Jun 04 2025

Madame Sosostris And The Festival For The Brokenhearted by Ben Okri

Do you believe that books come to you when it’s the right time for them? That doesn’t mean that you’re going to read them and immediately connect: and there’s a lot to be said for coming to books like Catcher In The Rye and the more dire works of Anne McCaffrey as an adult, when you can see how godawful the behavior your more adolescent self might have romanticized actually is. But sometimes, your (my) reading queue will bump books around and give you (me, oh fine, us) exactly what we need when we need it.

Which, ofc, is my roundabout way of saying that if I’d read Ben Okri’s wise, compelling Madame Sosostris And The Festival For The Brokenhearted earlier in the year, I might not have felt so moved by the insights of this slender book. The tale itself revolves around two pairs of well-off slightly older Britons. Viv is a member of the House of Lords, a compulsive organizer and improver. Her husband Alan is irritable but well-bred, a veritable titan of industry. Her best friend Beatrice is retired from finance and now rivals Viv’s organizational efforts with her own activities on numerous charitable boards. Beatrice’s husband Stephen is a self-made intellectual who runs a newspaper. While the women are great friends, the men don’t particularly get along.

On the twentieth anniversary of her greatest heartbreak, Viv has a revelation while chatting with a stranger at a party. Tho she’s married to Alan happily enough, she’s never really gotten over the pain of her first husband leaving her. Why, she wonders, are there no support groups for people who’ve had their hearts properly broken? A vision of a festival for those who’ve been hurt this way comes to her, but nothing really solidifies until she runs into the famed fortune teller Madame Sosostris during a party at the House of Lords. The clairvoyant agrees to come read fortunes at the woodland festival that Viv wants to organize in the south of France. It’s with some trepidation thus that Viv, Alan, Beatrice and Stephen are pulled into a strange journey that will change their lives forever.

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Jun 03 2025

A Year of Diana Wynne Jones: the mid 2000s!

In my quest to read all of Diana Wynne Jones’s books in one year, this month I read The Merlin Conspiracy, Conrad’s Fate, and The Pinhoe Egg!

We have now entered the era of Diana Wynne Jones books I read one time when they came out, and generally have not read since. It is an interesting perspective to be revisiting these for the first time in the context of this readthrough! I definitely appreciate their places in their various series more this time around. For instance …

The cover of one edition of The Merlin Conspiracy by Diana Wynne Jones shows a figure raising their arms in a swirling cape against a crackling backdrop of purple and green The Merlin Conspiracy (2003)

The Merlin Conspiracy is a sequel to Deep Secret, which I love very much and reread annually. The two main point of view characters in Deep Secret don’t even appear in The Merlin Conspiracy, however. Rather, the sequel features Nick—slightly older and slightly more mature—on adventures in several worlds, and his counterpart Roddy, who is experiencing some real problems in her own homeworld.

When I first read The Merlin Conspiracy, I missed the voices of Rupert and Maree from Deep Secret too much to appreciate what was actually featured in The Merlin Conspiracy. This time around, I appreciated the inventive worldbuilding, and the intricate way the plot elements are intertwined.

Nick, yearning to become a magid, has been trying to traverse between universes, so when he is pulled through to a different one he thinks it might be a dream. He gets caught up in political issues spanning several worlds, which ultimately seem to culminate on Roddy’s world. As in Deep Secret, there are two points of view, this time alternating between Nick and Roddy, who of course eventually join forces. From my older and wiser 2025 perspective, I think I would recommend The Merlin Conspiracy at least as much as Deep Secret. It’s got a lot of great stuff.

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Jun 02 2025

A Dumb Birds Field Guide To The Worst Birds Ever by Matt Kracht

Lol, that really is the entire title, which should prepare you for the irreverent humor within the pages of this bird guide, written from the point of view of someone who (hilariously) loathes birds.

