Sep 21 2026

Dead Girls by Beck Kubrick

Y’all, I would kill to protect Cassie. When Ash Hargreeves, the heroine of this YA graphic novel, calls her foster sister “terminally delightful,” she is being 100% accurate, as Cassie is the absolute best no matter what life and serial killers try to throw at her. I love her and want to embody her positive spirit as much as humanly possible.

But this is not a book entirely about Cassie, amazing as she is. By contrast, Ash is the perpetually angry seventeen year-old whose choices as to whom to trust may seem tenuous at best. But can you blame her? When she was a little girl, her mother committed some of the most horrific serial killings the small town of Clossdale had ever seen. After slaughtering five other young women, “Evil Evelyn” perished in a fire that almost killed her daughter as well. Ash has been in foster care ever since. She doesn’t really trust her foster parents — and she definitely doesn’t trust the system — but she believes in Cassie and in their other best friend Jamie, whose own less than awesome home situation prompts Jamie to spend as much time at Ash and Cassie’ place as possible.

When girls start dying in the woods around Clossdale thirteen years after Evelyn’s initial rampage, suspicions almost inevitably turn to her maladjusted daughter. Ash knows she didn’t do it, but that doesn’t mean that someone isn’t targeting some of the most rich and popular girls of their high school. The sheriff has made little secret of the fact that she believes that Ash has “bad blood” running through her. But when the girl Ash has fallen for disappears, and the killer seems to be hunting Ash next, will she be able to tap into the killer instinct she allegedly inherited from her mom in order to save the day and stop the real murderer?

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Sep 19 2026

Budapest by Victor Sebestyen

Victor Sebestyen offers a readable, one-volume history of Budapest from its Roman beginnings as Aquincum (plus a little more than a page on pre-Roman findings) through the time of the book’s publication in 2022, although it is very light on the years after the anti-communist uprising of 1956. Out of the book’s 377 pages, the remaining 33 years of the communist era and the 33 years from the revolution of 1989 — in which Hungary played a pivotal role for all of Europe — to the present receive 10 pages each. Though post-1989 Budapest really only gets four pages, Sebestyen still finds space to misread Fukuyama; and though Viktor Orban had been prime minister for about fourteen years (in two separate periods) by the time of publication, Sebestyen only mentions him as a student-age speaker at the reburial of Imre Nagy. The book is much stronger on the Habsburg period, and particularly on the 19th century that saw explosive growth, the merger of Buda and Pest into a single city, and the construction of the city’s modern appearance. It’s a defensible choice, as the 19th century did so much to shape the city’s current character and appearance, but between this emphasis and effectively ending the story in 1956, Sebestyen leaves the book looking at the past and giving short shrift to the gorgeous and dynamic city that Budapest has become as the 20th century turned into the 21st.

Budapest by Victor Sebestyen

Two more minor quibbles. First, the book has the subtitle “Portrait of a City Between East and West,” which is true enough, but the same can be said (and often is) of every major city between Munich and Moscow in one direction and between Venice and Ankara in the other. Though the phrase may be good marketing, it’s hardly unique to Budapest. Similarly, when Sebestyen writes about Hungary’s battles against the Ottoman Empire (roughly pages 47 to 63) he writes of the Magyar nation as a bulwark of Christendom against invaders from the East. This term has also been applied to Poles (and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), Serbs, Croatians and even, as a little background searching showed, Albanians and Armenians. These examples point to my second quibble, which is that a little more comparative work would have improved the book. A sentence here and there about Vienna, Krakow or other Central European capitals would have helped to put Budapest into a broader context. Sebestyen is right when he writes in his introduction that Budapest

is at the crossroads of geographical regions and of civilizations, at the intersection of ancient trade routes. Mountains that gradually slope into gentle hills converge on a great river, the Danube, and a vast plain. Mediterranean Latin, Alpine German and Slavic peoples meet here. This is the focal point of Roman Catholic, North European Protestant and Greek Orthodox/Byzantine cultures. (p. 2)

All the more reason to place the city among its peers, to look around a bit even whilst concentrating on one urban area. Of course it helps to get the comparisons right. Sebestyen writes

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Sep 18 2026

Tantalizing Tales — September 2026 — Part Three

The days are getting shorter and the worst of the heat is tapering off, at least in my part of the world! Hopefully the weather is also getting (or remaining!) nice and comfy in yours, with plenty of time for reading awesome books, like the following great selections.

We begin with the immaculate vibes of Marshall J Moore’s The Henchperson’s Guide To Unionizing. Labor Day may have come and gone here in the US but it’s always a good time to remember the rights that unions carved out for those of us in the workforce, whether we work for supervillains or otherwise (so yes, there are definite Halloween vibes going on here, too!)

In this comedic fantasy novel, Igor is the loyal assistant to a brilliant but demanding Doctor. Igor digs up graves, performs minor surgery and generally looks after his mad genius boss, for little thanks and questionable pay. But he believes in the Doctor’s mission of bringing new life to dead flesh, so is happy to put up with a lot in their joint quest for scientific revolution.

After a crowd of pitchfork- and torch-bearing villagers runs them out of their old digs, Igor and the Doctor are forced to find another place to carry on their mission. The walls of isolated Ravenwald Manor seem promising, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s already inhabited by a vampiric Count and his dissatisfied bride Cornelia. Meanwhile, an enigmatic witch and her feline familiar Grimalkin are also intent on performing an esoteric ritual there, leading to more than a little battling over turf.

Igor keeps the peace between the three factions as best he can. It wouldn’t do to have yet another swarm of villagers descend upon any of them, and working together is the best way to avoid arousing suspicion. He soon discovers, however, that he, Cornelia and Grimalkin have a lot more in common than they’d ever expected. When the three of them realize that their masters aren’t merely misunderstood figures but are actually planning to literally destroy the world, they’ll have to join forces to prevent Armageddon and, perhaps, to finally embrace life on their own terms.

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Sep 17 2026

Muneca by Cynthia Gomez

As soon as I read the word “Orinda”, I was all “no way! I have to tell my best friend about this!” as that’s where she’s from and this is literally the first time I’ve ever read anything set specifically in that part of California.

Orinda and Oakland in the 1960s are the setting for this queer romance that’s also, technically, a horror novel (I’ve seen the term “horrormance” thrown around lately but idk if I’m ready to embrace that term yet, lol.) Our protagonist Nati Fuentes has returned as an adult to the manor where her mother worked as an unappreciated servant for years. The Miramontes who own the manor are the proud white Hispanic descendants of Spanish colonizers. Their wealth, however, has dwindled. Heiress Violeta, a few years older than Nati, married well but now lies trapped inside her own paralyzed body, stricken by an illness that the doctors can find neither cure nor explanation for.

Nati suspects witchcraft. More importantly, she believes that if she can break the curse, she’ll be well rewarded for her efforts. Applying for the position of Violeta’s personal attendant, she begins investigating the Miramonte manor and those who reside within it, and soon learns that things are exactly as she expected and yet, somehow, worse.

One bright spot, so to speak, is the flame of anger burning inside Violeta’s soul. As Nati and Violeta begin to communicate and confide in one another, they hatch a plan to both free Violeta and wreak revenge on the people who’ve been keeping her trapped so cruelly. Along the way, they begin to fall into a love so obviously forbidden for who and when they are that it should be unthinkable. Will their passion burn strongly enough to destroy all the obstacles standing between them?

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Sep 16 2026

After Review: The 25-26 Arsenal Season by Poorly Drawn Arsenal

I don’t often talk about zines on this website but honestly, the quality and size of this terrific perfect-bound book firmly qualify it for review (plus it has more words than plenty of other books I’ve discussed here, lol.)

As regular readers will know, I’m a massive Arsenal fan, having unexpectedly fallen in love with the sport and the team and its style of play as they destroyed Manchester United in 1997, to the chagrin of my Red Devil brother. It’s been a glorious if often rocky road since then, with me often exasperatedly needing to remind fellow fans that yes, the Community Shield counts as a trophy (even if, admittedly, my attempts at claiming that the Tridentity Cup also counted were primarily facetious on my part.) As I’ve moved between cities and countries, through different life situations and relationships, my love for the Arsenal has always been one of the most incontrovertible parts of my character. This is very much helped by the fact that my club has held to our own shared values of respecting fairness, living within our means and promoting inclusivity. It hasn’t always behaved impeccably, but whomst among us is free of flaw? What’s important is that the club has done and continues to do its best, again reflecting my own growth through these turbulent and increasingly connected (for better or worse) times.

Anyway, through our many ups and downs, I have remained a cheerfully steadfast Gooner who, like my kids’ future stepdad Declan Rice, knows that it’s not done till it’s done. That’s the nature of sports (and life) after all: you do your best, process what happened then go again. For twenty-two long years, however, it seemed that the pinnacle of the most competitive and arguably most entertaining league in the world — the greatest objective measure of success in sports, or at least this sport as decided by common consensus — was out of our grasp. We came in second too many times, and slid all the way down to eighth not once but twice. And then somehow, in this latest season, we won the lot.

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Sep 15 2026

The Hanged Man by Jane Brookwood (EXCERPT)

The weather is cooling off up here in the northern hemisphere and the sequel to Practical Magic is in theatres too, so what better time to check out a new cozy mystery series featuring Tarot cards and a delicious tinge, if not more, of the supernatural?

Jane Brookwood’s The Hanged Man is the first novel in the Raven-verse Mystery series that’s named for the metaphysical shop owned by our heroine Fiona Miller. At The Raven, Fiona sells crystals, mixes teas and reads Tarot cards, alongside her cat and familiar Rosie. After doing a reading with Rosie that results in ominous portents, Fiona is already braced for the worst, even before she learns of the death of her long-lost best friend’s son. His body has been found in a manner eerily reminiscent of The Hanged Man card that Fiona only recently drew. Is it just a coincidence? Or a sign urging her to get involved with the investigation?

The town of Pineridge Hollow seems to have already made up its mind about the death, no matter what Fiona, Rosie or the Tarot cards have to say. As Fiona and her friends dig further into the town’s secrets, they’ll uncover long-held grudges and old money that would much rather its secrets stay buried, no matter the cost.

Read on for a scene-setting excerpt that reveals which cards Fiona drew in her initial reading! I took one look and went “Phew! Trouble is certainly brewing over there in Pineridge Hollow!”

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Sep 14 2026

Mythspeaker by Christopher Roubique

Frankly, any good faith attempt to bring the world’s diverse mythologies to a wider audience of young readers — a la Rick Riordan’s Camp Half-Blood Chronicles — is a win in my book. While Christopher Roubique is careful to note that his story is based not on any one tribe’s beliefs but on an amalgamation, it’s clear that this Middle Grade novel is strongly rooted in his diaspora Native American heritage.

Kyta is a bit of a loner. This is due in large part to an encounter he once had with Deer Mother, who told him that it was his destiny to save the world. Ever since then, he’s been training himself for this as yet unknown mission, staying hyper-alert to any opportunity for heroism.

Unfortunately, this state of constant vigilance means that he doesn’t have time — or so he believes — to enjoy his childhood or make friends with anyone except for Old Moon Eyes, a Living Myth who inhabits the forests. Old Moon Eyes thinks that Kyta should loosen up, but grudgingly helps quiz the thirteen year-old on the languages that Kyta instinctively understands and knows how to speak (his superpower, if you will.)

Tragedy strikes when the egg of the World Turtle Gonoka, that will eventually hatch to create a new continent of its own, is stolen from its heavily guarded cave. The guards have been slaughtered by a strange new beast, and the egg carted off by newcomers to the lands of the Ay’do. The Tenemusuh had sequestered themselves behind the high walls of the city they’d quickly built upon arrival but had seemed peaceable, until now at least. Perhaps, the Ay’do posit, the Tenumusuh don’t understand the ramifications of their actions? For Gonoka is not pleased that her egg has been stolen, and will not hesitate to destroy every living thing on her back should her egg not be returned to where it belongs.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/09/14/mythspeaker-by-christopher-roubique/

Sep 13 2026

Patriot by Alexei Navalny

“But life works in such a way that social progress and a better future can only be achieved if a certain number of people are willing to pay the price for their right to have their own beliefs. The more of them there are, the less everyone has to pay. And the day will come when speaking the truth and advocating for justice will be commonplace and not at all dangerous in Russia.” (back cover) Unfortunately, that day will never come for Alexei Navalny, for he has paid the full price of his life.

Patriot by Alexei Navalny

Navalny was born in 1976 near Moscow. He was a bit of a scrawny city kid, and during the school summer break, he was sent to his father’s extended family in a village in northern Ukraine. He returned from a summer of village life well fed and a bit bigger, and the cycle repeated itself the next year. The spring before he turned 10, the Chernobyl explosion spread radiation across the region, and the village where his father was from was evacuated. Navalny was 15 when Yeltsin stood on the tanks. He was a Soviet kid, growing up in a Russia that knew both promise and crisis. He was too young to be a kitchen dissident and samizdat reader, to have the astonishing and occasionally bloody-minded bravery of an Anna Politkovskaya. He was too old to be reflexively cowed by the system that Putin built. He finished a law degree in 1998 and further training in public finance in 2001.

