Feb 22 2024

The Briar Book Of The Dead by A. G. Slatter

I have so little time to read lengthy books for pleasure nowadays, so it should give you an idea of exactly how much I rate A. G. Slatter that I absolutely dropped everything to be able to cover her latest novel here. I’m still over a week late with it (because so many books! So little time!) but I’m so glad I made time for this instead of letting it fall into my ever-growing slush pile.

So! The Briar Book Of The Dead starts out a little slowly, as Ellie Briar laments her status as the only Briar cousin without magic. She was trained up well in administration tho, and does her best to serve as Steward of the small town of Silverton, despite her lack of magic and accompanying lack of status. Silverton is an interesting place, being one of the few where witches like herself and her family are allowed to practice in the open by the church, given their proven ability to hold back the vampiric Leech Lords across the border. Ostensibly, they have a priest to oversee their activities to make sure they don’t get too out of hand, but one of Ellie’s responsibilities lies in creating and sending excellent forgeries from their long-dead overseer back to the capital in Lodellan.

Ellie is busy administering to Silverton and its outlying homesteads in and around Balefire Eve when her beloved grandmother Gisela, the ruling Briar Witch, unexpectedly dies. The events of her funeral shake loose Ellie’s latent ability to see the dead. At first, Ellie can’t believe what’s happening to her. Their forebear, Gilly Briar, had banished all ghosts from their town, or so legend claimed. Now Ellie can not only see the ghosts of those lingering behind with a purpose yet unfulfilled, but speak to them as well. These specters desperately need her to lay their souls to rest, and won’t take no for an answer. Whether it’s through righting wrongs for them or providing their restless spirits with absolution, Ellie has her hands full, even before she learns of a deadly conspiracy that could tear apart everything the Briar Witches have struggled for so long to build.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/02/22/the-briar-book-of-the-dead-by-a-g-slatter/

Feb 15 2024

Rocket And Groot: Stranded On Planet Strip Mall! by Tom Angleberger

While on one of my periodic rage walks through my neighborhood a short while ago — tho, fortunately, these have been filled less with rage and more with a restless desire for movement recently, at least before I busted my knee again yesterday, deeeeep sigh — I stopped by one of the Little Free Libraries on my route and picked up this title for my kids. I figured that the outer space theme and copious illustrations would draw them in (plus I have a soft spot for that rascal Rocket Raccoon.)

Alas, my kids were their usual reading-resistant selves, despite this hardcover being in the same format as the many other Dog Man and Diary Of A Wimpy Kid books they adore. Perhaps I should get them to watch the Guardians Of The Galaxy movies with me: that might pique their interest! But given the current lack thereof, I figured I ought to at least give the book a read so I can make better recommendations to them as to what they might like about it (so, basically, my day job writ much smaller for my beloved little family.)

This illustrated chapter book is creatively formatted, as Rocket and Groot find themselves shipwrecked on a small, uncharted planet after a fearsome fight with space piranhas. With only the talking tape dispenser from their old (“borrowed”) space ship for company, they embark on an exploration of this strange new world, in search of both sustenance and a way back into space.

The closest landmark to them is a strip mall: weird, but not too, too out of the ordinary. Groot wants to find nutrients, but Rocket thinks it might not be a bad idea to stop by a dry cleaner’s first to get some of the space piranha battle stains out of his Guardians vest. The robot running the dry cleaners is eager to help, but also eager to guide Rocket to some of the other amenities, while Groot goes off in search of food elsewhere. Chaos, ofc, ensues.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/02/15/rocket-and-groot-stranded-on-planet-strip-mall-by-tom-angleberger/

Feb 13 2024

I Escaped A Chinese Internment Camp by Fahmida Azim, Anthony Del Col & Josh Adams

So I know that that order of attribution seems weird, as Fahmida Azim is the artist, Anthony Del Col the reporter and Josh Adams the art director of this Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novella. Like, who even puts the art director’s name on the cover of a book? But once you look at the contents, you’ll understand why, as Mr Adams’ tight direction keeps the book laser focused on telling its important, painful story.

This story revolves around the real life ordeal of Zumrat Dawut who, if posterity is kind, will be seen as a Muslim martyr who refused to renounce her faith despite torture by the Chinese government. By the grace of God and the American government, she escaped China and lives in the US with her family now. And I’ll be honest, it’s nice to read a story where US Immigration does the right thing. It restores my faith in the American system, a system that seems to be under constant attack by the most fearful and cynical of our fellow citizens even as the rest of us keep trying to make it better.

Zumrat is ethnically Uyghur, and was born in Urumqi, East Turkistan, a part of China. She’s already a mother of three when, in 2016, the government begins accelerating its suspicions of non-Han Chinese and, especially, Muslims. Her neighbors start throwing out anything connecting them to Islam, for fear of being beaten, arrested or worse. Two years later, she reports to the local police station for what she thinks is a routine check-in. Thus begins an ordeal for her and her entire family, as she’s taken away to a re-education camp where she’s routinely abused for being Muslim and, at least once, for being kind to a fellow prisoner.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/02/13/i-escaped-a-chinese-internment-camp-by-fahmida-azim-anthony-del-col-josh-adams/

Feb 11 2024

The Road by Vasily Grossman

Vasily Grossman is one of the great writers of the twentieth century, and The Road is a very good place to start reading his work. Born in the Ukrainian city of Berdychiv when it was part of the Russian Empire, Grossman experienced the Bolshevik Revolution and the ensuing civil war as a teen. He began writing short stories while studying chemical engineering at Moscow State University, and one of his early stories drew favorable notice from influential Soviet writers Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Bulgakov. He worked for a time in Donetsk, back when it was called Stalino, but by the mid-1930s he was both living in Moscow and able to write full-time.

The Road by Vasily Grossman

He came into his own as a writer when he worked as a war correspondent for the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star). Grossman witnessed and wrote about the Battle of Stalingrad, the great tank battle at Kursk, and the Soviet campaign to capture Berlin. In Stalingrad, he spent more than three months on the right bank of the Volga (p. 66), where house-to-house fighting between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht raged and the war in Europe was decided. He was one of the first reporters to see the Nazi extermination camp at Treblinka, which he reached in July 1944. Many of his dispatches are collected in A Writer at War, which is probably the other good place to start reading Grossman, as his best-known novels, Stalingrad and Life and Fate are vast epics.

After the war, Grossman increasingly came into conflict with the Soviet state. His work reporting Nazi crimes against Jews was suppressed, and he himself was fortunate to escape the anti-semitic campaign of the early 1950s, which only ebbed because of Stalin’s death. The cultural thaw of the Khrushchev years had its limits, as Grossman discovered when he submitted the manuscript of Life and Fate for publication. The authorities not only refused publication, they confiscated every copy of the manuscript that they could find, going so far as to take the typewriter ribbons that Grossman had used to write the novel. Only Solzhenitsyn’s work was as thoroughly repressed. Grossman died of cancer in 1964 at the age of 58. Life and Fate was not published until 1980; it was not published in Russia until 1988.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/02/11/the-road-by-vasily-grossman/

Feb 10 2024

The Dragon Griaule by Lucius Shepard

Before Lucius Shepard had published stories, he had the idea of a dragon who was 6,000 feet long, immobilized but not killed by a wizard’s spell ages ago, now more or less a part of the landscape with towns and villages on and around his body, which was difficult to distinguish from the other hills of the region. This was the dragon Griaule, to whom Shepard would return throughout his career: the first story in the collection, “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule,” was published in 1984; the last, “The Skull,” appeared in 2012, two years before Shepard’s own death. Throughout the stories, Griaule is vast and still, but awake, and malevolent. Some characters perceive his presence as part of the general atmosphere in the places built on his body. Others think that they have more direct access to his will, or perhaps vice versa.

The Dragon Griaule by Lucius Shepard

The stories begin in the register of fantasy tales, with perhaps a bit of industrialization peeking over the temporal horizon. Early on, the towns also want to rid themselves of Griaule’s influence and become more or less normal places. Later, the populace of places close to Griaule appear to have accepted their lot, and some even to revel in it. In the first story, the titular man is a painter who has not met with much commercial success. When he hears of the offer by the town of Teocinte to give a vast sum to anyone who can finally kill Griaule, Meric Cattanay sees an opportunity for a great plan, or maybe a great scam. Griaule will become an enormous canvas, Teocinte will become home to a wonder of art, and the action of the paints will become the dragon’s end, chemicals finally doing what sorcery could not. Shepard sketches the decades that pass, until finally

You decided to paint a dragon, to send hundreds of men searching for malachite and cochineal beetles, to love a woman, to heighten an undertone here and there, and finally to position your body a certain way. He seemed to have reached the end of the process. What next? (p. 29)

Who has outlasted whom?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/02/10/the-dragon-griaule-by-lucius-shepard/

Feb 09 2024

You’re Not The Only One F*cking Up by Lane Moore

subtitled Breaking the Endless Cycle of Dating Mistakes.

When I picked up this book for review, I did not realize that it would become incredibly relevant to my personal life. Everything happens for a reason, and I was genuinely pleased to get a little guidance as I navigate a chaotic (and frankly exhausting!) new-again world. But even if you’re not currently in the dating trenches, this short non-fiction book has a lot of great advice for those trying to figure out their own hearts and relationships, as well as the patterns that have brought them to where they are in their emotional lives.

Lane Moore is a bestselling author and comedian whose show, Tinder Live, dissects modern dating with both humor and heart. Wanting to further highlight the universality of the confusing and occasionally self-defeating dating experience, she put out a call for horrific dating stories, several of which form the backbone of this absorbing book. Too often, it’s made clear, people make poor choices almost out of habit, ignoring things they know are bad for them in hope of finally finding The One.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/02/09/youre-not-the-only-one-fcking-up-by-lane-moore/

Feb 08 2024

The Wandering Hour by Zack Loran Clark & Nick Eliopulos

I genuinely did not expect this first installment of the new middle grade horror series The Doomsday Archives to be quite as accomplished as it is but dang, what an impressive series debut!

New Rotterdam is one of those creepy coastal New England towns that definitely inspired H. P. Lovecraft’s Innsmouth (OH! I wonder if Emrys’ name was chosen in tribute to one of the contemporary authors working hard to reframe the Cthulhu mythos without Lovecraft’s rampant racism and biases. That would be really neat!) The sun rarely shines in this foggy, perpetually overcast place, and people seem to go missing with a regularity alarming to outsiders. Folktales and legends abound, almost all of the creepy kind.

Befitting the 21st century, a wiki has sprung up to help keep track of all these stories, making them feel less hallowed and distant, and more creepypasta and — as a result — disturbingly immediate. Called The New Rotterdam Wiki Project, the wiki is written and administered mostly anonymously. Emrys Houtman is one of the contributors to this project, along with his best friend Hazel. The two met at summer camp, and Emrys was super thrilled when his mom got a job that relocated them to Hazel’s town. New Rotterdam is filthy with cryptids and other weirdness, both of which he and Hazel are obsessed with finding and recording. It helps, too, that they live in the same apartment building, along with Hazel’s other best friend, Serena.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/02/08/the-wandering-hour-by-zack-loran-clark-nick-eliopulos/

Feb 05 2024

Zodiac: A Graphic Memoir by Ai Weiwei, with Elettra Stamboulis & Gianluca Costantini

This gorgeous hardcover graphic memoir by celebrated artist Ai Weiwei is a must-have for his fans, and a must-read for anyone who cares about modern art and, particularly, its intersection with political protest.

For those unfamiliar, Ai Weiwei is a conceptual artist, sometime designer of architecture and longtime political dissident against the Communist government of China. His father Ai Qing was a famous poet who fell afoul of Mao Zedong and was forced into internal exile, living with his wife and young child in subsistence poverty on the fringes of the Gobi Desert. Despite their hard circumstances, Ai Qing did his best to instill history, folklore and a sense of justice into his only child, who would grow up to be the internationally acclaimed artist that he is today. Now Ai Weiwei has produced a book, illustrated by Gianluca Costantini, that loosely ties stories of the Chinese zodiac with important milestones of his own life.

To those not already familiar with Ai Weiwei’s life story, the chapters can feel a little disjointed: looking up his history certainly helped me process the vignettes and allusions better. Some of the chapters are more loosely tied to the zodiac than others, tho each strives to ground its connection in a brief but usually excellent explanation of the accompanying myth and characteristics. Tho perhaps I say that as someone familiar with the astrology: a friend with a better grounding in Ai Weiwei’s art but less knowledge of the eastern zodiac certainly had the exact opposite impression that I did (hi, Emily!)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/02/05/zodiac-a-graphic-memoir-by-ai-weiwei-with-elettra-stamboulis-gianluca-costantini/

Feb 01 2024

Drawing Deena by Hena Khan

So there are a lot of reasons why this book resonated with me and made me cry for younger me, but foremost among them was the very clear cut, if never fully named, eldest daughter syndrome our main character Deena suffers from. Idk if it’s even a thing in certain cultures, but the expectation she faces to pretend that everything is okay, to soothe her parents by pretending that their choices are her choices, really cut me to the bone.

It’s not a spoiler to say that Deena manages to overcome this. The 21st century, particularly in America, is much kinder to children with mental health issues than it was when I was growing up. Watching young Deena learn to take agency over her own mental health was inspiring, even for an old like me, but especially for an old who wants her kids to grow up without all the unnecessary mental anguish I went through at their age.

The story itself revolves around Deena Rahman, a middle schooler who loves art but who worries that her parents’ constant fighting over money will lead to their divorce. She’s also under pressure to keep her grades up while helping with her mom’s dress business. Her mom is something of a complainer, constantly moaning about the price of things, including Deena’s much needed dental care. Deena, unsurprisingly, takes this to heart, blaming herself for requiring a mouth guard and secretly wanting extra art classes. Her beloved younger brother, meanwhile, pretty much gets to ask her to do all sorts of chores for him but only reluctantly reciprocates (this is a common theme in Hena Khan’s books. I love that the main characters adore their kid brothers but I personally find these younger brother characters irritating.)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/02/01/drawing-deena-by-hena-khan/

Jan 30 2024

What’s Wrong? by Erin Williams

subtitled Personal Histories of Chronic Pain and Bad Medicine.

After a lifetime of anxiety and self-medication, Erin Williams realized that the American health system had failed her. At best, it focused on symptoms instead of attempting to treat her as an entire person, leaving her to suffer with chronic pain and, finally, to search for answers as to not only how to feel better physically but how to cope with the mental, emotional and spiritual despair that she was constantly told were merely aftereffects of her physical disease. If they were considered at all a source or contributor to her maladies, it was clearly because she was mistaken or, worse, making these symptoms up. If they couldn’t see the problem, the medical system insisted, then the problem couldn’t possibly be real.

One thing before I continue: while the back cover makes it very clear that this is an American healthcare issue, the contents do not. I understand why: the point of the author constantly saying “our” without specifying who “we” is makes the contents feel more immediately relevant to the reader. But anyone with experience of medicine in foreign countries — or at least the countries with decent medical systems like Malaysia, tho anywhere else feels truly exemplary compared to the hellscape that is American medicine with its demon master of for-profit health insurance — will feel immediately how alien and awful the treatment depicted here is. As someone who’s experienced both systems, I can attest to both the veracity of Ms Williams’ depiction, as well as the uniquely frustrating misery of being unable to access life-saving care because of paperwork and price-gouging when other countries somehow manage it just fine!

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/01/30/whats-wrong-by-erin-williams/