Apr 17 2018

The Gatekeepers by Chris Whipple

I read The Gatekeepers, a book about White House chiefs of staff, like the grad student and extremely minor Washington insider that I used to be: acknowledgments first, then scan the bibliography, then a look at the notes, then the main text. In this case, I also read the last chapter, which is about the first year of Donald Fucking Trump’s administration, before any others. It will not surprise you that Trump and his enablers are screwing up the chief of staff role in pretty much all of the known ways, although they do not (yet) seem to have invented any new ways.

The last American president to function reasonably well without a designated chief of staff was Lyndon Johnson, whose tenure in the White House ended nearly 50 years ago. Organizing the executive office of the president around certain set functions with a chief of the staff is a system that evolved from practices that Eisenhower brought in, drawing on his experience as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during the Second World War. After nearly half a century of practice, the White House staff system has become an enduring function of American government and a crucial one for giving it direction. Whipple’s book, which draws on a documentary film he made on the same subject, describes how the role has evolved over time, and how each chief has shaped the presidency in which he (and they have all been he, to date) has served.

As Whipple lays it out, the role of chief of staff is a solved problem. A new president, who has probably campaigned on bringing change to Washington, needs a chief who knows the capital’s ways; this will cause rifts with the people from the campaign, and probably with the people who worked closely with the president at lower levels of government. The president’s most valuable asset is his or her time (because everyone only has twenty-four hours each day, and even Bill Clinton couldn’t work all of them), and the chief of staff must be able to enable the president to maximize that irreplaceable asset. That includes organizing the schedule around the kind of down time that each president needs. Obama was not at his best when he missed out on his regular family time; Nixon needed time alone in his study; Clinton needed time to talk to people and to schmooze.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/04/17/the-gatekeepers-by-chris-whipple/

Apr 12 2018

The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club Book 1) by Theodora Goss

Delightful novel, and well worth the rush read.

This is the first in the chronicles of the Athena Club, a group of women brought together by the fact that they are all monsters. Or, to be more precise, the daughters/offspring/creation of mad scientists (as well as the doughty Mrs Poole and the plucky Alice. Let’s not be classist and forget the servants, after all.) Their leader is Mary Jekyll, who initially consults with Sherlock Holmes and John Watson after the death of her mother leaves her impoverished. She hopes that some of the documents her mother has left her might help in pursuing the murderer Edward Hyde, whom she remembers from when she was a young girl. There was, she believes, a cash reward for information leading to his apprehension, money she desperately needs to keep body and soul together. Her investigations lead her first to the incorrigible Diana Hyde, the 14 year-old daughter of said murderer, who insists that the two are sisters, a claim Mary scarcely wants to believe. But as they encounter (and essentially gather) more women to their monstrous regiment, Mary discovers that there are more things in heaven and earth than she’d ever dreamt possible.

The Strange Case Of The Alchemist’s Daughter is a wonderfully imaginative retelling of the many, many mad scientist fables of early science fiction, inspired by Theodora Goss’ curiosity as to why so many of these scientists chose to destroy their female creations while letting the males run amuck. It’s charmingly written with frequent interjections from each member. Ms Goss does an excellent job of keeping each voice distinctive, even as she stays true to the tones, if not necessarily the details, of the source materials.

My one teeny tiny critique is that life was actually way, way worse for the Victorian poor than Ms Goss described. Every time I read of a prostitute with decent lodgings or sitting comfortably by a pub fire with barley water, I was thrown out of the otherwise quite immersive world-building. Doss houses and a mug of cheap gin were more the order of the day. But that’s a small criticism of an otherwise very entertaining novel. I’m very much looking forward to reading of what the Athena Club will do next, tho boo-urns, I have to wait till July for the next book.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/04/12/the-strange-case-of-the-alchemists-daughter-the-extraordinary-adventures-of-the-athena-club-book-1-by-theodora-goss/

Apr 10 2018

A Breath After Drowning by Alice Blanchard

Kate Wolf is a psychiatrist specializing in at-risk adolescents. She has a great boyfriend whom she loves almost as much as she loves her job, but her family history has made it so she has massive intimacy issues. Her father is a family physician and someone she’s always striven to emulate, but their relationship is fraught due to his emotional coldness, which has grown more and more frigid since the twin tragedies of losing her mother first to suicide then her younger sister six years later to the murderer next door. As the execution date of Henry Blackwood draws closer, Kate is more than ready to leave with her boyfriend on a media-free vacation. Unfortunately, a tragedy at work keeps her in Boston, where she’s approached by a former cop who is unconvinced of Blackwood’s guilt. As Kate begins to realize that the real killer might still be out there, she also starts to worry that she’s losing her grip on reality, as family secrets and a madness that refuses to be sated threaten to take over her life and destroy it.