Matt Kracht has been writing about birds for quite a while: while he might really hate them, he certainly knows his enemy! In this third installment of the series, he takes a look at what he deems the Worst Birds Ever. Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of highly qualified candidates for his list here!

In the tradition of all the Dumb Birds books so far, he describes why he made each of these fifty selections while giving it a fairly comprehensive field guide breakdown. Thus you get each bird’s mean nickname, scientific name, common name, then a long description of why it’s terrible. You also get a short physical description and an accompanying illustration that’s really quite well done for amateur work! Each entry is rounded out with a note as to the regions where the bird may be found, before an idiosyncratic rating according to the Bird Universal Mathematical Modeling and Ranking (BUMMR) system. The BUMMR system doesn’t make sense and doesn’t have to, tho Mr Kracht’s explanation of it and where one can send critiques is just another humorous part of this book.

Comedy-wise, my personal favorite bit was the opening, which involves an argument with his doctor over the calming effect of birdwatching. As funny as it can be to read the author’s (not entirely unjustified) rants, his humor really shines when he has a human foil to work off of.

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May 30 2025

Cousins In The Time Of Magic by Emma Otheguy

with delightful illustrations by Poly Bernatene.

Bear with me while I tell you an anecdote here. I used to work in some decently nice restaurants, and at one of them had a manager of Mexican descent who loathed Cinco de Mayo. According to him, it’s a holiday made up by American beer companies that no one in Mexico actually celebrates. And don’t even get him started on the conflation with Mexican Independence, lol.

So I admittedly came into this book — and what reads like the start of a fresh new middle grade series — with a bit of a weather eye for tone given that the original Cinco de Mayo plays a pivotal role in the plot. It was thus immensely gratifying to read Emma Otheguy’s note towards the end that this occasion has primarily been celebrated by Latines in the United States to commemorate the Mexican victory against the French. Why? Because it ensured that the Confederacy would not gain a crucial ally on its southern border during the American Civil War. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff involving the Monroe Doctrine, but the defeat of the French imperial forces at Pueblo ensured that democracy and liberty would continue to have a fighting chance in the Western Hemisphere.

Is that something I knew before reading this book? Heck no! Is it a darn good reason to celebrate? Absolutely! Does it one hundred percent explain the disparity in opinions regarding the day? Yes, and I’m super grateful that Ms Otheguy has gone to the trouble of explaining it all in a super accessible manner in this new portal fantasy novel for kids.

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May 29 2025

Allegro by Ariel Dorfman

Friends and readers, what a glorious thing it is to have music in the world! Whether you appreciate it for itself, or for the ways in which it can bring you closer to divinity — as Johann Sebastian Bach, among so many others, believed — music is a gift that connects the interior world ineffably with the external.

Writing about music, thus, has always been one of the most difficult literary tasks (and thank goodness we live in an era where any lapses in education and exposure can be remedied by looking up works on the Internet, for those of us with that not uncommon privilege.) Luckily for readers, Ariel Dorfman not only writes about the music of Bach and Handel and Mozart with both appreciation and passion, but also plunges us into the composers’ worlds, using a curious chapter where all three lives intersected in order to propel his story.

In 1765, nine year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has already achieved some renown as a performer and composer. While staying with Johann Christian Bach — the successful musician who was the son of the far more famous name, to modern ears — Mozart is importuned by a surgeon named Jack Taylor to intercede with Christian on a matter of reputation.

Years ago, Jack’s father, the famed ophthalmologist Chevalier Taylor, had operated on Sebastian’s failing eyes. Shortly afterwards, the older Bach died. Ever since, Christian has publicly blamed the chevalier for his father’s death.

Jack is determined to clear his father’s name. He insists that the departed George Handel holds the key, if only Christian will meet Jack and admit it. Christian has no intention of coming face to face with the son of his father’s killer, hence the desperate straits Jack has come to, begging a nine year-old for help. But Mozart is no ordinary nine year-old, and his insistence on seeing this mystery through will last over a decade, even as he seeks to find a place for himself and his music in the world.

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May 28 2025

Convert by John Arcudi & Savannah Finley

I can’t be the only person who picked up this title thinking that there’d be a religious subtext here. And perhaps there is, but the creators chose a much more interesting way to use the title word in this graphic novel, that collects the first (?) four books of the series.

Science Officer Orrin Kutela is a twofer on his space crew’s mission to an uncharted planet. As both an evolutionary biologist and an artist, he’s responsible for recording any images should the ship’s equipment fail. But it’s failure of an entirely unexpected kind that leaves him stranded planet-side, alone and with any help some thirty years away.

With k-rations running out, Orrin starts looking for sustenance. The local flora, while beautiful, doesn’t have enough nutrients to sustain a human being. The fauna proves difficult to hunt and trap. When Orrin finally manages to catch and cook a fish, his body rejects the meal entirely, treating it as poison.

Dying of starvation, Orrin writes what he thinks will be his last words in the journal he’s been diligently keeping since making landfall. But the planet and its inhabitants aren’t done with him yet, as he slowly begins a process of conversion that changes everything about him, body and, perhaps, soul.

There are strong Annihilation vibes in this tale of a man who must adapt to survive, and in so doing learn that sometimes survival is the greatest lie of all. Orrin’s adoption into the local ecology is both transcendent and nightmarish, as he learns not only how to assimilate but how to improve the lives of the sentient creatures he’s joined, even as the being known as The Provider uses him as a pawn. It’s thought-provoking and weird, even if I feel that it doesn’t go quite deep enough into the themes it’s attempting to explore.

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May 27 2025

Growing Home by Beth Ferry

with illustrations from the award-winning Terry and Eric Fan.

Oh my heart. I actually had to check my calendar to make sure that I wasn’t being particularly susceptible to this book due to hormones, and that I was in fact laughing and crying solely due to Growing Home’s charm, wit, and deeply understood and portrayed empathy.

Mr and Mrs Tupper live at 3 Ramshorn Drive with their daughter Jillian and a grumpy goldfish named Toasty. Toasty is mostly Mr Tupper’s pet, swimming around in his octagonal antique fishbowl — the Tuppers are antiquarians — and providing a sympathetic ear to his adult human’s musings and woes. Mrs Tupper doesn’t really go in for pets, so it’s a relief to her when Jillian proves to be more into plants than animals. Jillian adores her speckled ivy named, somewhat unimaginatively, Ivy. Toasty is a little miffed that he’s not the favorite, while Ivy basks in her position, as well as in the sunshine and cheer Jillian provides.

Their delicate balance is upset first by the arrival of a spider named Arthur, who’s surprised to find himself moved to Ramshorn Drive from the bookstore where he lived, then by Ollie, another plant rescued by Jillian. As their four distinct personalities rub along, they slowly become aware of their capabilities as a team… and of an unexpected threat that could ruin everything not only for themselves, but for the Tuppers as well. With the help of a little magic, will they be able to learn how to become real friends in order to save the day?

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May 25 2025

Kassandra by Christa Wolf

Kassandra tells the tale of the fall of Troy in a first-person flashback narrated by Cassandra herself. At the time of the telling, she has been in Greek captivity and is on her way to her execution. Cassandra was the daughter of Priam, the king of Troy, and his wife Hecube. Long before this novel’s starting point, the god Apollo had given Cassandra the gift of prophecy, but because she the refused to give him sexual favors he cursed her that her prophecies would never be believed. Cassandra’s lengthy monologue — the book is not divided into chapters, nor are there any line breaks between gaps in the story — begins some years before the Trojan War and continues past the city’s fall.

Kassandra by Christa Wolf

Wolf also expects her readers to know the court of Troy as well as Cassandra, who has grown up in it. She gives a little bit of context about who is who, and eventually I was able to piece together most of the relationships, but I am sure that as a person who has only read one Iliad one time I missed things. I added a layer of difficulty for myself by reading Kassandra in German, so I had to make the leap across the different transliterations of Greek names that have become traditional in German and English. (As I note below, there is an English translation of Kassandra, and Wolf’s use of language is not so spectacular that it presents more than the usual challenges of translation.)

Crucially for readers like me, who only know the Trojan War through the Iliad, Cassandra tells of expeditions from Troy to reclaim the king’s sister from captivity in Sparta, where she had been taken after another war. Women have considerable agency in the ancient world that Wolf depicts, but it is also, in the end, sharply limited, and women are routinely treated as objects, prizes for male conquest, or as a means to hurt other men. After two failed expeditions to retrieve their king’s sister, the Trojans’ willingness to support taking an equally valuable prize — Helen, the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta — is more understandable. In Wolf’s telling, Paris breaks the customs of hospitality by insulting Menelaus when the latter is on a pilgrimage to Troy, and his subsequent abduction of Helen guarantees that the war will be unrelenting.

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May 23 2025

Tantalizing Tales — May 2025 — Part Three

Hello, readers! We’re doing a third roundup column of Most Anticipated Titles this May because there are so many good books still pouring in here at the end of the month and in the first weeks of June. Gosh, how is it almost June already? It feels like we were just slogging through the five years of January before suddenly fast-forwarding to the start of summer!

It’s perhaps a little ironic then that the first selection I have for you today is a book super high on my interest list, Caitlin Rozakis’ The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association (and not just because I had a lunchtime meeting today about my kids transitioning to middle school soon!) As a lifelong lover of the magical school trope, I was totally sold on reading about the subject from the perspective of an over-worked parent, now that I am one myself.

When Vivian’s six year-old daughter Aria is bitten by a werewolf, they’re plunged into the previously hidden world of paranormal education. Back-to-school shopping is always a little disorienting, but Vivian soon finds herself in the unexpected position of having to make sure Aria has things like just the right sacrificial dagger and chew toys to fit in.

Meanwhile, Vivian also has to navigate PTA politics, with sirens and chthonic nymphs and people who can literally set her hair on fire. The biggest challenge of all, however, might be dealing with a prophecy of doom that sounds suspiciously like it’s about Aria. Every parent thinks their kid is special but this is way more than Vivian ever anticipated.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/05/23/tantalizing-tales-may-2025-part-three/

May 22 2025

Evil Eyes Sea by Ozge Samanci

What a terrific murder mystery graphic novel! I read a lot of both, and know how difficult it can be to perfectly encapsulate a crime novel — and one that involves not only a murder but political intrigue, as well — into graphic format. Ozge Samanci has managed that in this compelling tale, that’s rightfully been sweeping up awards.

Set in 1990s Turkey, Ece and Meltem are mechanical engineering students at Bosphorus University. Meltem is smart and beautiful, and has the men flocking to her. Ece is shorter and bolder, and often runs interference for the more reticent Meltem. The two women are best friends and scuba diving enthusiasts, aided by Meltem’s boyfriend Omer, who supplies both gear and a psychological shield against a chauvinistic society that questions the presence of women in certain public spaces.

It’s while on a dive in the Bosphorus that the unimaginable happens. Ece and Meltem are enjoying the underwater experience when what feels like a meteor crashes into the water beside them. The meteor is actually a fancy car, which has plunged in with lights ablaze. As it sinks further into the deep, the women see that there’s someone trapped inside the vehicle. Worse, it’s someone they know. Ece and Meltem do everything they can to rescue Selen, another woman who goes to school with them, but they’re too late. By the time they bring her to the surface, she’s already dead.

Unable to shake the memory of what happened, Ece wants to investigate. Meltem has no interest in digging deeper into Selen’s death but circumstances prevail, pulling them into an orbit of lies and corruption that could very well have deadly consequences for them both.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/05/22/evil-eyes-sea-by-ozge-samanci/