Jun 21 2022
Across the Green Grass Fields is the first of Seanan McGuire‘s Wayward Children series that I have read that’s entirely waywardness, and I liked it that way. There’s no mention of Eleanor West’s Home, nor do any of the characters from the previous five novellas in the series appear. I didn’t miss them at all, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/21/across-the-green-grass-fields-by-seanan-mcguire/
Jun 20 2022
This is one of those books that I can appreciate, even if I don’t like it. And there’s a lot to like here, so maybe it’s just a me thing. I just… I feel like Cat Valente has a lot to process in terms of abuse and marriage, and that her issues spill out way …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/20/the-past-is-red-by-catherynne-m-valente/
Jun 12 2022
Elder Race offers an extended meditation on Clarke’s Third Law, some thoughts on cultural contamination that are not new but are important to Adrian Tchaikovsky’s characters, all wrapped up in a fast-paced adventure of swords and sufficiently advanced technology. The novella is set on Sophos 4, a planet colonized by humans during the first interstellar …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/12/elder-race-by-adrian-tchaikovsky/
Jun 11 2022
Forbidden love between two princesses. Forbidden not because they are both women, but because they are princesses, and relations between their two states are tense and unequal. Thanh is a princess of Bình Hải, in the south, nominally superior to its northern neighbor but falling back in relative power because of the neighbor’s greater access …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/11/fireheart-tiger-by-aliette-de-bodard/
May 28 2022
It isn’t true that the full title for When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain was originally meant to be When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain With Her Two Tiger Sisters and Considered Eating Cleric Chih but it could have been. Except that at that point it would have been politic to mention the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/28/when-the-tiger-came-down-the-mountain-by-nghi-vo/
Dec 04 2021
Because I had enjoyed Sumi so much as a character in Come Tumbling Down, I picked up Beneath the Sugar Sky, which I had somehow missed when it was a Hugo finalist in 2019, expecting to find more of her and of Confection, the Nonsense world where she found her proper home. That turned out …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/12/04/beneath-the-sugar-sky-by-seanan-mcguire/
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 27 2021
Sarah Gailey gets to have all the fun of writing a Western while avoiding all the cultural baggage of writing one in the twenty-first century by moving the story into a dystopian future in which the United States has broken down enough that towns are isolated and most travel is by horse or by foot, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/27/upright-women-wanted-by-sarah-gailey-2/
Nov 26 2021
Though it contains tales of considerable violence, The Empress of Salt and Fortune remains in my mind as an almost restful story. It’s set at a secluded compound near Lake Scarlet, a nearly perfectly round lake formed by a falling star, and named for a glow that sometimes appears at sunset, starting faintly and then …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/26/the-empress-of-salt-and-fortune-by-nghi-vo/
Nov 25 2021
Many things have transpired at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children since I read the debut novella, Every Heart a Doorway, but I did not feel lost at all. My thanks to Seanan McGuire for making subsequent installments of her series inviting even to people who do not hang on its every word. The Home …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/25/come-tumbling-down-by-seanan-mcguire/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire