Jan 29 2024

Diary Of A Confused Feminist by Kate Weston

You know you’re getting old when British YA diary novels are no longer compared to Sue Townsend’s or even Helen Fielding’s oeuvre.

For all that I am now an old, I thoroughly enjoyed this tale of Kat Evans, the fifteen year-old girl who wants to be a good feminist even as she worries about friendships, boys and school, roughly in that order. She and her two best friends, Millie and Sam, are determined to raise awareness about feminism at their secondary school. But when Millie and Sam both get boyfriends, while Kat’s own budding relationship with Hot Josh is thrown into jeopardy by mean girl Terrible Trudy, Kat fears not only that’s she’s being a bad feminist for her negative thoughts but also that her besties soon won’t have time for her any more. As Kat’s anxieties escalate, will she be able to overcome her concerns about being seen as a baby in order to reach out for the help she desperately needs?

This was a humorous yet realistically drawn look into the life of a typical young woman battling not only the pressures of everyday life in the 2020s, but also mental illness. I loved how matter-of-factly Kate Weston presents anxiety: she deftly shows how it’s not a life sentence but a completely manageable condition. Even without the mental health aspect, it’s great how she encourages teens (and older readers!) to aim for clear communications with friends and family. It’s so easy to stew in one’s own emotions and concerns, letting them build in pressure in your head, when support for most is so easy to find nowadays (as I recently discovered in my own personal life! But also I fully acknowledge how lucky I am to have sensible, supportive friends, new and old.)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/01/29/diary-of-a-confused-feminist-by-kate-weston/

Jan 25 2024

Where The Body Was by Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips & Jacob Phillips

Gosh, I wish every aspiring literary thriller author who’s planning on writing some heartfelt, wordy, incredibly dreary and often borderline racist tale of suburban scandals would just read this graphic novel and go ahead and reevaluate whether this manuscript they’re working on actually says anything that the Brubaker/Phillips crew hasn’t covered perfectly already.

My day job is the crime beat, and let me tell you, I have read so much junk masquerading as elevated prose applied to the suburban whodunnit that it makes me want to tear my hair out. Grace Metalious’ Peyton Place was the scandalous, trailblazing ur-text of this subgenre, but she definitely did not take it as seriously as some of the authors operating in the field today. Dear modern authors: it’s okay to write entertaining prose that doesn’t aspire to literary greatness via tortured text renderings of a person’s incredibly banal interior life. People grieve, we get it, but y’all writers need to give readers a reason to care about that person before we can care about their sadness. Because sadness? It isn’t unique. Last year was the shittiest year of my life and my grief bored even me, and I say that as someone who actually cares deeply about myself.

In all honesty, if I’d realized that this book was meant to be a suburban thriller, I’d have probably passed on it. I know Ed Brubaker as more of a heist/noir writer, so I was expecting more of that. The 80s setting, crosscut with modern day panels, fit the quasi-historical lens of his that I’m used to, so by the time I realized this was basically suburban shenanigans, I was already too hooked to try to flail away.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/01/25/where-the-body-was-by-ed-brubaker-sean-phillips-jacob-phillips/

Jan 23 2024

Here In Avalon by Tara Isabella Burton

A large part of me is glad that Tara Isabella Burton was not writing novels back when I was a teenager, because I would have made her books my entire life aesthetic.

Her three novels to date — Social Creature, The World Cannot Give, and now Here In Avalon — revolve around women who are voraciously hungry for large lives lived on their own terms but who feel trapped, and so lash out emotionally, heedless of whomever around them gets hurt. These women are never the main character: that honor goes to the other woman who is, in turn, most trapped in their orbits, loving them and envying them and supporting them and perhaps ultimately destroying them. Usually these central women belong to an in-group that the main characters are curious about before falling headlong into. There is also usually creepiness and crime and most of all a regret for all that was lost in the final pages.

