Jan 08 2021

Lore by Alexandra Bracken

Siiiigh.

In the year 2021, is describing a book as being like The Hunger Games even a good reference any longer? Especially since, if you’re really looking for an on-the-nose comparison, Highlander would be much more appropriate?

I suppose I’m focusing on the petty business of book marketing because I don’t want to address how disappointing this book was to me overall. It’s blurbed as being The Hunger Games (sigh) only with Greek gods in modern-day New York City, and if that isn’t a cool as Tartarus description, I don’t know what is! Especially since the heroine is essentially a cage fighting orphan who thought she’d gotten out of the world of the Agon, only to reluctantly get dragged back in again when old friend/flame Castor shows up at one of her matches with a cryptic message, swiftly followed by the appearance of the wounded goddess Athena herself, begging for help. Athena promises that she’ll get Lore, our titular heroine, out of the Agon for good, as long as Lore helps her survive this latest in the cycle, due to end in seven days. Lore grudgingly agrees, binding her fate to Athena’s for the duration. Hijinks ensue.

Really great premise, completely undermined by the fact that nothing about the Agon makes a lick of sense. Some distant time ago, nine of the Olympian deities rebelled against Zeus, and in retaliation he cursed them to be mortal for a week once every seven years, during which any non-god who killed them would gain their powers instead. The bloodlines of ancient heroes train for these hunts but also seek to protect their own immortals, should one of their (male) heroes slay a deity, as the powers of a god grant not only immortality but also mystical power and influence. In the 21st century, only a few of the original gods remain, the rest having been slain and their powers usurped by humans, who have not always survived being hunted by other bloodlines themselves. Apparently, tho, should a god kill another god, the slain deity’s powers dissipate into the aether.

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Jan 07 2021

Dance Class #11: Dance With Me by BéKa & Crip

It took me a while to get into the flow of this volume, but once I was there, I was all in!

The Dance Class series revolves around three French girls — Alia, Julie and Lucie — who take the same dance class, as well as their families, friends, love interests and rivals. In this volume, Alia is exploring her budding new relationship with Evan, while Julie is trying to break up with her own boyfriend. When all three girls are given the opportunity to fly to Spain for flamenco classes, they leap at the opportunity, embracing adventures and hijinks along the way.

It’s rather slender as far as plot goes, but it’s incredibly dense with lovely details and insight into the life of three dance-obsessed teenage girls. I loved that the girls weren’t cookie cutouts and that they had distinct personalities to go with their different looks, even if you don’t necessarily find out as much about their backgrounds as you might like here. Tho with ten previous volumes to go through, there’s definitely a wealth of material to be had already! As this was my first exposure to the series, I’m thoroughly thrilled to discover that there’s more available for me to read, and as immediately as I’d like to!

Part of the reason it took me a while to get into the book tho, is that the authors are uninterested in catching you up to speed, which is fine. The narration of this book tends, like a webcomic, to read as a complete entry per page, so if you’re unfamiliar with the series, it can feel pretty disjointed as we switch between the perspectives of not only our main characters but also their supporting cast. Once I started figuring out who was who, which happened roundabout the time the story started feeling more like it had a plot than was constituted merely of a series of cute anecdotes, I was completely sucked in.

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Jan 05 2021

The Soul of Purpose: A Step-By-Step Approach to Create A Purpose-Driven, Healthy Life by Jaya Jaya Myra

New Year, New You, and if that’s your thinking as 2021 opens, then you could do much, much worse than to pick up a copy of Jaya Jaya Myra’s The Soul Of Purpose. As with all self-help books, what you put into the process is what you get out of it, and I’ll plainly state that as far as self-help books go, this one is devoid of most of the toxic nonsense that permeates the industry. While I’m not a huge fan of books that purport to be able to heal all your woes with positive thinking and special diets, I did like how Ms Myra emphasized that adopting these doesn’t mean you have to throw conventional wisdom out the door either.

Her process begins with the four-step WELL Method, which encourages you to figure out your purpose in life in accordance with the gifts you were born with. She subscribes to the Eastern belief that all people are made up of five elements — air, earth, fire, water and space (I’d say void but I’m an L5R nerd) — and that while some elements are predominant in one’s physique and personality, true health comes from having these elements exist in harmony within you. One key observation is that harmony is what you’re looking for, and not balance, as the latter implies the exhausting work of juggling and, possibly, forcing greater quantities than necessary to be present in your make-up.

She hews back to more standard Western rhetoric in emphasizing harmony also in the mental, physical and spiritual, while illustrating how each aspect feeds into the other. Atheists may not care for her firm belief in having a spiritual connection to God, but her beliefs have less to do with religion than with a belief in a higher power where you can rest your burdens when everyday life gets a little too overwhelming. I also enjoyed her embrace of both modern medicine and traditional, as she discusses the importance of exercise and breath work in maintaining all aspects of one’s health. I’m a little skeptical at the idea that deep breathing and meditation will keep most illnesses at bay, but I do appreciate that she presents these as practices to add to your everyday life and not as alternatives to going to the doctor and practicing good physical hygiene.

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Jan 04 2021

Persephone Station by Stina Leicht

The thing about Stina Leicht’s latest novel, Persephone Station, is that it’s remarkable not for what it does but for what it is. The story itself is bog standard: a ragtag group of misfits is hired to defend an outpost of innocents against a group of corporate marauders whose vengeful leader has complicated reasons for the attack. In space! There are a few interesting twists and turns, but the pacing served to kill all suspense for me as we rocketed along to the ending. It’s a perfectly serviceable, perfectly fine space Western/opera with several cool but hardly groundbreaking ideas about sentience and aliens and what the future might look like.

What sets PS apart from the rest of its sci-fi brethren tho is how the vast majority of characters are female or nonbinary. It’s not merely a gender swapped sort of story, tho it certainly prompts the reader to consider how men are usually the default in, not just books like these, but most adventure stories. Each woman or nonbinary person is a whole character with an agenda, back story and motivations that make sense for them, and they’re created with such a decisive female-centered gaze that you almost forget most books aren’t like this. It’s really weirdly refreshing. It’s not that the gender roles are reversed, or that men are diminished or nonexistent: it’s just a tale of female and nonbinary adventurers fighting and/or protecting each other, kicking ass and taking names. Men exist in this universe, but in this tale, they’re supporting characters who are peripheral to the storylines, as Ms Leicht deliberately focuses on everyone else.

I’m not saying that this is the kind of book I want to read all the time, but I did enjoy how quietly subversive it is for a space Western/opera to remind readers that you don’t need guys to make for an interesting story. It’s okay to not have guys be a motivator or otherwise important part of a narrative, fictional or otherwise. It’s okay for them to shush so that everyone else gets a turn to be the hero or bad guy or best friend or secretive boss. Even the male love interests are only on for a few pages so we can get back to the meat of the story. And it’s all dealt with so matter-of-factly that you probably wouldn’t even notice how few guys there are till the end, and you likely wouldn’t care.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/01/04/persephone-station-by-stina-leicht/

Jan 02 2021

Taking Stock of 2020

Whew, what a year. I’m glad to be here to see the end of it. In late April, at the height of the first wave of the pandemic, I found myself in the hospital for an emergency appendectomy that required a second surgery and several nights in the ICU. It happened like this: one Friday, I had some dental work that involved local anesthetic and true to my long-term form, I needed more than the usual amount. That left me pretty useless for the rest of the Friday, which was not entirely surprising. Saturday seemed normal, though to be honest I don’t much remember it now. Sunday I felt kinda oogly, in the way that happens to everyone from time to time and that hardly ever leads to a visit to the doctor. By 8 Monday morning I could barely walk. Somewhere in there, I had acquired a serious infection, though I didn’t know it yet.

“I’ll go to the ER just to rule out appendicitis,” I said. I listened to sense and took a taxi rather than a bicycle to the hospital, which is about a mile away. (I may have learned from a few years back when I biked a similar distance with a hairline fracture in a leg bone, because I was on the way to pick up a child from daycare that was closing in about five minutes. German closing times are emphatic.) Appendicitis was ruled in, and it wasn’t many hours later that I was wheeled in to surgery.

Modern medicine surely saved my life that day, and again later that week when the infection refused to let go easily. Social distancing saved my life every bit as surely, given that late April was just past the first peak of hospital utilization in Germany. Keeping the medical system from falling over meant that it was working when I, like heart attack or stroke or other critical patients, needed it most. I’m happy to be here and writing.

I was right that I would not keep up my pace of reading from 2019. I read about thirty fewer books this year, ending at 50, my lowest total in quite some time. In the early weeks of the pandemic, I couldn’t concentrate on anything, and re-started by going all the way back to a book that I loved as a third grader. November and December saw me finishing fewer books in two months than I did in some weeks in, say, May. Events weighed on me, even though if asked I would probably not have said that they did.

On the other hand, it was a good year for reading in German. The “München erlesen” (“Munich selections” with a pun on the German verb for reading) series published some years back by the Süddeutsche Zeitung caught my fancy in 2019, and I read another six books from the 20-volume set this year. Eight more to go, one of which is Lion Feuchtwanger’s Erfolg (Success), 750 closely-set pages. It would be by far the longest book for adults that I have read in German.

Also in 2020, I read one book that purports to be mostly translated from German. Definite translations include seven from Japanese (manga volumes not reviewed here), one mostly from Finnish, one from Polish, one from Chinese, and one from Old English. I read 10 books written, edited or translated by women; Wikipedia says that the gender of the author of The Promised Neverland is not known to the general public.

Five of this year’s books were re-reads. I read three full volumes of poetry this year, the most in several years.

Best epic poem and best usage of the word “bro,” Beowulf translated by Maria Dahvana Headley. Best re-read, The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. Best use of Bavarian dialect, Die Rumplhanni by Lena Christ. Most infuriating stories of corruption, Moneyland by Oliver Bullough. Best geekery, The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder.

Full list, roughly in order read, is under the fold with links to my reviews and other writing about the authors here at Frumious.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/01/02/taking-stock-of-2020/

Jan 01 2021

The Case of the Fire Inside (Bad Machinery #5) by John Allison

My husband got me this book several years ago as I’m a huge Bad Machinery fan, but for some reason or other, I put off reading this until I felt it was the “right time.” So it’s been languishing on my dining room table for years, unready to join its kin — the first four volumes — that I hide in a special place to save from my kids’ grubby and destructive fingers, until I decided on Christmas morning, while my kids were occupying themselves with presents, that it was finally the moment!

Ofc, the first thing I did upon slipping back into that wonderful fictional world was chastise myself for waiting so long, but if I did that for every book I own that I put off reading, I’d be recriminating myself foreeeeever. And don’t think I wasn’t sufficiently punished when I went online afterward to track down the next volumes, and found myself faced with a multiplicity of editions and availabilities. Wound up buying used copies from online thrift stores because I’d waited so long to get the particular editions I wanted… and I’ve just discovered I could’ve gotten the exact copies I had in mind directly from the author’s website, oh good grief.

But this should give you some idea of the charm and hold that this series, revolving around six teenagers solving weird crimes in the town of Tackleford, England, has on the reader. Both funny and poignant, John Allison is doing some of the best work of his career with this series, and especially with this fifth installment, The Case Of The Fire Inside. Our heroes are growing up and setting aside things like their mystery-solving clubs in favor of romance and swotting up for college (well, most of them anyway: Charlotte is incorrigible as always.) Shauna and Jack have broken up, so now Jack and Linton, his best friend, spend all their time thinking about meeting girls. This doesn’t sit well with the last member of their trio, Sonny, who isn’t ready for a girlfriend and wishes they could go back to just playing with toys and having adventures. While moping at the swim party organized for his 14th birthday, he thinks he sees a girl swimming outside off the beach. He runs to see if she needs help, more or less followed by Charlotte, who is busy getting herself kicked out of the pool establishment. The mysterious girl disappears, but not before Sonny finds some weird hide lying on the seashore. Charlotte stuffs the hide into Sonny’s bag because… well, because she’s Charlotte and in her tortured logic it’s the sensible thing to do.

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Dec 31 2020

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

How would a sword-and-sorcery author who basically wanted to have a hell of a lot of fun write in the twenty-first century? They’d write like Tamsyn Muir does in Gideon the Ninth, I think.

“In the myriadic year of our Lord—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!—Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.” (p. 15)

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

How’s that for an irresistible opening? Why does she have both a sword and dirty magazines? Who is this King, this Prince? What is the House of the Ninth and why does Gideon want to escape? Muir doesn’t spell out any of it right away, and at least one of those questions isn’t answered at all in the entirety of the book, but the first paragraph sets the story’s frenetic pace, light touch, and merciless mashup of times and genres.

The story has some of the furniture of science fiction — there are spaceships, and a civilization that spans different planets with at least some implication of interstellar travel, plus some biotechnology and advanced mechanical thingies — but it’s a fantasy story, at least in this first volume of the series. The House of the Ninth is all about necromancy, and Muir hints that the Emperor is himself an immensely powerful necromancer served by a small elite force of similarly puissant sorcerers known as Lictors.

Gideon herself is one of only two young people in the only settlement on the planet, and as the first paragraph shows, she wants nothing more than to get the hell out of Dodge. Not many pages further into the book, readers learn that the Ninth House is run by a pair of priests who are much more dead than undead (although everyone else doesn’t notice, or pretends not to notice in the interest of not joining the ranks of the dead and undead), kept in motion by Harrow, the only other young person in the settlement and, not coincidentally, the daughter of the propped-up pair. Harrow also delights in foiling Gideon’s attempts to escape the House of the Ninth. It’s a funnily toxic sibling rivalry with side orders of swashbuckling, since Gideon is training to be a serious fighter, and death magic, since Harrow is a high priestess of a necromantic order. Until one day.

The Emperor is running out of Lictors and summons representatives — a sorcerer and a cavalier — of each of the nine Houses to the planet of the First, to unravel the secrets of Canaan House and become, possibly, Lictors themselves. Each of the Houses has traditionally played a different role in the Empire, and their approaches to magic (mostly but not always necromancy) differ appropriately. They are also all putting on a show in one way or another, displaying their power and hiding any weaknesses, of which there are far more than any let on.

Many things are not as the representatives expect. Canaan House is more of a ruin than an imperial palace or great temple. It is virtually uninhabited, and the few priests present are more cryptic than helpful. Further, some of the tests on the path to Lictor-hood prove to be deadly. Nor can they be solved by any one pair of representatives; the rivals must cooperate or fail. Still further, someone or something is trying to kill the representatives of the Houses. Is it a dreadful legacy of the past haunting Canaan House? Is it the rival Houses? Both? More?

The sword and sorcery turns into a locked room mystery turning into a series of puzzles, and hijinks very much ensue. Snappy dialog, changing factions, unexpected romantic entanglements and plenty of sarcastic mockery move the book forward quickly and excitingly. Harrow and Gideon are as a mismatched pair as any in fantasy, and yet their story does just what heroic tales from the genre have been doing all along, updated for the 2020s.

+++

This was the perfect book for Doreen. Her correspondingly enthusiastic review is here.

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Dec 30 2020

White Ivy by Susie Yang

I had a very Lucille Bluth moment at the end, reading the final sentence and saying aloud, “Good for her!” even as I wished I had a martini in hand. Whether to celebrate or to sedate with is a good question, tho. The weird thing is that while I was cheering her on, I didn’t even like our titular Ivy, who’s lazy and obsessed with superficialities. She’s not particularly clever or moral, and her goal in life is to marry into a “good” WASP family so she won’t have to do anything she doesn’t want to ever again. Or so she thinks, after a fashion: Ivy’s thoughts tend to be muddled as she’s not the clearest thinker. What Ivy is really chasing is privilege, and in America, she knows that the ultimate privilege is to be from a moneyed and pedigreed white East Coast family. Nothing will stop her from achieving her dreams, not love, not even the promise of wild wealth. Riches, Ivy instinctually knows, are transient but cachet is forever.

White Ivy starts out as a fairly typical Chinese immigrant story (tho don’t read the blurbs, they’re weirdly misleading.) Ivy Lin is raised by her grandmother Meifeng in China while her parents establish themselves in Massachusetts. When she makes her way over at age 5, she hates it. Her parents are strict, impatient strangers and everything is new and terrifying. Things get a little better when Meifeng joins them in America, tho she’s also the one who teaches Ivy how to steal, mostly small items from thrift stores and garage sales, in an interesting commentary on property and valuations. As Ivy grows older, she develops a crush on golden boy Gideon Speyer, a classmate at the tony private school her parents enrolled her in. Before anything can actually happen between them tho, her parents move the family to New Jersey. Even tho Ivy eventually goes to college back near Boston, she’s already working as a first-grade teacher when her path crosses Gideon’s once more. Their courtship is a whirlwind, and soon Ivy is on the precipice of getting everything she’s ever wanted. But a series of bad decisions will force her to do the unthinkable and jeopardize everything she’s sacrificed so much of herself to attain.

I hesitated to say there that she’d worked hard vs sacrificed via lopping off or stifling parts of herself, as Ivy’s life throughout the book is less about mindful forward motion than it is a series of impulsive decisions and paralyzing dread. I actually had a lot of sympathy for her, and particularly for her incoherence any time someone asked her what she wanted to be. Our society puts far too much store by ambition, as if that’s an adequate panacea for the alienation from self that’s all too common for workers in a capitalist system (why yes, this is a bit of a Marxist review. As with most philosophers, Old Karl wasn’t all wrong.) Ivy’s upbringing had also done so much to squash what she wanted in favor of what her parents might think acceptable, so I totally understood where proactive choices felt so far outside her capabilities. Honestly, that probably spurred some of her worst choices, because she’d never been taught to carefully consider consequences on her own, or even that she was allowed to not choose between two options. I even sympathized with her efforts at self-effacement, especially when trying to fit in with Gideon’s friends, and her dull rage at having to diminish herself. She stoops to conquer indeed.

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Dec 29 2020

The Mythics Vol 2: Teenage Gods by Philippe Ogaki, Patrick Sobral, Fabien Dalmasso, Alice Picard, Jerome Alquie, Frederic Charve & Magali Paillat

This has got to be one of the most beautiful anime-inspired comic book titles for young readers out there today. Despite the creative teams varying between each of the three issues that make up this trade paperback, the quality is uniformly high, and the art style doesn’t deviate so much between issues as to seem jarring. If anything, having different artists helps solidify the vastly differing personalities of the three heroes introduced here, one to each issue. My favorite art was probably in Alice Picard’s illustrations of Parvati’s story, with gorgeous colors by Magali Paillat. Which isn’t at all to throw shade on Jerome Alquie’s artwork of Miguel’s story, or Frederic Charve’s and again Ms Paillat’s on Neo’s. Parvati’s was likely my favorite art-wise because the story lent itself to cuteness plus beauty a little more than the other two did. For cripes’ sake, there’s a tiger that turns into the most adorable housecat! I was the embodiment of the hearteyes emoji every time Shahruk-kitty was on the page.

Unfortunately, Parvati’s tale was also the one that made me wonder whether a sensitivity consultant had been brought in to look over this book. As opposed to the Aztec and Ancient Greek mythos referenced in the other issues in this collection, Hinduism is a major living religion, and seeing the goddess Kali used as an embodiment of evil made even this non-Hindu reader cringe. I’ll freely admit that I don’t know for sure whether her depiction in this issue is actually offensive to Hindus but knowing that a sensitivity reader had gone through this would have allayed my fears significantly.

What did concern me as a secular reader was the odd attitude to vaccines, which smelled a lot like the nonsense anti-vaxxers in America have been spouting in recent times. It’s true that any vaccine that’s been rushed to market without sufficient testing should be considered skeptically, and it’s true that we should be careful what we put in our bodies, but the vast majority of vaccines are beneficial and shouldn’t be at all controversial: a nod to this latter would have gone a long way to reassuring me that this wasn’t anti-vaxx dog whistling.

Those issues aside, it was a very cute story about a go-getting young Indian girl who discovers she’s been chosen by the goddess Durga to be her avatar in the fight against Evil. Mumbai is suffering strange outbreaks of a super-rage disease, where the victims become mindlessly destructive zombies. Overachiever Parvati Patel is on a school trip to the zoo when another outbreak occurs, and the goddess Durga comes to her to reveal her powers. Parvati is eager to fight Evil, even if it means breaking her own heart a little in the process.

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Dec 24 2020

From Page To Screen: The Man In The High Castle by Philip K Dick

I finally finished all four seasons of the brilliant Amazon adaptation of the sci-fi classic, and was struck both by the similarities, which were neutral to bad, as well as by the differences, which were mostly wise choices on the part of the series’ creative team, imho.

There must, ofc, be plentiful differences in order to expand Philip K Dick’s somewhat slender tale to encompass four gripping seasons. The biggest change is the enhancement of the roles of John and Helen Smith, an all-American couple who pledged allegiance to the Nazis when the Axis powers won World War II, and eventually rise to become the most powerful couple in America. John is played by Rufus Sewell at his conflicted and deadly best, as he denies more and more of his humanity in order to survive and thrive in the American Reich. His best scenes come when you think he’s cornered, especially when reporting to his superiors in Germany. His absolute ruthlessness against even more evil people than himself is a joy to watch, even as you know he’s still a very bad person.

Chelah Horsdal’s Helen self-medicates and self-deludes in order to live up to her role of the perfect Nazi matron, until their eldest child, Thomas, makes a choice that lays bare the utter horror of the system they’ve spent so long propping up. As Helen tearfully admits to her daughter in the season ender, she only started caring when the Reich began to do to her what they’ve done to everyone else; pretty much the lesson every Face-Eating Leopard Voter eventually learns. Her story arc is bold and entirely well-deserved, as is her husband’s, tho don’t think for a moment that this story team won’t have you on tenterhooks the entire time.

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