beauty, and honoring your feelings while also looking for the humanity in others is essential.

The text is written as a love letter from a caregiver to a young child, but also contains loads of advice for how to be truly beautiful. In a world where Black bodies are devalued based on skin color or other supposedly African features, this is a really important sentiment to relate. Black kids need to hear that they’re beautiful because they’re authentic and brave and eager to live in community, a message they’re not often afforded in the United States Of America.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/05/06/hello-beautiful-by-traci-n-todd-loveis-wise/