May 10 2021

Fearless World Traveler: Adventures Of Marianne North, Botanical Artist by Laurie Lawlor & Becca Stadtlander

I thought I had a fairly good knowledge of obscure Victorian women who became explorers against the odds, so I was pleasantly surprised to learn of yet another one via this beautiful picture book for children (tho I continue to be chagrined by eras and societies that deny people opportunities on the basis of sex alone.) Marianne North was a self-taught naturalist and painter whose vivid oil studies, often completed in situ while racing against light and weather, not only made waves in her own day but continue to impress in one of the longest continuing solo exhibitions by a woman, in a gallery dedicated to her works at Kew Gardens.

Ofc, it helps that she came from money and basically funded renovations to the Kew that allowed for same, but her works do stand on their own merit. Several are included in the gorgeous endpapers for this already sumptuous volume, and it’s hard not to be entranced by her artistry and especially her use of color. I can only imagine how Victorians trapped in smog and greyness must have felt when confronted with such riotous, lush beauty, tho the anecdote about witchcraft at the end gives me a fairly good idea.

Laurie Lawlor does an excellent job of telling Ms North’s story simply and without bias, acknowledging the aspects problematic to modern readers while still conveying how groundbreaking and impactful Ms North’s actions were and continue to be. Becca Stadtlander’s illustrations are for the most part perfectly suited to the text. Her depictions of tall, shy Marianne and her family are lovely, and while her depictions of wildlife pale in comparison with her subject’s, who can cast aspersions on anyone following in those illustrious footsteps? Ms Stadtlander wisely uses a different art style entirely, so it all balances out. I did, however, think it an odd misstep that the pictures of Marianne traveling through territories alien to Victorian society were entirely devoid of any local guides or bearers. I can see where she might be riding solo with only a pack horse for company, but have a hard time believing she’d pole her way through crocodile infested waters alone, much less ride a laden elephant by herself. It’s weird to see the pictures ignore the help the text acknowledges. Please don’t erase indigenous peoples. Visibility matters.

That said, this was a beautifully put-together, highly informative — though light, given its intended audience — biography of a botanical artist whose name and contributions deserve to be better known. I also enjoyed the extra material at the end that encourages readers to find out more about this remarkable woman. I got my ten year-old to buddy read this with me, and we both liked it, with him noting that the art was really good (and inspiring!) throughout.

Fearless World Traveler: Adventures Of Marianne North, Botanical Artist by Laurie Lawlor & Becca Stadtlander will be published tomorrow May 11 2021 by Holiday House and is available from all good booksellers, including

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/05/10/fearless-world-traveler-adventures-of-marianne-north-botanical-artist-by-laurie-lawlor-becca-stadtlander/

May 07 2021

Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-Stace

This book reads like a corporate war manga as told from the perspective of the plucky ace/aro civilian sidekick who’s the bridge between the corporate super soldiers/heroes and the public kept in the dark about what the evil megacorps are doing, both to the super soldiers (called SpecOps here and given only numbers as identifiers) and to the general populace. Mal is your typical 22nd century 20 year-old, long orphaned in a corporate war, juggling several gig jobs to survive while sharing what was once a hotel room with at least five other people. One of her jobs is live streaming play in BestLife, the massively multiplayer online game where she struggles to make a dent in the leaderboards while playing the War version (as opposed to the Fantasy or Sci-fi settings.) The War version is mapped to the real world where she lives, with the main draw of the setting — besides providing an outlet for people jonesing for realistic violence — being the occasional sightings of the dozen SpecOps NPCs, based on the corporate androids developed by Stellaxis, the corporation that controls water, to combat the mechas of Greenleaf, the rival corporation that controls food.

The SpecOps are both elusive and wildly popular, with fanbases and lines of merchandise both in-game and in the real world. After Mal streams a sighting of 28, she and her best friend and teammate Jessa are summoned by an unknown sponsor to get more up-close footage of the SpecOps. Thing is, their new sponsor B is convinced that the SpecOps aren’t highly realistic androids at all but are actually kids Stellaxis got away with kidnapping and experimenting on because everyone who knew them had died in one of the many devastating attacks on Stellaxis land.