A Breath After Drowning explores trust issues on several levels, before neatly severing, or at least casting severe doubt on, the reader’s belief in each of the people Kate relies on through the course of this book. It’s an unsettling experience, losing all your narrative moorings, and one of the best evocations of paranoia I’ve experienced in a long time. I trusted no one, strongly suspecting all the characters that Alice Blanchard built for us, and really enjoyed the weird emotional parallel I felt to poor Kate lost in a snowstorm about three quarters of the way through. And still I was surprised by the revelation of the actual killer!

A Breath After Drowning Blog Tour Schedule

Usually with thrillers, the ending after the climactic reveal feels like a bit of a let-down, with damaged souls trying to fumble their way back to normalcy. But I was genuinely heartened by the ending of ABAD, with its promise of health and wellness in every respect. A very satisfying thriller from a writer who knows how to work the reader’s emotions.

The Frumious Consortium is participating in our very first book tour with the publication of ABAD and will be featuring an interview with Ms Blanchard next week! If you’re interested in reading more, check out the other blogs on the tour, and come back in nine days to hear more from the author herself!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/04/10/a-breath-after-drowning-by-alice-blanchard/

Apr 09 2018

Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos #1) by Dan Simmons

I am getting So. Fucking. Tired of picking up a sci-fi “classic” and having to read through pages and pages of barely endurable garbage to come to the conclusion of “what the fuck was that?!” And I don’t say this about all the classics, obviously: decades on, Ender’s Game, Parable Of The Sower and A Fire In The Deep are still amazing, mind-bending, minimally problematic books that, unlike fucking OverHypedrion, stand up as individual novels without needing another whole four hundred pages to be a complete story. And look, Hyperion isn’t as godawful as Shadow And Claw or Gardens Of The Moon: there’s some good writing and storytelling in this volume but that ending blew. As did Martin Silenius’ story. As did, oh my God, the total adolescence petulance masquerading as the traitor’s story. As a dying utterance “A plague on both your houses!” is striking, poetic and justified. As a way of life, it’s petty as shit. And the traitor cries at the betrayals, and I’m supposed to feel sad? Gtfo.

Without a doubt, the most compelling tales were the more overtly religious ones. I stayed up waaaaay too late at night finishing the priests’ tale, which was horrifying and good. So for the stupid book to end without even hinting at a resolution was a cheap let-down, especially in relation to Lamia’s non-answer to Hoyt’s assertion regarding the cruciform. Seriously, just publish this as a single novel with the second book that everyone seems to love and I’d (probably) be a happier camper. As it is, I’m just irritated at the fact that this book goes on forever without actually coming to any sort of decent resolution short of obtaining a whole other book.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/04/09/hyperion-hyperion-cantos-1-by-dan-simmons/

Apr 07 2018

Raven Stratagem (The Machineries of Empire #2) by Yoon Ha Lee

If you’re new to the Machineries Of Empire series, start with my review here.

So when I first began reading this I thought, “Wait, what, my memory must really be going because this is totally different from what I remembered of the ending of Ninefox Gambit.” Then I got through over half of the book before realizing that I’m not as decrepit as I thought, and ooh yeah, Yoon Ha Lee knows how to throw his narrative punches!

That said, I did not rate Raven Stratagem as highly as NG, mostly because of the glaringly obvious Andal connection, but also because, tho it was pretty great when it came to action and math and deception (and it made me root for Shuos Mikodez! I was not expecting that at all!) it lacked a certain poignancy that it might easily have reached (and that its predecessor did reach,) particularly in the later chapters with Khiruev and Istradez. Also, it seems odd to me that one can voluntarily reject formation instinct after it’s been indoctrinated/inoculated. I suppose it could be argued that DNA is not destiny, but if it’s so easy to throw off formation instinct, wouldn’t more Kel be doing it in the heat of battle?

Anyway, I was left wondering at the end where Mr Lee could possibly be going with the third and final book in the series, Revenant Gun, but I suppose no one knows where Nirai Kujen has gone or what he’s up to. I’m very excited to find out, tho!

See what Doug had to say in his review here.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/04/07/raven-stratagem-the-machineries-of-empire-2-by-yoon-ha-lee/

Apr 04 2018

School for Psychics (School for Psychics #1) by K.C. Archer

Imagine, if you will, the absurdly unlikely but highly entertaining hijinks of the TV show Quantico starring a Jessica Jones type, where all the cast have mental superpowers. That is the fun romp that is K. C. Archer’s School For Psychics, in this case the Whitfield Institute to which our heroine, the wisecracking, damaged Teddy Cannon, is recruited after being banned from every casino on the Vegas strip. Teddy has always been able to read people in a fashion that has pretty much caused her to isolate herself from everyone except her beloved adoptive parents. She parlays this skill, however, into profits at the poker tables, to the chagrin of the casinos who ban her before she can finish paying back the stakes she owes a Serbian mobster (in what was the weakest part of the narrative to me, the fact that she didn’t sock aside money from her winnings, the hallmark of a gambling addict, but otherwise never displayed any other symptoms of addiction once she’d left Vegas.)

Anyway, the Whitfield Institute trains psychics for placement with law enforcement agencies, and Teddy is eager to take the opportunity to make something of her life after flaming out of Stanford. She joins an assortment of 20-somethings who each have their own set of skills and secrets, and begins a rigorous training program at the secluded island campus. But when a routine assignment reveals that her mentor may be the very antithesis of everything he’s taught her, and that the riddle of her own mysterious past may not be as unsolvable as it seems, Teddy finds herself and her friends in great danger as they race to uncover a truth that seems to be coming for them whether they like it or not.

This was a super fun book that felt like it would make for a great TV show. The paranormal “science” wasn’t the most rigorous even for that field of study but it was less insulting than some of the pseudoscience that peppers a lot of mainstream entertainment today, so the lack of precision didn’t spoil my experience at all. I also really enjoyed watching Teddy’s character grow and learn from her time at Whitfield, even if I’m more #TeamLucas than Nick. I’m excited to see where K. C. Archer goes with this series (and hope that Teddy doesn’t go the route of Season 2 Jessica Jones, who is high on a cocktail of self-pity and narcissism that is growing increasingly hard to watch.)

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/04/04/school-for-psychics-school-for-psychics-1-by-k-c-archer/

Apr 04 2018

Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga #4) by Pierce Brown

One of the great joys to me of reading Pierce Brown is the gif-heavy conversations I have throughout with Alec about my feeeeeeelings. Because Mr Brown gives me so many feelings, tho this book, I admit, was a little less superlative than the original Red Rising trilogy. It’s hard, of course, to scale the same epic heights reached in the original, which is a tale of rebellion and rage against an oppressive regime that has genetically and socially engineered its citizens to comply in a system designed to enrich the highest echelons at the expense of the lowest. And now that Darrow, our hero of the original trilogy, has broken the chains of oppression, he finds that the burden of building a just society in lieu of what he destroyed is far more difficult than he ever imagined.

Beginning ten years after the close of the first trilogy, Darrow is a warrior exhausted by war who needs to stay on the offensive. The Senate representing the demokracy his wife established is even more weary, and tells him in no uncertain terms that they will no longer give him the manpower or funding to continue. But Darrow cannot listen, so a full quarter of this book is about his rage and despair.

Unlike its predecessors, Iron Gold is told from multiple perspectives, so instead of just Darrow, we also see the stories of Ephraim, a jaded Grey who has become a freelance thief; Lyria, a Red doing her best to eke out a decent living in a refugee camp, and Lysander, the most obnoxious dipshit I’ve ever had to read about. For real, three times he’s told not to do an important thing and three times he convinces himself that said thing is exactly what he should do. He’s the BIGGEST idiot.

Despite my ongoing annoyance with Lysander, the varied storylines are quite entertaining, his included, but I felt that the most meaningful was Lyria’s. The persecution of her people by the Red Hand has all too many uncomfortable parallels with what happens to groups seen as “collaborators” in the aftermath of violent regime change. That said, there was never one climactic moment where I felt “Mr Brown has done it again!” as I did with the previous books. Of course, this one is less self-contained than the others, so I imagine we’re building to those moments in future installments. I can’t wait to read them (and gif my emotions to Alec, of course.)

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/04/04/iron-gold-red-rising-saga-4-by-pierce-brown/

Mar 31 2018

Brick Lane by Monica Ali

This powerful book about a woman discovering her own agency through the lens of the Bangladeshi immigrant experience surprised me at how timeless it felt even though it’s set at the turn of the 21st century. It’s very much in the tradition of classics by Thomas Hardy and Willa Cather, documenting with a fine eye for time and place the interior lives of their flawed and sympathetic characters. It actually came as a surprise to me that this book chronicled the period that it did as it felt somehow older, less modern, but to a very large extent that speaks less to the book than to the rapid tumult of progress in the era covered and, more pertinently, in the places it details. Bangladesh and England with their fraught histories with one another and on their own make excellent backdrops for a study of a woman who learns that there is more to life than just existing.

My only criticism of this novel is that it felt less like a novel than a series of vignettes strung together, mostly competently but occasionally with enough of a leap in the narrative to make the gap noticeable. There are a lot of shockingly underwritten scenes, in the manner of Leo Tolstoy, but unlike the great Russian, Monica Ali wisely refuses to compensate by overwriting other scenes to a dull and grisly death.

I requested this book from my library because I stayed very nearby Brick Lane, in Bethnal Green, when I was in London briefly earlier this year. I was actually a bit disappointed reading it because the Brick Lane I know is quite different just over a decade on, tho I interpret this as an improvement and another sign of rapid progress to the good. Contrasting my visit with the book did emphasize again how oddly underwritten the riot scene, among others, was: Ms Ali is not quite as good describing exteriors as she is at emotion. The novel is still shockingly good for a debut, and definitely belongs on a shelf next to its predecessors as a modern classic.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/03/31/brick-lane-by-monica-ali/

Mar 25 2018

Spook Street (Slough House #4) by Mick Herron

I need more Slough House books. You guys don’t understand: I need them (she says, tapping her veins.) It’s so unfair that Book 5, London Rules, isn’t out yet in the US.

ANYWAY, with Spook Street, the Slough House series has officially become my favorite spy series. Aside from being smart and topical, these novels are funny as hell. And you know I like my stories to be liberally sprinkled with empathy and kindness, which these definitely have. Since we’re talking about books chronicling exploits in modern espionage, there’s also going to be a lot of nastiness, but in Mick Herron’s hands, none of it is gratuitous and all of it is heartbreaking (or at the very least hilarious.)

So yeah one of my favorite characters died in these pages and I’m still mad as hell about it, but I trust what Mr Herron has done with his writing to respect that narrative choice, because it was clear that Mr Herron respected that death and gave it the writing it deserved. I also loved his pacing: there is nothing so thrilling as coming to the “oh shit” realization just a handful of pages before the author masterfully reveals the truth.

My only criticism is that I’m getting rather tired of River, who is starting to be the mediocre white dude who manages to sail through life as the extremely boring hero of the piece (also, duh, Jackson Lamb is the hero here and I will brook no competition, especially from bland young white men from privileged backgrounds.) I am, however, intrigued by the addition of Coe to Slough House after what happened in Nobody Walks, especially since I want Bettany back on the streets now that Taverner is on the outs. But who knows if the bleak, tragic Bettany has a place in a world that uses often inappropriate drollery to cope with the horrors modern life flings at our security services ? I wouldn’t put it past Mr Herron to manage that integration with both skill and panache, honestly, and I CANNOT WAIT for London Rules.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/03/25/spook-street-slough-house-4-by-mick-herron/

Mar 24 2018

Any Day Now by Terry Bisson

For a good part of the way through Any Day Now, I was fairly certain that it would turn out to be the fourth perfect book, and even now I am not entirely sure that it is not. The book won’t be for everyone, though; I bounced off of the novel completely the first time I tried to read it.

If I had to say it was like anything else, which it isn’t, I would say it’s halfway between Ferrol Sams‘ three books about Porter Osborne, Jr. and The Armageddon Rag by George R.R. Martin. The story starts as a coming of age tale, with Clay, Bisson’s protagonist, as firmly located on Kentucky’s northern border as Osborne was in central Georgia. Clay is a generation younger than Osborne. Where Osborne fought in World War II, Clay is the son of a returned sailor, the last one off his sinking ship, forever marked by the experience.

(Clay grows up in the same town where Bisson did and eventually starts at a college in the Midwest not unlike Grinnell, which Bisson attended. Though Clay is a personal name rather than a family name, given that he is from Kentucky it was impossible for me not to think of Henry Clay and the other Clays who shaped both state and national history.)

Bisson tells the early part of the story in short snippets that are short on description, long on dialog, and that I found achingly beautiful. Bisson populates the small town with vivid people, capturing a Kentucky between eras, between north and south. Within 30 pages, Clay is in high school, and within 50 in college, but those formative years are as clear and memorable to a reader as they were to Clay. Some of the phrases coined then among friends echo through the years as they progress in their lives, leave town, fail to leave town, see each other again as time passes. Clay picks up a little bit of science fiction — a phrase from Arthur C. Clarke but as he starts to reach out toward a world beyond Owensboro it’s jazz and Beat writing that provide the rocket fuel for his launch.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/03/24/any-day-now-by-terry-bisson/