July 2021 archive

What I Like About Me by Jenna Guillaume

I stayed up way past my bedtime to finish this charming, body positive tale of a 16 year-old at an inflection point in her life, trying to figure out what’s going on with her parents, her best friend, her sister, the boy she thinks she loves and the boy she most definitely does not love, …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/07/30/what-i-like-about-me-by-jenna-guillaume/

The Follower by Nicholas Bowling

As the parent of twins, I can attest to the fact that twins can be as sweetly devoted yet as deeply strange as the siblings depicted in this novel. After the death of his father, the already rather odd Jesse Owens (yes, really) starts looking for meaning in all the most metaphysical places. His search …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/07/29/the-follower-by-nicholas-bowling/

The Smurfs Tales #1: The Smurfs And The Bratty Kid by Peyo

I grew up with The Smurfs as a child, tho in all honesty, I was one of those children who barely absorbed the “mythology” of the overarching story vs enjoying the gags of each standalone episode. And while I certainly gobbled up my fair share of Asterix and Tintin comics, I never got into the …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/07/27/the-smurfs-tales-1-the-smurfs-and-the-bratty-kid-by-peyo/

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

I loved “The City Born Great,” the 2016 short story (and 2017 Hugo finalist) that was the seed of this novel. “The conceit of the story is that great human cities have a life of their own. Maybe that life awakens quickly, maybe it takes centuries or millennia, but at some point the genius loci …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/07/25/the-city-we-became-by-n-k-jemisin/

Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow

Isn’t Eastern Standard Tribe a neat title? It sounds so nifty, so cool, so exciting, there must be a lot happening behind it. Doctorow has Art, the first-person narrator of roughly half the chapters, spell things out about halfway through the book. “It’s like this,” I said. “It used to be that the way you …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/07/24/eastern-standard-tribe-by-cory-doctorow/

Assassin’s Orbit by John Appel

Gosh, I’m at the point in my life where I really wish we had a better comparison for books featuring older female heroes than The Golden Girls. Nothing against the classic sitcom, but literally the only similarity Assassin’s Orbit has with TGG is that the main characters are feisty older women. That’s definitely a draw …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/07/22/assassins-orbit-by-john-appel/

Disney’s Beauty And The Beast by Teddy Slater, Ron Dias & Ric González

When my middle child brought me this book to read aloud, no doubt gifted to my kids in a grab bag of books from my mother-in-law, I was pretty excited to do it. I grew up obsessed with my hardcover copy of Disney’s Cinderella, and Beauty And The Beast was one of my favorite Disney …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/07/19/disneys-beauty-and-the-beast-by-teddy-slater-ron-dias-ric-gonzalez/

Sweet Tea by Piper Huguley

This is a sheer delight of a clean romance novel, one that touches on getting comfortable with your roots but still being open to love when it shows up to surprise you. Althea Dailey has finally made partner at her intellectual property law firm in New York City but, now that she’s achieved her life …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/07/13/sweet-tea-by-piper-huguley/

The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison

Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison

I wrote in 2015, “One last thing that I liked about The Goblin Emperor is that it didn’t end with an obvious sequel on its way. There are many stories that Addison could set in this world, and they would be a pleasure to read…” The Witness for the Dead is one of those stories, …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/07/12/the-witness-for-the-dead-by-katherine-addison/

The Wicked King (The Folk Of The Air #2) by Holly Black

Haha, what the hell, NetGalley only sent me the first three quarters of this novel for review? Good thing I looked up the next book in the series and realized from the blurb that I had no idea how the events described there led from this one, and so discovered that I was missing an …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/07/09/the-wicked-king-the-folk-of-the-air-2-by-holly-black/