At first, Mal and Jessa refuse to believe B, but take the job because she’s paying in water rations, probably the most valuable currency in New Liberty City. But when B disappears, and Mal runs into the real-life versions of 06 and 22 while looking for her, the two friends realize that maybe Stellaxis hasn’t been telling the entire truth after all, and that there’s far more to B’s story than they’d previously acknowledged.

Mal makes for an unusual heroine: kind but antisocial, determined but not the smartest. Her crush on 22 is never really explained, but she has a hard time explaining herself generally. And honestly sometimes who can explain a crush! Her strongest trait is the fact that she’ll push herself past the point of exhaustion in order to do what’s right, even in the face of overwhelming odds (with my one quibble being that anyone who regularly hikes up and down 6 flights of stairs on the daily has no business calling themselves out of shape, not unless it’s a struggle every time.) Fortunately, Mal is surrounded and supported by some real badasses, including the irrepressible Jessa, as she sets about fomenting a revolution and getting to the bottom of what Stellaxis is doing both to New Liberty City and to her beloved 22.

The social commentary was easily my favorite part of this book, as Nicole Kornher-Stace criticizes the idea of corporate-owned nation-states and the ways in which capitalism and fascism intersect. I also loved that she emphasizes a lesson I’ve only learned in the last year or so, that the adage “a poor craftsman blames his tools” is as much smug bullshit as “money can’t buy happiness.” Bad tools are a handicap in the same way that modern poverty is: not only do they make you think you’re a bad craftsman/undeserving person, they also actively discourage you from trying harder and discovering your true potential. Good tools can be life-changing, and anyone who pretends otherwise is protecting entrenched interests at the expense of everyone else.

That said, Firebreak does suffer from the fact that Mal often feels more like a supporting character than a main. I loved the #OwnVoices representation but found Mal’s awkward, antisocial personality difficult to mesh with. And that’s fine! She’ll definitely connect with lots of people who aren’t me, and the ideas and plot of the book otherwise are both thought-provoking and entertaining, tho it certainly helped to keep in mind the manga concept as I read.

Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-Stace was published May 4 2021 by Saga Press and is available from all good booksellers, including

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/05/07/firebreak-by-nicole-kornher-stace/

May 06 2021

Toasty by Sarah Hwang

So pleased to begin celebrating Asian American Pacific Islander Month here at The Frumious Consortium with this surrealist delight of a children’s book! Toasty is a piece of toast who loves dogs and really, really wants to be one himself. He has a collar and a sparkly ball, but his first actual foray from home to make doggy friends at the park does not go as planned. Spoiler alert: all’s well that ends well, tho certainly not in the way Toasty expected.

My kids are OBSESSED with object animation shows, so I knew this book was going to be right up their alleys (even tho the twins have a perpetual antipathy to dogs due to their love-hate relationship with our aging bichonpoo.) My ten year-old, especially, giggled his way through reading the entire book. “The plot was random but I loved it,” was his final verdict.

The plot was, indeed, fairly random (but adorable!) as it centers Toasty’s desire to belong and to be loved. Sarah Hwang’s debut as an author presents universal themes in a manner light enough for young children to grasp. Her art looks deceptively simple, with broad, visible strokes that evoke the drawings of her young readers, but is crammed with expressiveness and lacks any of the murkiness that is the occasional drawback of the quasi-fauvist art style.

A delightful debut, with silliness balancing out the heavier themes of belonging and love. I’m really looking forward to reading and sharing more of Ms Hwang’s work with my kids in future.

Toasty by Sarah Hwang was published May 4 2021 by Holiday House and is available from all good booksellers, including

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/05/06/toasty-by-sarah-hwang/

May 05 2021

Hurricane Summer by Asha Bromfield

There is a LOT going on in this book, and some of it is really good and some of it is really bad, but I definitely looked up the age of the author after this and I’m genuinely convinced that in a decade or two, she’s going to come back to this book and wince because there’s so much she gets right but so, so much that she doesn’t understand how to write quite yet. And I’m not saying that 26 year-olds shouldn’t write books: Asha Bromfield clearly has a lot of talent and a lot to say. But after reading this, I genuinely don’t think that she’s finished processing her traumas yet in a way where she’s actually forgiven the people who hurt her given the way she forces our heroine Tilla to forgive, and so the denouements feel more forced and shallow than they might in, say, fifteen years, when she’s finally come good with what happened to her.

(I am not a doctor, I only play one on TV*.)

Hurricane Summer is the story of the summer of 2008 in Jamaica, immediately before, during and after one of the most devastating hurricanes to hit the island. Tilla is 18 years old, and sent away from Canada with her nine year-old sister to spend the summer with her father in her parents’ homeland of Jamaica. Tilla’s parents have a strained marriage, with Tyson floating in and out of his family’s lives, traveling back and forth between countries. As the story begins, Tilla and Mia haven’t seen their dad in over a year, but he’s keen to have them visit and learn about their culture, pooh-poohing their mother’s concerns about the dangers of hurricane season.

It’s culture shock almost immediately as the girls land, as their dad keeps them waiting for almost an hour before picking them up. After love bombing them, he spirits them off to the countryside instead of to his Kingston home, dumping them to stay with their country cousins before hightailing back to the city himself. While their grandparents and boy cousins are happy to have them there, the rest of the family takes a much dimmer view, from their bitter Aunt Herma to menacing Uncle Junior. Cousin Diana, who’s about the same age as Tilla, initially seems to take the “foreigner” under her wing but soon makes it clear that they’re going to be frenemies at best, even before Tilla meets Hessan, the cute guy Diana regards as her own.

When Tilla isn’t foolishly falling in lust with Hessan, she’s exploring the island with her cousin Andre, who introduces her to the best of Jamaica, including one memorable scene in the middle of the hurricane. But it’s also Andre who opens her eyes, however unwittingly, to the colorism and sexism of Jamaican society. As her summer lurches from one disaster to the next, Tilla needs to overcome heartbreak and claim her own identity independent of the men she loves who fail her over and over again.

First of all, I want to scoop Andre out of these pages and put him somewhere safe where he’ll never be hurt again. I want to nurture and protect that sweet shining soul, and I’m only going to imagine the best and most wonderful things for him. He’s one of the loveliest fictional creations I’ve encountered this decade.

I wish I could say the same for anyone else in this book, including poor Tilla. It’s just hard to believe that at the age of 18 she’s never had a best friend, and that she’s still so pressed about a dad who’s been a fucking deadbeat for years. So much of what happens reads like she’s a 13 year-old aged up to make some of the situations more “appropriate” for a YA novel (and more on this in a bit.) It’s also really hard to imagine that anyone this passive would suddenly grow a spine and tell as many people off as she does in the end. I just… there’s been a trend in contemporary literature lately of girls who just do whatever guys say despite their own wishes and despite not owing the guy, usually a virtual stranger, a goddamn thing. Ladies! You are allowed to say no! You are allowed to not put yourself into dangerous positions! You are allowed to not be polite when all your radars are going off!

Because lots of bad shit happens to Tilla when she doesn’t listen to her internal danger sense, stuff that makes me really hate that this book is shelved as YA. Sexual pleasure and assault are both treated in a way that feels more graphic than it needs to be for this genre. This is a grown up book about grown up problems, and it is weird as hell to see it cynically marketed for readers who may not be ready for all that.

It’s also weird to see Tilla just not understand Patois, which anyone who speaks English should be able to pick up easily from context clues. I get not being able to speak it, but needing to ask the meaning of “wha gwan” (what’s going on), “mongrel” (dog) and ffs “shop” (shop!) is just bizarre and makes her seem extremely childlike. Which leads to my (other) main criticism of the book: that Jamaican culture and society is overwhelmingly portrayed as abjectly terrible. Except for Andre and several minor characters, everyone is outright awful. Tilla proclaims that she loves Jamaica and feels it running through her spirit, but you get the feeling that she kinda hates all the people? But radically forgives them, as she says in one of the opening dedications, or something?