For all that, none of Ms Burton’s books feel same-y. For example, I love Janice Hallett, but was a little baffled at the use of the exact same moralistic framing device in the last three books of hers I’ve read (not including The Twyford Code, which I plan to get to reading and reviewing here #soon.) Ms Burton might use similar base archetypes but all her characters are so unique in their circumstances — even when the books call back to each other — that her stories always feel like they’re exploring new facets of her focus subjects. If there are, arguably, only two stories in all the history of the world, then hers continue the time-honored tradition of telling us new, heart-searching things about ourselves while working from a very particular base framework.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/01/23/here-in-avalon-by-tara-isabella-burton/

Jan 22 2024

You Wish by Jeff Victor

I somehow managed to persuade my 13 year-old to read this with me, and we were both incredibly delighted by this sweet, spunky tale of a young girl living in the middle of nowhere who discovers that magic really does exist in her life.

Ten year-old tomboy Avery helps her father run a gas station in the middle of a practically deserted desert valley. She has no friends because there are so few other people around, and none of them are her own age. When she’s not helping customers at the pumps, her main pastime is learning magic tricks, in hopes of injecting a little excitement into her humdrum existence. Her dad tries his best — he’s funny and sweet — but there’s really only so much you can do when you’re living out in isolation.

When Dad drives into town one day, leaving Avery in charge, she finds herself in need of a new lightbulb. Hoping to find one in his cluttered garage, she unearths instead an old-timey lantern. As she dusts it off, a brilliant blaze erupts from it, along with an adorable little monkey-cat hybrid named Gribblet (whom Jms and I immediately cooed over like he was a Pokemon.) Once Gribblet realizes who she is, he helps her embark on a journey that will not only show her that magic is real but that she herself is far more magical than she ever imagined.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/01/22/you-wish-by-jeff-victor/

Jan 19 2024

The Chemical Wedding by John Crowley

Or, more properly and to give the book its full era-appropriate title, The Chemical Wedding by Christian Rosencreutz, A Romance in Eight Days, by Johann Valentin Andreae in a new version by John Crowley

The Chemical Wedding in a new version by John Crowley

Cheekily claimed as a special 400th anniversary edition, The Chemical Wedding is a new version of one of the founding Rosicrucian documents, an allegorical text from 1616 first published in German, purportedly by one Christian Rosencreutz, actually by a Lutheran pastor named Johann Valentin Andreae. This version, writes Crowley, is not a new translation. He based it on the original English translation from 1690 and a more modern one from 1887, plus some consultation with a new translation from 1991 and assistance from Andrés Paniagua, who checked Crowley’s versions “against original German printings.” (p. 23) The book itself is also a lovely object, even in the paperback edition that I have, put together with care by Small Beer Press. The size is just right, the margins are generous, the layout pleasing, the odd inscriptions from the original reproduced clearly for modern readers. It’s printed in two colors, with Crowley’s footnotes in a red that’s distinct from the main text yet very readable. The white pages and two colors of ink reproduce the alchemical importance of red, black and white that occur throughout the story, reflecting states of matter, stages of development, phases of the great Work of alchemy. Illustrations by Theo Fadel round out the presentation. There’s an emblem for each of the Days of the Romance, while other full-page illustrations depict scenes and concepts from the peculiar goings-on in preparation for the alchemical wedding.

Crowley claims that his “aim in producing this new version was simply to make this, one of the great outlandish stories in Western literature, accessible to readers in the context of no context.” (p. 14) That’s not, strictly speaking, true, as he adds a congenial introduction that supplies considerable context, along with footnotes throughout the text that illuminate details, point up contradictions, speculate about what the author might be up to, and generally provide context for any reader whose eyes drift down the page toward them. It’s possible read The Chemical Wedding in the context of no context, but it would be a lot more effort and a lot less rewarding.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/01/19/the-chemical-wedding-by-john-crowley/

Jan 18 2024

Life House by Pete Townshend, James Harvey, David Hine & Max Prentis

Ngl, reading this felt like what I imagine an acid trip would be like. I guess one good thing about it is that it made me want to listen to more of The Who’s music? Good thing this graphic novel is being released with an accompanying vinyl LP! (Link at the bottom, tho you can also snag this book on its own.)

Life House is based on a rock opera originally conceived by Pete Townshend, lead guitarist and principal songwriter of The Who, as the follow-up to their massive multimedia hit, Tommy. Alas, Life House as a rock opera was shelved due to practical constraints, tho it did serve as the inspiration for their globally bestselling album Who’s Next?. That album has now been remastered and the original script reshaped into the graphic novel format/package we have here.

I’ll be blunt: this is some weird shit. And that’s fine! I love weird shit. But it was also weird shit that was originally conceived in the 70s, and I think a lot of the cultural references just totally flew over my head. Anyway, in a dystopian future, an autocrat known as Jumbo Seven rules over England, the last nation left remaining after the rest annihilated themselves via nuclear warfare. The first Jumbo outlawed religion and music in her quest to save/control her people. The current Jumbo, seventh of her name, rules over a land where most of the citizens live in a sort of stasis called Grid Sleep (basically The Matrix, but without artificial intelligence using people as batteries.)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/01/18/life-house-by-pete-townshend-james-harvey-david-hine-max-prentis/

Jan 17 2024

Guided Tarot Box Set by Stefanie Caponi

One of the silver linings of 2023 being such a garbage year for me emotionally was the fact that it encouraged me to start making better use of my many Tarot decks, not (necessarily) to divine the future — tho my weekly spreads do have the concerning habit of choosing to focus on Arsenal games instead of my actual personal life when the former arise: as of this time of writing, I’m 8.5/10 correct publicly posted predictions — but to work on my inner impulses when faced with daily challenges. And while I have mumblemumble number of decks, I realized that I don’t actually own a copy of the classic Waite-Smith which set the standard of symbolism for the many decks that came in its wake.

Given that this box set was going for pretty much the same price as a deck alone, I had to snag it. In all honesty, I really wanted a book that does a deep dive on the symbolism of Pamela Colman Smith’s art, created in collaboration with the academic and mystic A. E. Waite. I’ve seen really cool ads on social media for pdf downloads of that kind of exploration, but I’d much rather have a hard copy, so thought this would be a good place to start.

The presentation box this comes in is lovely: sturdy, with a satisfying flip-top lid closure, and with the most gorgeous metallic lettering on the front. Inside, there are slots for both the book and the deck, which keeps everything secure and tidy. That said, the box is so large, I’m not sure what to do with it now. I’m uninterested in carrying the whole kit and caboodle around: I’ll pack the deck into my purse for the month of January, then store it with my other decks when it’s not in active rotation. It seems weird to have the book stay in the box, tho perhaps once the month is over, it makes sense to store deck and book together in the original packaging. It’s just not very practical for the more advanced reader, tho I suppose that isn’t really the target audience for this set anyway.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/01/17/guided-tarot-box-set-by-stefanie-caponi/

Jan 16 2024

Children Of The Phoenix Vol. 1: The Eye Of The Storm by Oskar Källner & Karl Johnsson

I went into this thinking, mostly due to the publisher, that it was a graphic novel. I was a bit surprised to open it up and find that, while there are certainly very lovely, impactful illustrations courtesy of Karl Johnsson, this is very much a middle-grade chapter book. That’s not a bad thing at all, just a surprise, and in hindsight a welcome foray by Papercutz into the wider book market.

The Eye Of The Storm further plunges readers straight into an alien environment, as names and descriptions are thrown about with little explanation of who these people are and, more mystifyingly, whom they’re arguing about. We cut over to two young Swedish siblings, Alice and Elias, getting into school shenanigans before heading home where the real trouble lies. Their parents have a volatile relationship and their mom, Tien, hasn’t come home after a very loud and public argument with their dad Adam. She’d headed off into the nearby Lunsen Forest with Adam in hot pursuit. He hadn’t been able to find any trace of her, however, and when she hadn’t returned the next morning, he called the police.

Unfortunately, the police seem to be under the impression that Adam harmed Tien. Unwilling to be processed into State care while the cops interrogate their dad, Alice and Elias take off into the forest themselves. They find some of the equipment they knew their mom, a university researcher, had brought into Lunsen. But they also find a lot more than they’d ever bargained for, as a strange figure leaps out of the shadows to attack!

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/01/16/children-of-the-phoenix-vol-1-the-eye-of-the-storm-by-oskar-kallner-karl-johnsson/

Jan 11 2024

The Woman In Me by Britney Spears

Y’all. Y’ALL. I was barely thirty pages into this book and I wanted to take up my sword and shield and fight to the death for Britney. And I know that autobiographies aren’t gospel: they’re always going to tell you only one point of view. But damn, y’all. Even if she was exaggerating (and I’ll explain shortly why I don’t think that’s the case,) her family fucked her over.

And honestly, as far as memoirs go, this book feels like it barely scratches the surface of how pop megastar Britney Spears came to be where she is today. She covers in broad strokes — with the help of a ghostwriter, and THAT’S TOTALLY FINE! She’s never claimed to be a prose author, and it’s great that she clearly knows when to rely on the expertise of others — her life growing up in Louisiana, her desire to be an entertainer, her creativity, her love life and the nightmare conservatorship that controlled her every move. While she pulls no punches in calling out her parents and Justin Timberlake for being dicks who capitalized off of her pain to enrich themselves, she’s far gentler with both her sister and the other men who were in her life, including Keven Federline, a trash fire she has every right to cuss out but doesn’t.

What makes her book so convincing is both the grace it’s clear she’s attempting to live with and extend to others, as well as the matter-of-fact tone throughout (and yes, you know Gallery’s legal team fact-checked this book to death and back.) Britney doesn’t care if she sounds stupid or wacky, and she’ll straight up confess when she’s being a bitch. But she also wants to know why she isn’t allowed to be a normal human being with emotions, who makes very normal human choices and, yes, even the occasional mistake. Sure, most reasonable people know that the attention that comes with all the money — especially when you’re an entertainer who needs the fame for your livelihood — can be a nightmare, but the amount of dissection and excoriation she received was next level, and truly appalling.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/01/11/the-woman-in-me-by-britney-spears/

Jan 10 2024

City Of Betrayal by Victoria Thompson

Hunh, this had better not be the last book in the Counterfeit Lady series, as seemed to be hinted at in the afterword. I understand how this seventh volume would be a thematically appropriate story to finish on, but it absolutely lacked the larger part of why so many readers, myself included, have adored these adventures for years.

Some background: the Counterfeit Lady in question is Elizabeth Bates nee Miles, a one-time grifter who’s mostly been on the straight and narrow since marrying her beloved Gideon and settling into New York City’s upper upper middle class. The tale of how she met Gideon, however, is quite unconventional. While running for her life in Washington DC, she joined a group of women suffragists in order to evade detection, and wound up getting thrown in prison anyway for being “part” of the protest. During this ordeal, she met and struck up a friendship with Gideon’s mother, and soon found herself falling in love with upright, honest Gideon himself.

While she’s tried to distance herself from her criminal past, she’s found that there are circumstances where utilizing her uncommon skillset is necessary for protecting the vulnerable and ensuring that justice is served. Most of the books in the series have been about the cons she runs for exactly that purpose, often with the help of both the Bates and Miles families. This novel is a departure, tho shady dealings certainly abound as Elizabeth, Gideon and Mother Banks head down to Nashville to help lobby politicians to ratify the 19th Amendment, the law that will finally give American women the right to vote.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/01/10/city-of-betrayal-by-victoria-thompson/