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It took me three tries, but I finally found enough time to get past the first five percent of the book to dive into this excellently rendered fantasy world. Which isn’t to say that the first five percent was bad, just that it’s awfully dense with chimney-climbing stuff, and given my heavy reading load, it …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/10/05/steeplejack-steeplejack-1-by-a-j-hartley/
I likened reading Darcey Bell’s A Simple Favor to enjoying a bananas smoothie of noir tropes and modern mom issues, and will extend that simile to say that I wasn’t sure how much I liked the aftertaste, but was pleased to have read it ahead of seeing the movie starring Anna Kendrick, Blake Lively and …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/10/01/from-page-to-screen-a-simple-favor/
Y’all, that was bananas. Imagine every noir trope/betrayal/plot twist thrown into a blender and served up with a healthy dose of modern mom issues, and you have this completely insane book that I read essentially overnight when I should have been sleeping. Granted, I was trying to crush the book ahead of going to see …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/09/22/a-simple-favor-by-darcey-bell/
About 60% of the way through this book, I thought, “Wtf, this isn’t going to be about what I think it is, is it?” and then it fucking was. And while I was okay with the events that led to the book garnering its own #WTFThatEnding, I was legitimately pissed with how the book has …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/09/16/behind-her-eyes-by-sarah-pinborough/
I’m not one of those snobs who always insists that the book was better than the movie adaptation. In my experience as a pop culture connoisseur, particularly in our modern era, book and movie are often on a similar level to one another. Gone Girl, for example, was excellent in both forms, though that likely …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/09/14/from-page-to-screen-crazy-rich-asians/
Tommy Orange is such a superlative writer that he can do things that irritate the hell out of me in other books and somehow make them work. And better than work: he creates magic on the page. It’s not really a spoiler to say that There There ends with multiple storylines left unresolved. In the …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/09/11/there-there-by-tommy-orange/
So let me begin with a quotation from near the end of the novel (pg 345 of the paperback Titan edition): “If I took away the sensory overlay I could directly know the patterns of so many concepts coming to fruition out here on the North Sea: the physics behind pressure gauges and safety seals, …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/09/10/occupy-me-by-tricia-sullivan/
Definitely my favorite of the series so far. Murderbot is slowly becoming more comfortable and confident as an autonomous unit interacting with humans, with a purpose that is becoming clearer, as well: to take down the GrayCris corporation whose actions essentially precipitated Murderbot’s discovery and subsequent flight across the galaxy. There’s a greater wistfulness, too, …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/09/07/rogue-protocol-the-murderbot-diaries-3-by-martha-wells/
Okay, jeez, this book means well but honestly, it’s like someone took a distillation of current events from the last ten or fifteen years and fictionalized it to make it easily understandable for and palatable to the average white woman. Here is modern feminism (with a bit of background on the movement in America) and, …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/09/02/the-female-persuasion-by-meg-wolitzer/
Hands down my favorite fantasy novel of 2018 so far. In large part because it isn’t a fantasy novel or, as I described it to Bookclub chat, is really a meaty sci-fi novel in a delicious fantasy shell. It’s smart and witty and heartfelt, and I laughed and cried and gasped in sheer astonishment in …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/08/21/foundryside-founders-1-by-robert-jackson-bennett/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire