Jul 16 2022
After tangling things forwards and backwards in A Trail Through Time, Jodi Taylor offers more straightforward adventures for the historians of St Mary’s in No Time Like the Past. Which is to say, there are calamities, dangers expected and otherwise, narrow escapes, and scuffles with university bureaucracy. I would say that Dr Madeleine Maxwell, first-person …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/07/16/no-time-like-the-past-by-jodi-taylor/
Jun 01 2022
This may easily be the most fascinating invented setting I’ve read for a murder mystery in ages, and that definitely includes the Anglo-Nordic nation Peter Spiegelman created for his excellent A Secret About A Secret. Imagine, if you will, a near-future world in which North America was never colonized by Europeans. Instead, the indigenous tribes …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/01/the-peacekeeper-the-good-lands-1-by-b-l-blanchard/
Mar 21 2022
A Trail Through Time is the fourth book about Madeleine Maxwell and St Mary’s Institute for Historical Research where the historians investigate major historical events in contemporary time — “It’s time travel, OK” — and follows closely on the events of A Second Chance. The title of this book refers to the ability of its major antagonists, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/03/21/a-trail-through-time-by-jodi-taylor/
Dec 31 2021
In Lent, Jo Walton takes the life of Girolamo Savonarola both seriously and literally. Not only his life, the whole framework in which he lived that life: God, demons, Purgatory, the Rule of St. Benedict, the Dominican Order to which Savonarola was dedicated, his desire to create a new Jerusalem in Italy, and ever so …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/12/31/lent-by-jo-walton/
Nov 28 2021
Like Doreen, I initially thought that Riot Baby was an imperative phrase, not a descriptive one. Instead of getting his characters to riot, Onyebuchi has them bide their time and keep absorbing the hits that life, in this particular instance life as working-class Black Americans, gives them. Those hits start early, and keep coming. Riot …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/28/riot-baby-by-tochi-onyebuchi-2/
Nov 18 2021
I don’t think I’ve yet met a premise of P. Djèlí Clark’s that I haven’t loved! Ring Shout posits the idea that the Ku Klux Klan are made up of both your regular hate-filled Klansmen and demonic Ku Klux entities from another realm masquerading as human. Not everyone can see these Ku Klux in their …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/18/ring-shout-by-p-djeli-clark-2/
Nov 16 2021
Meet Daisy Sparrow, a young peasant witch living in Elizabethan England. Together with her beloved Mum, she brews and sells potions and other assorted concoctions at market fairs. But she wants more from life than just helping people who probably didn’t need that much help to begin with, even if she’s painfully shy when it …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/16/the-queens-favorite-witch-book-1-the-wheel-of-fortune-by-benjamin-dickson-rachael-smith/
Jun 17 2021
I’ve read F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby twice, and each time I’ve been baffled by the acclaim*. Much like the critics of its time, I think the book is fine, but not much more than that. The trouble is that Gatsby is an idiot, Nick not much better, and Tom and Daisy are just …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/06/17/the-chosen-and-the-beautiful-by-nghi-vo/
Jun 04 2021
The elevator pitch is essentially Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander meets Diana Wynne Jones’ The Time Of The Ghost, with naval battles galore (any Dianas who write about those? I’d be awfully pleased to know it.) Ofc, The Kingdoms isn’t quite so rapey as Outlander (thank God) nor as suspenseful as TToTG but is a thoughtful look …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/06/04/the-kingdoms-by-natasha-pulley/
May 31 2021
The Relentless Moon, the third book in Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronauts series, changes locales and first-person narrator from the first two books, The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky. Nicole Wargin is also one of the original astronauts, and in early 1963 as The Relentless Moon opens, she is both an old Moon hand …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/05/31/the-relentless-moon-by-mary-robinette-kowal/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire