Feb 08 2021

The Iron Raven (The Iron Fey: Evenfall #1) by Julie Kagawa

I’ve never read the original Iron Fey series Julie Kagawa is famed for, and as far as I can tell given my tastes, that’s actually for the best. The original books are a YA fantasy romance revolving around Meghan Chase, a human teenager who discovers that she’s the daughter of the Summer King of the Faery. Given that those novels were written a little over a decade ago, it should come as no surprise that there’s an obligatory love triangle between Meghan, her best friend Puck and the son of the Winter Queen. She picks Ash, becomes the Iron Queen etc. etc. There are admittedly a lot of cool narrative twists but most of the critical reviews of the series complain about Meghan and her relationship with Ash. I get the feeling that if I’d read those books, I would never have bothered to pick up The Iron Raven, which would have been a huge disservice to myself as this novel is pretty darn awesome.

It likely helps that Meghan and Ash are supporting characters here and that the focus is on Puck, the fairy formerly known as Robin Goodfellow, as he faces a new threat to the Faery Realm. He’s pretty much just minding his own business attending the Goblin Market when he runs into Kierran — Meghan and Ash’s son — who is now King of the Forgotten. The alluring moon elf Nyx, who turns out to be Kierran’s loyal bodyguard and assassin, accosts them with tidings of strange goings on in the Between realm populated by the Forgotten. Intrigued, Puck accompanies Kierran and Nyx to the forgotten town of Phaed, where an encounter with a fearful monster reawakens malevolent parts of Puck’s personality that he thought he’d long grown away from. Even worse, the monster gets away, slipping from the Between to the Nevernever of the faeries themselves, setting Puck and Nyx on a quest to warn Meghan and find help in destroying the monster for good.

In a lot of ways, this book reminded me of a particularly well-written Changeling roleplaying adventure, with lots of humorous banter, mystic powers and swashbuckling action. Puck is a terrific main character and narrator, with a ridiculously louche yet disarmingly self-aware attitude, who has to confront his own demons in order to win the day. I loved the many references to other established fairy tales (tho I did think it a little weird that the faeries of this realm seemed so ignorant of references to what was clearly a neighboring mythology,) and especially appreciated how Ms Kagawa built her narrative so that I was easily caught up to speed with the who and where of what was going on from past to present. I was also deeply appreciative of how the book wraps up its A-plot before going into the cliffhanger: TIR feels satisfyingly complete on its own, but I still really want to read what happens next.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/08/the-iron-raven-the-iron-fey-evenfall-1-by-julie-kagawa/

Feb 07 2021

Drive Your Plows Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

Nobel laureate, Polish literature, what’s not to like? It turns out that for me the more relevant question was what’s to like?

Tokarczuk’s first-person narrator and protagonist, Janina Duszejko lives alone in a small group of houses on a plateau in southern Poland, hard up against the border with the Czech Republic. Most of the houses are only seasonally occupied, when people from Poland’s larger cities come to enjoy their summer retreats. Despite her advancing age, Duszejko acts as caretaker for the part-time residents, looking after their houses during the cold months. The novel opens in winter, with one of her few neighbors banging on the door in the night, soon to announce that another neighbor is dead.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Druszejko is also something of an eccentric in the area, a devout practitioner of astrology who prefers the company of animals to people. In her narration, two tics show this aspect: a Propensity for Capitalization, and a habit of giving nicknames to everyone around her. The first dead man is Big Foot; the neighbor who wakes her is Oddball; the woman who runs a boutique in town is Good News; Oddball’s policeman son is Black Coat; and so forth.

There is only one settlement on [the Plateau]—ours. The village and the town lie below, to the northeast, just like all the rest. The difference in levels between the Plateau and the rest of the Kłodzko Valley isn’t great, but it’s enough for one to feel slightly higher up here, looking at everything from above. … During harsh winters the Roads Authority, or whatever that agency is called, closes this road to traffic. And then we drive down it illegally, at our own risk. Assuming we have good cars, of course. In fact I’m talking about myself. Oddball only has a moped, and Big Foot had his own two feet. We call this steep stretch the Pass. There’s also a stony precipice nearby, but anyone who thinks it’s a natural feature would be mistaken, for it’s the remains of an old quarry, which used to take bites out of the Plateau and would surely have consumed the whole thing eventually in the mouths of its diggers. They say there are plans to start it up again, at which point we shall vanish from the face of the Earth, devoured by Machines. (pp. 48–49)

In fact, Tokarczuk has lived in exactly this area since 1998. Given some of her depictions of nearby life, it’s not surprising that more conservative local notables have spoken out against her.

In Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, in and around details of her life, observations of nature on the Plateau, and disquisitions on astrology, Duszejko matter-of-factly tells of deaths that follow Big Foot’s demise from choking on the bone of a deer he had illegally shot. The Commandant (of local Police) is found upside down in a shallow well not far from the Pass. Innerd, a fur farmer brothel owner and the rare character known by name, disappears in summer, presumably having run off with a lover or else escaping vague mafia menaces. Instead, he is found some months later, badly decomposed, his leg caught in a hunter’s snare. Duszejko has a Theory that Animals are taking Revenge on the hunters who had preyed on them. All of the dead men’s Horoscopes had Signs that clearly pointed toward a demise of the kind that they met.

And … that’s about it. Tokarczuk evokes the landscape nicely. She voices criticisms of small-town life that have been around since forever, even as she gives some particularly Polish details. Experienced thriller and mystery readers will have spotted what is going on around the Plateau well before I did, and I picked up on it at most a third of the way through the book. Judging by brief descriptions of her other works — less than half of them have been translated into English, and my Polish was never enough to manage novels — I may have picked up the most pedestrian of her works. I think I’d prefer Flights, or House of Day, House of Night, or The Books of Jacob, which is forthcoming later this year. I’ll explore those because Polish Nobelist is a combination I’m predisposed to like; Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead mostly drove past me without catching my eye for long.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/07/drive-your-plows-over-the-bones-of-the-dead-by-olga-tokarczuk/

Feb 05 2021

Blind Spots: Why Students Fail And The Science That Can Save Them by Kimberly Nix Berens

As someone who grew up studying under the American, British and (the absurdly simplistic) Malaysian New Curriculum systems, as well as a mom to kids with special needs, I found this book endlessly fascinating in how it interrogates mainstream educational thought and offers solutions to the continuing problem of falling student standards. With primarily an American focus — understandably given Kimberly Nix Berens’ background in this country’s educational system — it turns a critical eye on the history of schooling in America and why it hasn’t uniformly improved the lives of its students since perhaps the initial Golden Age when mandatory K-12 freed kids from limiting and often dangerous labor practices.

It’s widely known that America is falling behind the rest of the world’s leading countries/regions in educational standards while, perhaps less well known, still spending far more than our counterparts. Dr Berens convincingly lays out why this is happening, while also suggesting what to do about it. Granted, what to do about it happens to be a plug for her own institutions/models of learning, but this shallow vein of capitalization is ultimately superseded by the fact that she’s putting her money where her mouth is and has the science to back it up.

For Dr Berens is a behavioral scientist, and she strongly believes that the greatest problem with the American system of education is its dogmatic refusal to look at results in favor of a philosophy-affirming feel-good fuzziness that ultimately fails both students and teachers. She’s critical of the quickness with which children are labeled Learning Disabled, as well as of the idea that students fail to learn because of inherent deficiencies in themselves instead of in the system.

As a former corporate trainer who strongly believes that if a willing learner is unable to understand something I’m teaching, the onus is on me to communicate effectively; and as a mom who is often frustrated at the way certain educators I know think autism is some sort of socio-educational curse instead of an opportunity to explore different methods of teaching; and as a lifelong learner with firsthand experience of wildly different methods of teaching, who also strongly believes in the ability of behavioral science to help people sort themselves out for the better, I found Dr Berens’ analysis compelling and reasonable, even if I thought her description of standard American education used far worse examples than I’ve ever seen myself…

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/05/blind-spots-why-students-fail-and-the-science-that-can-save-them-by-kimberly-nix-berens/

Feb 03 2021

Sisters by Daisy Johnson

This is one of those books that’s so propulsive that you want to devour it in one sitting, even as the harrowing nature of what you’re reading is telling you to maybe put it aside and take a nap, for the sake of your own mental health.

Sisters follows September and July, two teenage girls separated by ten months in age, as their mother Sheela takes them away from their Oxford home after a school bullying incident. Their new home, at least temporarily, is The Settle House belonging to their dead father’s family, usually let out to tenants and generally in a state of disrepair, high on the Yorkshire coast. Once there, Sheela gives in to the depression that has plagued her for most of her life, while her daughters become more and more enmeshed in the strange games they play with one another and with whomever crosses their path.

This is the weirdly wonderful kind of book with a plot that’s difficult to describe for fear of spoilers. Even going in blind, I figured out what the big twist was at the 20% mark, and spent the rest of the novel waiting for confirmation of my theory as well as details as to how it all came to pass. I must say that I wasn’t disappointed, as I can sometimes be by horror stories, as this essentially is. I think a little more time could have been spent on the pathology that made the women of this family so susceptible to what happened: I get that Peter was abusive and Sheela never emotionally stable to begin with, but a large part of me thought the plot relied too much on a shrugging “I guess that’s just genetics!” instead of looking into how September got away with being a total psychopath for as long as she did. I also wish the text had been a little more clear with what happened afterward. I enjoyed the hallucinatory, smothering feeling of July’s struggle to escape her sister, but the second time jump created more questions than it answered. The first time jump was ambiguous enough without adding a coda that only served to obscure the story even more than it had been already.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/03/sisters-by-daisy-johnson/

Feb 02 2021

Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins written by Eric Kimmel

Kid One first fell in love with this book as an elementary school student, a Protestant child living in an Orthodox country enjoying a very Jewish story. And what’s not to like? Hershel of Ostropol wanders into an unnamed Central European village on the first night of Hanukkah expecting celebration and hospitality. Instead, he finds that the place is tyrannized by goblins, who forbid most anything enjoyable and who hate Hanukkah most of all. They have made the old synagogue their roost, and none dare challenge them.

Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins by Eric Kimmel

There is a way out, of course. If someone can stay in the synagogue all eight nights of Hanukkah and light the candles each night, the village will nearly be free. The last condition is that on the eighth night the goblin king himself must light the Hanukkah candles. Then and only then will the spell be broken and proper celebrations return to the settlement. Hershel gathers a few things and makes his way up the hill; the villagers expect never to see him alive again.

Trina Schart Hyman’s illustration wonderfully capture a wintertime village in Central Europe, and they bring the goblins to life in a mix of menace and absurdity that depicts them as scary enough to keep a village in thrall but dim enough to fall for Hershel’s tricks. For defeat them Hershel does, armed with such things as boiled eggs and a jar of pickles, Hershel drives the goblins off one by one, lighting a candle each night and bringing the village closer to liberation. His wits and fearlessness are his true weapons, and kids reading the book enjoy Hershel’s unflappability in the face of increasingly horrid monsters.

In an afterword, Hyman praised Kimmel’s restraint in telling the story, saying he provided just enough direction for an illustrator to make the most of the tale’s possibilities. Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins was a runner-up for the Caldecott Medal in 1990, and it has been in print ever since. I could read it again and again, enjoying Hershel’s cleverness, the illustrations’ perfection, and the goblins’ consternation each time they lose out. So satisfying!

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/02/hershel-and-the-hanukkah-goblins-written-by-eric-kimmel/

Feb 01 2021

Real Men Knit by Kwana Jackson

Happy Black History Month, everyone! I’m so excited to have just read a strong slate of contemporary novels featuring Black protagonists and casts living their best lives, whether it’s via superheroics, sleuthing or, in this latest case, shop-keeping while falling in love.

Real Men Knit follows Jesse Strong, the youngest of four very different adoptive brothers. Mama Joy, the mother whose last name they all took for their own, has just passed away and now the boys are having to figure out what to do with her yarn store, a Harlem fixture that is also, unfortunately, bleeding money. Damian, the eldest and a straitlaced CPA, thinks selling makes the most sense but Jesse, the seemingly aimless Lothario, surprises everyone by volunteering to give running it a try. Ofc, he doesn’t actually know much about running a business. Fortunately, Kerry Fuller is on hand to help.

Kerry’s mom has always had a habit of throwing herself into bad relationships, so Kerry spent a lot of time at Strong Knits growing up, eventually transitioning into the helpful, almost invisible part-time employee that the Strong bros had the habit of overlooking. So when she steps up to back Jesse’s play, they’re all surprised, especially since Kerry has recently gotten her somewhat deferred degree and is looking into getting a full-time position teaching. But she’s just as determined as Jesse to keep Mama Joy’s dream alive. Plus, she’s had an unrequited crush on Jesse since she was a teenager… not that that has anything to do with her decision, or so she tells herself.

As Kerry and Jesse work on reopening the shop and figuring out how to pay all their bills, they slowly become closer. Ironically, this causes them to want to keep their distance from one another, for fear of hurting and of being hurt. But true love, as the stories go, can never be denied.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/01/real-men-knit-by-kwana-jackson/

Jan 28 2021

Marvel’s Black Panther: Sins of the King by Ira Madison III, Geoffrey Thorne, Tananarive Due, Mohale Mashigo & Steven Barnes

I feel like a dope for admitting how confusing I find the marketing/formatting of this product. It’s an audiobook, but I read it, and you can only get text samples from the website at the time of writing? Oh, wait, depending on what link you use, you can access both the text as well as audio narration by Chidi, I mean, William Jackson Harper (but honestly, I can see Chidi standing at a whiteboard, animatedly reading this out loud to me before offering me Peeps chili, lol.)

Anyway, I read this in its entirety and sampled the first chapter as audio. As far as Marvel novelizations go, it’s decent, with the edge probably going to the audiobook version (and I’m generally not good at listening to books, so this is pretty high praise from me.) King T’Challa of Wakanda a.k.a the Black Panther is pensive on the anniversary of his father’s death, wondering whether he’s doing his best in maintaining T’Chaka’s legacy, especially in the face of constant criticism from his still-isolationist council. When the Avengers call, letting him know that the villainous Graviton is heading to the neighboring country of (siiiigh) Rudyarda to steal secret technology, T’Challa leaps at the chance not only to do something heroic but also to prove to his council the worth of improving foreign relations, especially with a neighboring nation they share a contentious relationship with.

Post-apartheid Rudyarda is appropriately thankful for the help, even though casualties are high and destruction of infrastructure even worse. But when T’Challa later attends a benefit to help rebuild the city of (siiiiiigh) Kiplingaard, he’s assailed by an assassin whose subsequent death is captured on social media, labeling Black Panther a killer. Heading back to Wakanda under a cloud, he’s stunned by the sudden, mystifying appearance of perhaps the last person he’d expected to see: his very own father, whose secrets may go a long way to explaining recent mysterious events.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/01/28/marvels-black-panther-sins-of-the-king-by-ira-madison-iii-geoffrey-thorne-tananarive-due-mohale-mashigo-steven-barnes/

Jan 23 2021

The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

Well this time around — the first in at least eight years — I read the Tom Bombadil chapter, and I’m glad I did. I had gotten in the habit of skipping it, so it had lodged in my mind as both much longer — turns out the chapter is only 15 pages — and far duller than it is. (Though I still skip or at most skim the poetry and songs in LotR.) Tom’s important, though, both narratively and mythically. He’s the first character who’s unambiguously magical. Gandalf, to that point, is just a whiz with lights and fireworks, and unusually adept at blowing smoke rings. Frodo knows that Gandalf knows a lot, but doesn’t yet have the framework to reckon with a world that’s got a lot of magic in it, and precious little well-disposed toward Shirefolk. The Black Riders have been mostly an unseen menace, good with cries that carry across the miles or some odd sniffing. Frodo and friends have sense enough to avoid them from the beginning, but again don’t, can’t appreciate what they are. Tom Bombadil and the Old Forest show the four hobbits a thing or two about magic, almost without thinking, and they begin to know Middle Earth outside the friendly confines of their home fields.

The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

Mythically, Tom is the thing that does not fit in Tolkien’s carefully worked out cosmology. He’s got nothing to do with Valar and Maiar and all the rest from the oldest of the Silmarils down to the latest of the Dúnedain. Tolkien worked out three Ages of the history of Middle Earth and knows where everything came from, how everything descended from the songs and the Trees and the breaking of the world this way and that. And then there’s Tom. He just is. Not part of the scheme. Not affected by the entire rest of the mythos. When Frodo puts on the Ring, Tom basically says, “Dude, stop.” And when Tom tries on the Ring himself, his reaction is one big “Meh.” If myths are like languages, then Tom is an irregular verb. There’s no reason that verb shouldn’t behave like other verbs, but it doesn’t. It just is. And that’s the sort of thing that makes an artificial language, an artfully constructed mythos, feel real. A mythology where everything fits together perfectly, where every piece has its place, will feel both incomplete and too perfect. So Tolkien gives his readers Tom Bombadil, who does not fit in, and by not fitting in helps to make Middle Earth whole.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/01/23/the-fellowship-of-the-ring-by-j-r-r-tolkien/

Jan 22 2021

Hall Of Smoke by H. M. Long

This was a weird and wonderful story of a warrior priestess coming to realize that maybe the gods are liars, and that the most important thing is to work for the betterment and security of one’s people instead of haring off to get yourself killed for an idea of glory.

Hessa is an Eangi, one chosen by the Goddess of War herself to bear a shard of her mystic fire. When Hessa is fifteen, she’s tasked by her head priestess Svala to kill a man with mismatched eyes. Three years later, she finally meets the man but has already offered him the hospitality of Hearth Law. Loath to break one of the more binding traditions of the peoples of the north — especially since Omaskat is kind and entirely unlike any of the people she’s killed before — Hessa allows him to pass from Eang’s temple, the Hall of Smoke, unmolested. When Svala finds out, Hessa is banished from the town of Albor until the goddess forgives her. But while Hessa is doing penance, Albor is overrun by the Algatt, their neighbors to the north who worship Gadr, the God of the Mountain. The message is clear: if Hessa wants to save her people, she must track down Omaskat and kill him as she was always meant to do.

This quest sends Hessa all over the map, as she encounters unexpected allies and foes in a landscape suddenly thick with unbound gods and demons. Eang was said to have bound all who wished humanity harm when she conquered the Old Gods, but she seems to be more and more absent from the Waking World. Hessa must contend not only with loose malevolent entities but also with her shaken faith as she seeks to protect what’s left of her people, the Eangen, from what seems to be certain doom, both in this world and the next.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/01/22/hall-of-smoke-by-h-m-long/

Jan 21 2021

Last Song Before Night (The Harp and Ring Sequence #1) by Ilana C. Myer

Siiiiiigh.

There are the bones of a good story here. Once upon a time, Poets were able to work Enchantments with their songs, but when dark magic began to take over in the form of plague, the king of Eivar demanded that magic be excised from the kingdom altogether, putting the Poets and the Academy that trained them firmly under his heel. But rumors that the Red Death has returned would indicate that magic still exists in Eivar, and that magic may be the only way to stop the Red Death for good.

Lin wants to be a Poet despite the profession being closed off to her gender. A chance encounter with the great Poet Valanir Ocune not only encourages her to keep trying, but also sets her on the path to becoming one of the greatest Poets Eivar has ever seen… if she survives the process. Her companions, after a fashion, are Darien, the most talented Poet of his age, and Rianna, the sheltered daughter of a nobleman who may not have renounced his old, banned religion. Together, they will work to defeat the source of the Red Death, and bring all the goodness of magic back to Eivar.

The first problem with this book is that it’s filled with unlikeable people doing irrational things. Lin hates herself and thinks Darien is amazing (he’s not), Darien is a jerk who gets away with everything because he’s The Special One, and Rianna…. man, she starts out so promising but her incredibly self-centered, over the top reactions to everything that happens after she runs away to find Darien are just revolting. You can’t justifiably murder a guy for not treating you like you think a tortured romance hero should. It’s just… it felt a lot like I was reading a book from the 1970s or 80s, with an oddly restrictive sense of morality, where it’s okay for the alleged hero to shove a woman just because he’s frustrated and petty, and where the heroine’s constant self-abasement is seen as sympathetic instead of tiresome. For a book written in 2015, it feels regressive (tho at points I did worry that far too earnest people might read this book and see the casual slights against the stand-in for Judaism and not get that Ilana C Myer is ironically pointing out the tropes too often used against her people in Western literature.)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/01/21/last-song-before-night-the-harp-and-ring-sequence-1-by-ilana-c-myer/