He has some stories of what Russian business was like in the early 2000s. One place he worked took the whole company to Turkey each year for a week, for morale building. It became a tradition, and then a legend. Navalny arrived at the business just as the bosses were trying to cut back. On the whole, the stories in Once Upon a Russia are better and wilder. As Navalny presents himself in Patriot, wild is not exactly his style. “It may sound corny, but it’s true: I wanted my efforts to make the world a better place.” Accordingly, he gradually soured on business. “My company, building offices in Moscow, offered no such opportunities. I shuddered at the thought that my whole life might be spent helping certain people make an extra couple of million dollars.” (both p. 180)

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Sep 12 2026

Über Zensur by Ai Weiwei

The title translates as On Censorship, and over the course of his life, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has encountered it far more than most people. (The book was originally published in English; I received this edition as a birthday present. It was translated into German by Luca Groß, and it reads both smoothly and clearly.) His father was the poet Ai Qing, and thanks to the censorship of the Chinese state and the Chinese Communist Party, the Ai family was exiled from Beijing to northeastern China in 1958, and then further to Xinjiang in 1959. The family did not return to Beijing until 1976, when the younger Ai was 19. By 1978, he was part of an avant-garde art group, and in 1981 he was one of the earliest reform-era Chinese students in the United States. A chance encounter led to a friendship with Allen Ginsburg, and a living link to America’s beatniks and counterculture history.

Über Zensur by Ai Weiwei

He has worked in a wide variety of media, and he has also been a civic activist. He drew particular ire from Chinese authorities when he conducted an independent investigation into why so many buildings, especially schools, collapsed following the Sichuan earthquake of 2008. Local and national authorities wanted to censor reports of corruption; they also wanted to prevent an open accounting of how many children died in the quake’s aftermath. A police beating led to a cerebral hemorrhage, which was treatable because he was in Munich when it occurred. In 2010, local authorities in Shanghai slated his studio for demolition, and placed him under house arrest. In 2011, he was arrested on tax charges; the Chinese state confiscated his passport. In 2015, he was allowed to leave China and he settled in Germany until 2019. He declared Germany a closed society and decamped for England. He now divides his time between England, where his children are in school, and Portugal.

Censorship and control, and his reactions against them, have shaped his life and art. The best parts of this brief book are where he relates his own experiences as a way of illustrating the harm that censorship imposes on people’s lives. The book itself comprises about a score short essays, from the initial definitions of “On Censorship” and “What is Censorship?” to more oblique considerations in “Surveillance” and “Understanding the Unknown.” He offers more detailed ideas in “Censorship and Privacy” or “Censorship and Education.” For Ai, censorship is any control or attempted control of a person’s thoughts and expression by an institution with the power to try to enforce such control. Self-censorship is particularly important, because the authorities do not have the capacity to be everywhere, so they rely on people to censor themselves.

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Sep 11 2026

Tantalizing Tales — September 2026 — Part Two

Hello, dear readers! I got my flu shot yesterday and have been struggling a wee bit more than usual ever since, so all I want to do is climb back into bed with a book. The question, ofc, is which one? A strong contender is definitely Freya Marske’s Bodies Of Magic, publishing next week!

Medical school meets dark academia in the hallowed halls of the Academie of the Grand Duchy of Sieuxerr. Mages with the healer’s gift are given five grueling years in which to master their powers. At the end of that time, they’re subjected to the Grand Exam, which will determine the course of the rest of their lives.

Unfortunately for the overachievers among them, the Grand Exam is also a group project. Candidates are only told five days in advance who their randomly selected teammates will be. Together, the team will have to successfully complete five practical cases. They will either all pass together or all fail together.

Academie students Estiene, Alys, Moyna, Jehane and Clement are all aware of this, and have all prepared themselves as best they can for the attempt. There’s no preparing, however, for their discovery of the corpse of Ysabel Caudotte, the school’s best student. All five of them have a connection to Ysabel and know that they have to solve her murder, even if some people would rather her death be considered a suicide. The students only have five days to figure out whodunnit tho, or risk jeopardizing their entire futures.

I fell in love with Ms Marske’s writing while reading the inventive and unapologetically horny Cinder House — it was actually my first choice for Best Novella for the 2026 Hugo Awards — so can’t wait to experience her take on a dark academia murder mystery here!

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