In the same way that I rail against the North American concept of niceness, I also rail against the idea that you have to forgive people, especially if they make no attempts at amends. While we owe it to society to be the best people we can possibly be, we do not owe it to individual people to not hold them responsible for their bad actions. If someone hurts you, you are under no obligation to let them think they can keep doing it. Abusers and their enablers will tell you over and over again that YOU need to be the better person, when it’s on THEM to change. Being good does not mean allowing other people to get away with harmful behaviors!

Yet for all that I rail against the cultures that put Tilla through this absolute hell of a summer — and look, I know it’s empowering to think that YOU’RE the hurricane and you get to go home while these people pick up the pieces, but YOU’RE not the rapist or the people who encourage and excuse him while slut-shaming you, and you don’t need to minimize your own pain just to make life easier for other people! You deserve to take up space! You matter! — I cannot deny the power of this story. It is brutally honest and wonderfully observed, and the fact that I’m so overwrought with advice and love for Tilla and women and girls like her speaks to how vividly this book is written. It has its flaws, for sure, but I wish only the best in healing for Ms Bromfield, and hope she takes comfort in knowing that she’s built an incredible monument here to Andre and his friendship and love. She and I may not agree on radical forgiveness (which, btw, is not uniformly applied in this book, as if even she doesn’t really believe in it) but I 100% believe in the power of the radical empathy she puts on display here.

*This is an old joke, a protomeme, if you will, from 1984 (the year, not the book. Sigh. Whippersnappers.)

Hurricane Summer by Asha Bromfield was published yesterday May 4 2021 by Wednesday Books, and is available from all good booksellers, including

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/05/05/hurricane-summer-by-asha-bromfield/

May 03 2021

Odyssey Of The Dragonlords — Players Guide by James Ohlen, Jesse Sky & Drew Karpyshyn

As I look forward to being fully vaccinated — two shots down and waiting for those antibodies to spool up, baby! — I’ve been itching to play more tabletop role playing games than just my current three hours a week, twice a month or so local game. It’s a fun D&D game, a homebrew fantasy with light steampunk elements, and nothing beats the convenience of everyone living in a five-minute-drive radius from one another (even tho we’re all playing over Zoom still and for the foreseeable future.) Scheduling, however, is a constant pain. Plus, as someone who used to game regularly twice a week, twice a month feels like the bare minimum of nourishment.

So when an old friend asked if I was interested in joining an Odyssey Of The Dragonlords game, I nearly fell over myself to say yes. To be frank, D&D is not my favorite system, but no one plays my favorite flexible d10 roll and keep systems any more, so I’ll take what I can get. Since I was already familiar with the basics of D&D, I was told that I only needed to read this player’s guide, downloadable as a free pdf (at least for now) from Modiphius Entertainment. I was also told that the setting was vaguely Ancient Greek, but in more of a Clash Of The Titans style than actual historical mythology.

And, y’know, I didn’t know what to expect honestly, but it certainly wasn’t this beautiful, professional package full of meaty plot hooks and flavor! The three-page character sheet in the back alone is a gorgeous meld of function and art, and I’m itching to print it out on some of the antiqued paper I’ve been hoarding. As for the supplement’s text, while there are parallels to the established Greek history and pantheon, the deities are entirely original, and the story and world-building tension uniquely first class. As a testament to how absorbing the new playable races are, for this campaign I’m stifling the whimpering protests of my inner minmaxer and building a Siren Barbarian who has All The Feelings. After I told the Discord chat my character concept, they suggested I eventually take the Barbarian Path Of The Storm Herald, the Sea aspect of which is just going to be the best flavor for making the most of my bipolar girl’s background and abilities. Her journey going forward will be loosely based on finding a way to positively manage and channel her emotions, given the unfortunate lack of pharmaceutical mood stabilizers and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in fantasy settings. I’m just so pleased that a predisposition to mental illness is presented here as inherently non-villainous, and just as much a part of a hero’s makeup as her wings or religious leanings.

I can’t say anything yet about how this setting and the new rules work as a play experience, but as a reading experience, it’s incredibly rich, absorbing material for flexing one’s imagination. Supplements like this make me so glad Wizards Of The Coast decided to go back to using an Open Gaming License in 2016, as it really allows for more people to get into the game while encouraging a community of creatives to give players a reason to buy more of the source material. While I’d ideally prefer to play something non-D&D eventually, books like this leave me content with the system and willing to overlook some of its most egregious failings (I mean, no merchant skill, wtf is up with that?!) in order to enjoy a great collaborative storytelling time with friends.

Odyssey Of The Dragonlords — Players Guide by James Ohlen, Jesse Sky & Drew Karpyshyn was published March 3 2020 by Modiphius Entertainment and is available from all good booksellers, including

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/05/03/odyssey-of-the-dragonlords-players-guide-by-james-ohlen-jesse-sky-drew-karpyshyn/

Apr 30 2021

The Beautiful Ones by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

I’m gonna preface this by saying that I’m sure there are tons of readers who love this book, who just adore this Belle Epoque-inspired fantasy romance novel. And I’m glad for readers who find joy and comfort in its pages. But if you, like me, find shitty historical romance tropes utterly tiresome to the point of frustration, then please do read on as I complain about how, as in the perennial classic subReddit Am I The Asshole?, Everyone Sucks Here. Not even Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s delicately tuned writing, a convincing pastiche of Georgette Heyer and her ilk, can save this book from being a deep disappointment.

I mean, I can get over the absolutely ridiculous idea that telekinesis — or psychokinesis as it’s called here — is viewed merely as sport for the lower classes, and that Hector Auvrey, our “hero”, has made a fortune from entertaining with it but has never been conscripted by an army. And I can get over how that and an altered geography are the only fantastical elements in this otherwise bog standard historical romance. I simply cannot get over the weird misogyny underlying everything in this book, especially with poor Valerie.

Here’s a precis: Hector and Valerie were once engaged to be married, and he went abroad to make his fortune. She said she’d wait, but after several months? years? of withstanding the pressure from her impoverished, if noble family, she finally agreed to marry the wealthy, dull Gaetan Beaulieu, in hope of reviving her family’s fortunes. A decade passes and Hector, having amassed his riches, returns to Loisail to fling his wealth in Valerie’s face. But how to get close to her family? He decides he’ll start by courting Gaetan’s unsophisticated cousin, Nina, in an effort to ingratiate himself into the Beaulieu household. Nina falls for worldly, handsome Hector like a ton of bricks, so when she discovers that he loves Valerie — who rebuffs him because she’s fearful of the love she bears him, a love that would cause her to repudiate reputation and good sense to have him — Nina is understandably heartbroken. Only Hector then realizes that he actually loves Nina. And Valerie is pissed to discover this, so decides she’s going to do whatever it takes to keep them apart.

It’s weird because Ms Moreno-Garcia does a really good job at first of sympathetically portraying Valerie, forced by her family to marry a man who does the bare minimum to help them, instead lavishing her with expensive gifts that she can’t convert into funds to help float her relatives. Gaetan doesn’t care about Valerie’s interests, whines when she has migraines that cause her to back out of social engagements — that he huffily refuses to attend solo because he’s apparently a huge baby — and spoils his own cousins in sharp contrast to hers. When this idiot finally realizes that Valerie never loved him, he exiles her from Loisail, and we’re supposed to feel vindicated, like her entire life hasn’t been one long string of punishments already. And yeah, she does go over the top in trying to marry Nina off in a way that will benefit her own family, and to punish Hector for having the temerity to be in love with someone else, but the latter especially felt less organic than a “how can we make readers hate the ex-girlfriend?” device. You know, maybe romance novels don’t fucking need cliched female villains. Maybe, if we’re writing a romance novel about telekinetics, we can also stretch the expectations of genre readers by not having the ex go from restrained, tragic figure to vulgar, shrieking harpy.

And oh sweet babby Jebus, I wanted so much to like Nina, but all her “I’m not like other girls” bullshit was only in the service of the romance plot. I spent the first 70% of the book desperately hoping that she’d kick Hector to the curb and go be a badass entomologist who’d later fall in love with someone worthy of her, once she’d matured and gone through a few more heartaches. But nope, she bucks convention primarily to choose Hector, who is one of the least interesting sopwit leads of a romance novel I’ve ever had to endure. I’m still not entirely sure why he loves Nina. I think it’s a combination of her long, pretty hair and the fact that she’s the only eligible woman available for him to imprint on when he falls out of love with Valerie. Since Nina is also justifiably rejecting him at the time, the idiot gets into another cycle of stubbornly pursuing a woman who’s told him to leave her alone. What that guy needs is therapy, not an ingenue wife.

Anyway, this was an extremely frustrating read, and probably not the best way to begin my experience with Ms Moreno-Garcia’s oeuvre. I’m hoping the two other novels I have scheduled of hers to review this year are far less infuriating, as I’ve heard good things about several of her other works.

The Beautiful Ones by Silvia Moreno-Garcia was published April 27 2021 and is available from all good booksellers, including

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/04/30/the-beautiful-ones-by-silvia-moreno-garcia/

Apr 29 2021

Beatrice Bly’s Rules For Spies: The Missing Hamster by Sue Fliess & Beth Mills

This absolutely charming picture book series debut follows young Beatrice Bly as she applies herself to the business of being an investigative spy. Armed with her notebook and, more importantly, her keen powers of observation, she’s solved many a household mystery, tho no one save her best friend knows her true vocation.

When the class hamster Edgar goes missing one day, all the other students are shocked and saddened. Beatrice, however, sees this as the perfect opportunity to use her skills for the greater good. While everyone else goes on the usual if ineffective hunt for the missing pet, Beatrice follows the clues… but how far will she go, and what will she discover at the end?

A large part of the charm of this terrific tale comes from Beth Mills’ delightful illustrations. Entire wordless pages describe several of Beatrice’s pre-Edgar exploits with an expressiveness that packs so much information into a form easily digestible by kids and admired by more advanced readers. It felt less like reading a book than enjoying an animated series: that’s how wonderfully her illustrations flow. Sue Fliess’ writing partners perfectly with the art, telling this sweet, funny story without overloading young readers, while still presenting a smart, empowering tale that had even a veteran mystery reader like myself both enthralled and impressed. It’s hard to believe how much story the authors manage to pack into a mere 32 pages!

Which, hilariously/annoyingly, was one of the first questions my eldest asked me when I told him we were doing buddy reads yesterday evening. “Is it less than fifty pages?” he wanted to know before he’d consent to join me. As I’ve told my husband, the greatest regret of my life is the fact that my kid isn’t the voracious reader I was at his age and still am today. That said, Jms really got into the book and rated it highly, particularly admiring Beatrice’s intelligence in tracking down Edgar. My personal favorite part — that he didn’t really understand because he’s always had short hair — was how Beatrice ties her hair back when she’s about to get some serious spying on. Ah, well, there’re lots of things he’ll understand better when he’s older.

Highly recommended for the independent reader in your household, and well worth a look in from adults who enjoy mysteries and want to share that love with the kids in their lives.

Beatrice Bly’s Rules For Spies: The Missing Hamster by Sue Fliess & Beth Mills was published April 6th 2021 by Pixel+Ink and is available from all good booksellers, including

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/04/29/beatrice-blys-rules-for-spies-the-missing-hamster-by-sue-fliess-beth-mills/

Apr 28 2021

Münchnerinnen by Ludwig Thoma

It will not surprise a contemporary reader that a young housewife, neglected by her husband, will find affection elsewhere. Nor did it likely surprise Ludwig Thoma’s audience in 1919 when Münchnerinnen (Munich Ladies) was published. The book is set in the late 1800s, when people would have felt it necessary to affect surprise, though given the amount of scheming and winking in the pages of Münchnerinnen nobody would have been surprised back then either.

Münchnerinnen by Ludwig Thoma

Thoma follows the unhappy marriage of Benno and Paula Globerger. Benno is the heir to and proprietor of a shop in downtown Munich, what in Germany is known as a Feinkostladen: coffee, tea, sweets, some baked goods. In the time of the story, it might also have been a Kolonialwarenladen, a store for what were then unapologetically called “colonial wares.” When he first took over the store, he dreamed of making it something special, of cutting deals with the most exclusive importers, of competing with Munich’s finest locales. By the time of the story, though, his ambition has flagged. Benno is fundamentally lazy and never follows through on his big dreams. Moreover, Munich’s finest society is not exactly open to newcomers. His mother keeps a lid on his attempts to make more of the store than his father did. As Münchnerinnen opens, four years or so into the Globergers’ marriage, Benno is in the habit of leaving the store in the late morning to go and drink wine with his buddies at a local institution. When he can, he spends his evenings playing cards, and drinking, with male friends.

Against Benno’s preferences, he agrees to spend his name day in the countryside with his wife, a friend, and the friend’s wife. The mountains south of Munich are idyllic, and the two pairs are in a lovely area near a lake. It turns out, though, that Benno’s idea of countryside is a restaurant, where he and his friend promptly overindulge, take a room to nap in, and then settle down to a card game with a third man they have found to complete the round. (Germany has several traditional three-handed card games, which I don’t pretend to understand.) Left to their own devices, the wives wander down to the lakeside, where they are soon offered an excursion on a boat, paddled by a young student they had seen on the train down plus a friend of his. Well.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/04/28/munchnerinnen-by-ludwig-thoma/

Apr 27 2021

Slingshot by Mercedes Helnwein

I found this book shockingly, uncomfortably relatable, and would fight anyone to defend its heroine, the precocious 15 year-old Gracie Welles. I, too, was sent to a “prestigious” boarding school at that age by a well-meaning dad who didn’t really understand the realities of what I needed to survive it, and I too spent countless hours while there listening to the Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream, which is an album that I can say with the utmost sincerity saved my life (along with Soundgarden’s Superunknown.) Luckily for me, I was even then possessed of the social graces that make it easy for me to make friends and get along, unlike sophomore Gracie whose main connections to the social life at her Florida boarding school are her rich jock roommate Georgie and her biology teacher Mr Sorrentino, on whom she has a completely inappropriate crush. When she discovers that her “soulmate” is engaged, she freaks out and starts skipping out on his classes.

Playing hooky one day finds her saving new kid Wade Scholfield from the violent attentions of popular senior Derek McCormick and two of his goon friends, using the titular weapon. When she and Wade are busted immediately after for not being in class and for being in possession of a weapon, they’re put on dining room clean-up duty together. Gracie doesn’t want to make friends despite Wade’s overtures, but the more time they spend together, the more she thaws. And soon their friendship is getting complicated, even before Gracie decides to take the terrible advice of ultimate Cool Girl, senior Beth Whelan. When Gracie almost inevitably loses Wade, how far will she be willing to go to get him back?

Other reviewers have called this book a cross between John Greene and Sally Rooney, and that’s a really good description. Slingshot unpacks the innermost thoughts of a complicated and vital fifteen year-old as she navigates her first real love and its realistic push pull. I can see why it’s being marketed as Young Adult — tho shudder to think that in the current marketing climate, classics like Bonjour Tristesse, The Lover and Rainey Royale would be labeled the same* — but it’s shorn of so many of the easy wins and comfortable tropes of the genre that it really feels deeper and harder, more Normal People than Paper Towns, and frankly better than both in my opinion. It’s honest about sex and love and the perils of coming of age for sensitive kids with fucked up parents and excellent taste in music. Had I been in a 21st-century American boarding school instead of the 1990s religious hellhole I went to, this could very well have been my story.

The only thing I didn’t find 100% plausible was the outburst Anju had at the end. A large part of me hopes that young women decades after my own adolescence are much more cognizant of their own social roles and might actually talk the way she did, tho I did appreciate Mercedes Helnwein’s wry observation that the speech does seem too good to be true. I also appreciated the inclusion of this playlist, not something I ordinarily care about in books, as well as the in-text recommendation of The Wipers, whose Up Front is one of my current favorite songs.

Even if Ms Helnwein didn’t rummage around in your personal history to craft this book as she did with mine, discerning readers will find a lot to like in this fierce and messy tale of growing up and finding your first love. The craft shown is impressive: the story folds back in on itself with parallels that feel more artful for feeling entirely natural. Slingshot is not a book for romantics — Gracie was much more forgiving of Wade’s letter than I was, but I hold grudges — but it’s by far one of the most realistic depictions of being a weird and lonely teenager I’ve ever read.

*and it’s not that I don’t think YA isn’t a worthy genre, it’s just that some of its superfans are nucking futs! I’ve read reviews dinging this book for lacking reality because the fifteen year-old heroine smokes cigarettes and curses out teachers without getting into too much trouble, like how petit bourgeoisie do you have to be to not know the kind of very rich or very poor kids who do all that as a matter of course?! And then the pearl clutching over the very normal plot thread of a teenager having a crush on a teacher! It’s only problematic if the teacher reciprocates! V sorry to break my rule on not commenting on other people’s reviews in my own but witaf: go meet some people outside your smug middle-class bubble!

Slingshot by Mercedes Helnwein was published today April 27 2021 by Wednesday Books and is available from all good booksellers, including

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/04/27/slingshot-by-mercedes-helnwein/

Apr 25 2021

Firstborn by Louise Glück

I have to confess that I didn’t get a lot of, or get a lot out of, Firstborn, the debut collection of poems from Louise Glück. It was published in 1968, when she was 25. Fifty-two years and a dozen or so collections later, she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Like my reading of Seamus Heaney, I’m interested in where a lauded poet came from, how she got started, what she was writing at the beginning.

Firstborn by Louise Glück

I’m not in terrible company with my reaction to the collection. Glück herself writes, in the Author’s Note to The First Four Books of Poems, “Toward the poems of Firstborn, some written nearly 35 years ago, I try to cultivate an attitude of embarrassed tenderness.” Elsewhere in the same note, she writes, “the idea of revising old work seems odd to me, the spirit animating that work being no longer accessible. Some of the poems, chiefly those in Firstborn, might, in being reconstructed, evaporate.”

That said, a number of the poems in the first section, “The Egg,” are scorpion-shaped. There’s a sting in the end, the last line or two, that whips back at and sometimes into the reader. The first poem, “The Chicago Train,” is like that, as are, for example, “Labor Day” and “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson.” The second section, “The Edge,” brings more character studies and brief sketches. Glück’s first-person narrators in this section are more obviously persons she has observed or imagined, people in various places and times, and particularly people at other stages of life than a somewhat newly married woman in her mid-20s. Whether that’s “Grandmother in the Garden” or “Pictures of the People in the War,” Glück is trying on other lives, working to give readers moments or perspectives from a wider range of folks. Some, though, were completely opaque to me. “Seconds” falls into that category; I can’t tell who’s speaking, who they’re talking to, or, largely, what they’re talking about. Is it a few seconds of domestic violence? Child abuse? Something else entirely? I think the final line is meant to be another scorpion sting, but I don’t know where it’s meant to land. Not every poem is meant to be comprehended; some are meant to be apprehended. In any event, I am not the intended audience for every poem, and it’s fine for some to remain opaque.

The third section, “Cottonmouth Country” turns to places as the second turned to characters. Glück, though, is a nor’easter; real cottonmouth country is mostly beyond her range. “Meridian” neatly captures a languid summer afternoon on Long Island Sound. “The Tree House” catches a geography of memory rather than maps, while “Solstice” pairs place and time, whipping at the end from summer to winter’s icy sting. Glück closes with “Saturnalia,” a vision of Romans and empires ending, with people offering sacrifices for hoped-for future prosperity. Glück’s talent and writing prospered well past this initial collection, and I’m interested to trace more of her path.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/04/25/firstborn-by-louise-gluck/