May 21 2025

Sabotage At Casa Grande Springs by DD Sterner

This middle grade mystery-adventure hearkens back to the Famous Five and similar novels I devoured as a kid, tho with one crucial difference I’ll talk about later in this review.

Thirteen year-old twins Brice and Brianna Hendrix have recently moved to Florida, and are spending the summer helping their mom by volunteering at the retirement center where she works. Casa Grande Springs also happens to be where their grandfather Mr Opa lives with Weaver, the half Saint Bernard, half Labrador who’s as much the twins’ dog as his own.

The twins are thrilled that their best friend Daniel Gonzalez has joined them in volunteering there, too. All three of them expect a pretty cushy gig where they’ll get to fish in the pond, explore the woods and practice their archery in their copious down time.

Unfortunately for the young teens, a series of weird events keeps cutting into their plans for leisure. While the wild animals getting loose on the premises might just be the unfortunate result of someone leaving a door open to the local and varied Everglades wildlife — necessitating that the kids spend a lot more time on clean-up than they’d anticipated — there’s no innocuous explanation for the collapse of a recently constructed porch roof. Someone is deliberately sabotaging the retirement home, but why?

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May 20 2025

Grown-up Graphic Novels to Seek Out!

Even for the decidedly bookish, it can be tough to stay current with new grown-up graphic narratives from small publishers! Here are four gems out this season that are worth having on your radar. Checked Out by Katie Fricas is out today, May 20th; Second Shift by Kit Anderson, and George Takai’s next graphic memoir It Rhymes with Takei are coming out in early June; and I Ate the Whole World to Find You by Rachel Ang came out in April. Whether your taste is unsettling magical realism or inspiring progressive memoir, there’s something for you here!

the cover of Checked out by Katie Fricas seems to have a young woman flying with some pigeons and booksChecked Out by Katie Fricas, published by Drawn and Quarterly, tells the story of Lou, 20-something and living her best queer life in New York City, juggling dating, an interesting job at a private library, and working on her passion project of writing an epic graphic novel about Cher Ami, a heroic pigeon of World War II.

The bright, vibrant art has a lot of character, in a style that kind of reminds me of some of Kate Beaton’s earlier sketchier stuff, but with more magic markers.

As someone who has been a grown up already for a … while …. I don’t always love stories of disaffected 20-somethings finding their way in life. But Lou is a wonderful character and we get to see her interacting with her friends in really affirming ways, and with New York City in a lot of fun scenes. I recommend Checked Out if you like stories about weird jobs, NYC, cartoonists figuring things out, and/or pigeons.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/05/20/grown-up-graphic-novels-to-seek-out/

May 19 2025

There Doesn’t Have To Be A Reason by MC Kasper

As a chronic thinker who tries not to over-dwell on things, I cannot even begin to tell you what a relief it is to find a book like this. My constant compulsion to justify myself is likely a product of being raised by overly critical parents, so finding a kids’ book that short-circuits the idea that everything has to have a reason or a use or a purpose besides “I like it and I think it’s cute” is honestly staggering — and so, so valuable — to me.

But not only does MC Kasper just flat out state in the title and thesis of this picture book that sometimes There Doesn’t Have To Be A Reason, she also sneakily introduces science facts to young readers, as Bear and their animal friends discuss what all their tails do.

Bear has a stubby little tail that they think is cute. Their friends, however, want to know what the purpose of Bear’s tail is. After all, other animals’ tails play a big part in their everyday lives, whether with movement, communication or safety. What does Bear’s tail do?

As Bear and the other animals try out various activities to see whether Bear’s tail can be useful in the ways that the others’ are, Bear and their friends learn an important lesson. Not everything has to have a practical use in order to be appreciated and admired. Sometimes, it’s just enough to exist. Love, after all, isn’t something you earn. Unlike trust and respect, love is a feeling that doesn’t have to make sense. Most of the time, it’s just there, and that’s okay.

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May 18 2025

A Perfect Day to Be Alone by Nanae Aoyama

I purchased A Perfect Day to Be Alone on the strength of Doreen’s review. The book is, as Doreen described, short, quiet, absorbing, surprising and, in the end, memorable. A young Japanese woman named Chizu is the first-person narrator, and she tells her story over a bit more than a year as she manages her first forays into adult life, made all the more challenging by a move to Tokyo, the big city to end all big cities in Japan.

A Perfect Day To Be Alone by Nanae Aoyama

I’ll borrow Doreen’s summary of the setup, since it lays things out clearly and concisely: “Chizu has graduated from secondary school but doesn’t really know what she wants to do with her life besides possessing a vague idea of living in Tokyo. Her mother, who is about to accept a post overseas, arranges for Chizu to live with Ginko, an elderly woman and distant relative who owns a house near a train station. Ginko has long been in the habit of letting a young woman stay with her in exchange for the company (and, presumably, the rent that Chizu’s mother insists on sending.)” I’ll add that Chizu had been living at home for a little while; she and her mother annoyed each other. Her father is barely present, many years after her parents’ divorce. As far as I could tell, the women who had stayed with Ginko through the years were all relatives of one sort or another on Chizu’s mother’s side. This is a glimpse of the kind of informal networks that make Japan (and many other places) run, and make it so hard for outsiders to find a firm footing.

Unlike many protagonists who move to the big city, Chizu neither has great ambition nor gets swept up in adventures. She and Ginko watch a lot of television. They take care of chores, more or less. They bicker a little bit — Chizu likes to aggravate people, for no particular reason that she can pinpoint — but only a little bit. Ginko is slightly eccentric; the room where Chizu stays features framed pictures of all the cats that Ginko has had through the years arranged around the perimeter where the walls meet the ceiling. She calls them Cherokees because that was the name of the first cat, and she says that’s the only one she remembers.

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May 16 2025

Tantalizing Tales — May 2025 — Part Two

Hello, dear readers! This week, we’re looking at books coming out in the back half of May, starting with a terrific series debut!

Tori Eldridge’s Kaua’i Storm was a long time in the writing. Despite being a native Hawaiian who can trace her ancestry back to 1783, Ms Eldridge felt far less confident about setting a book in the islands of her birth after years of living in the diaspora. Her fifth book finally tackles the issues of her island home, with what she hopes is the proper respect for the people and culture.

After ten years away as a park ranger in Oregon, our heroine Makalani Pahukula has come back to Kaua‘i for her grandmother’s birthday celebration. But she struggles to connect with her people and feels detached from their values, simpler way of life and slower pace. She’s also worried by the news that her cousins — a failed college football player and a rebellious teenage girl — have gone missing. Makalani hopes that they just ran off for fun, but when hunters find a dead body in the Keālia Forest Reserve, she fears that something ominous is at play.

Making use of her ranger tracking and survival skills, Makalani embarks on a search for her cousins, despite facing resistance from the locals and even from her own family. In her pursuit of the truth, she discovers that the investigation will open her heart, reawaken her love for the land she calls home, and strengthen her bond with those she loves.

Because no matter how long she’s been away, for Makalani, Hawai‘i is in her blood.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/05/16/tantalizing-tales-may-2025-part-two/

May 15 2025

Chip And Chatti Save The Farm by Heidi Paul

Gosh, how long has it been since I’ve held a physical copy of a children’s chapter book in my hands? It was a genuine, nostalgic pleasure to read this in the company of my dog-nephew Mario, as he kept me company during downtimes in an otherwise frantic (if super fun!) performance week.

Set in a pastoral recent past of horse buggies and hoboes, this book tells the tale of best friends Chip the dog and Chatti the cat. Their owner spends long hours at work and doesn’t have much time to play with them. When they meet Twinkle the mouse, she promises to grant them a wish so long as they don’t eat her.

What Chip and Chatti want most is the freedom of adventure. Neither of them thinks that Twinkle can actually provide that, so are astonished when Twinkle manages to set them free. Soon, the trio are on their way to the vastness of the countryside, with the aid and companionship of an unusual man named Bingo, who is somehow able to understand them all perfectly.

Bingo introduces them to the joys of life on the open road, as they travel from farm to farm looking for enough work to provide them a few meals and a night’s lodging. Chip and Chatti are happy to help where they can. But there’s something odd about the latest farm they get to. The animals are skittish and the new owner is grumpy. Will Chip, Chatti, Twinkle and Bingo be able to figure out what’s going on and put everything to rights?

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May 14 2025

The Crimson Road by A G Slatter

Despite having one of my least favorite shared universe names, A G Slatter’s dark fantasy novels are one of my few can’t-miss series! And nowhere was I happier to have read almost all of the books in it than here in this latest installment, The Crimson Road.

As the novel opens, heiress Violet Zennor is waiting for her father to die. She has spent most of her life being trained by him to be the perfect weapon, to go on a hazardous quest — in about three months’ time — to atone for his grave mistakes. Then Hendrek dies, and she finds herself finally in charge of her own destiny.

Or so she tries to be. Despite the urging and threats of both the town bishop and her father’s solicitor, Violet mulishly refuses to start on a journey that even she can see is suicidal. She just wants to stay home and hang out with her loved ones, maybe take a nice vacation somewhere (honestly, relatable.)

This is in stark contrast to Hendrek’s carefully laid-out plans. His intentions were for her to travel to the far north, beyond the border that the Briarwitches established to keep the Leech Lords confined to the Darklands where they reign in blood (and a mostly contained madness.) A child of prophecy is growing in the north, who must be destroyed before he can reach his ascendancy. That child, Violet’s brother, was sold as a stillborn baby to a mysterious man in exchange for a fortune. Realizing too late that the corpse was likely a vessel, Hendrek tried to atone by raising Violet to infiltrate the Darklands… and kill her own brother.

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May 13 2025

How Do I Wonder? by Gianna Davy & Brenda Rodriguez

This was a delightfully whimsical picture book about encouraging children to wonder about the world around them. Whether discussing science, art or feelings, it exhorts kids to stay curious and questioning about both realities and possibilities.

Brenda Rodriguez’ illustrations are terrific: colorful, diverse and really bringing Gianna Davy’s questions to life. I also really admired Ms Davy’s ability to use such nimble verse: some of the vocabulary is tricky to fit into meter but she does it with aplomb!

And now I’m going to be a downer by saying that this book also made me uncomfortable because it doesn’t actually answer the question it posits on the cover. “What Should I Wonder About?” is definitely less catchy a title than How, but that’s essentially what this book offers: a myriad of ideas for kids to use to get off their screens and start thinking about the world around them. It says that you don’t need much beyond a comfy place and quiet time to be curious, which is true. But, and crucially, it also doesn’t affirm the need for research, or for being able to tell truth from fiction.

In the current climate of chaos this feels almost like an unforgivable omission — and yes, I know I’m being really hard on a kids’ book. But I also believe that writing for children isn’t just about encouraging them to read. Like this book’s creators, I want to encourage them to think, but I want them to think responsibly. Even LM Montgomery, creator of some of the most beloved and imaginative heroines in the English language, wrote that too much imagination can be harmful, in more than one of her series. Obviously, we’re not talking about using imagination to write fiction or engage in ethical scientific experiments, but about blurring the line between reality and imagination. When you have fabulists who don’t understand science in positions of being capable of killing millions of people through a surplus of self-confidence coupled with a surfeit of ignorance, it’s not enough to say “ask questions”, which all too often leads to the fatuous “I’m just asking questions” stance. It’s important to also say “do the research, learn as you go, and have empathy.”

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/05/13/how-do-i-wonder-by-gianna-davy-brenda-rodriguez/

May 12 2025

Good Luck To Us All by Karen Vermeulen

subtitled A Graphic Memoir of Sorts.

First, big thanks to Doug and Emily for holding down the fort while I went on what I thought was going to be a working holiday… that turned into a mostly devices-free holiday. It was thus a delight to come back to work, and read and laugh and cry my way through what has turned out to be the next 5-star book on my 2025 list, Karen Vermeulen’s astonishing and gracious Good Luck To Us All.

This graphic memoir skips lightly over the first thirty-something years of the author’s life, telling us briefly about her work and world travels and disinterest in “settling down” before finding herself firmly in her 30s, single and living alone in Cape Town, South Africa. Figuring she might as well add a middle sobriquet to her chosen descriptor, she decides to adopt a cat which, unsurprisingly to this animal lover, turns out to be the best decision of her life (even if she is horribly allergic to cats.)

The chapters that follow delve with both humor and brutal honesty into the issues that plague single middle-aged women worldwide. Pets and (other people’s) children get several chapters, as do physical and spiritual health, in hilarious essays on yoga and meditation retreats. More poignant are the passages on aging and beauty. It’s probably the mom in me, but I wanted to reach through the pages and tell her “baby, no” every time she put herself down. Perhaps it’s also the fact that I’m a person who’s worked (and is still working!) hard to earn my self-esteem, and hate it when people (myself included!) have a hard time embracing their own joy and loveliness.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/05/12/good-luck-to-us-all-by-karen-vermeulen/

May 09 2025

A Year of Diana Wynne Jones: The New Millennium!

In my quest to read all of Diana Wynne Jones’s books in one year, this month I read Believing is Seeing, Year of the Griffin, Mixed Magics, and Unexpected Magic! That’s three collections of short stories and the sequel  to my deeply beloved Dark Lord of Derkholm.

This custom image by Marnanel Thurman shows the dates we read this book, the book’s title and the series title, "A Year of Diana Wynne Jones," with the cover of one edition of the book. Believing is Seeing (1999)

This is a story collection, and Marn very helpfully put the list of stories included into the custom image. For me personally, the standout story in this collection is “Dragon Reserve, Home Eight” which constructs a whole system of worlds and their imperfect governance, including telepathy, dragons, and spaceships, just the kind of exciting genre combo I gravitate towards.

This collection has a range of genres, with everything from legendary origin story to straight up magician fantasy, to science fiction, and blends thereof.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/05/09/a-year-of-diana-wynne-jones-the-new-millennium/