Jun 07 2023

The Ultimate RPG Tarot Deck by Jef Aldrich & Jon Taylor

Well, hello there, intersection of two of my favorite gaming interests! I mean, how much do I love the intersection of roleplaying games and Tarot? I wrote an entire book incorporating Tarot cards and interpretation into an original RPG!

So I was really pleased when this came across my reviewing desk. Not only did I want to take a look at this deck as a divination tool, I wanted to see how it would inspire a session of my own game Equinox, substituting the prompts in the included 140+ page guidebook for the ones I’d originally created. The first step, ofc, was to take a look-see at the cards themselves. I brought them to my regular D&D group’s very last Odyssey Of The Dragonlords session — it’s the first D&D campaign I’ve ever finished in its entirety! — and we all oohed and aahed over the product. The box itself is fairly simple, and the cards are a little longer than the average Tarot card, which makes them feel a little weird on first shuffle. The cards are also a bit hard, but regular use will soon soften them up.

The art on the cards is done by Zachary Bacus, with colors by Angueria “Hank” Jones. The Rider-Waite influence is strong, but for the most part the artistic team does a great job of adding (arguably more) fantasy details into each image, encouraging adventure hooks and storytelling. The guide book expands on this further, adding very Dungeons & Dragons-influenced details to each card description. I did appreciate that while D&D was clearly the touchstone for this project, the deck is freely adaptable to any fantasy setting. Some of the choices are a little odder than others — honestly, who uses a Warlord outside of the much-maligned 4E? I had a Tiefling Warlord who was impossible to play (I soon switched over with relief to a Dwarf Avenger) so seeing the class referenced twice here is a bit jarring — but overall you get the archetypes the authors are going for, even if some of them do skew a little more masculine than anticipated. Like, I get why the archetype associated with The Emperor is the Game Master, but having the image on the card look an awful lot like Gary Gygax reinforces the idea that only dudes GM, which is definitely not the case, IME as both player and (female) GM. Sure it’s a nod to the game’s history, and in the larger scheme of things this is a very minor quibble. It’s just hard enough to get people who aren’t cishet white guys into the game, much less running games themselves, without reinforcing a power structure that puts said white guys on the pinnacle.

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Jun 06 2023

The Good Asian — Deluxe Edition Vol. 1: 1936 by Pornsak Pichetshote & Alexandre Tefengki

with colors by Lee Loughridge and letters by Jeff Powell.

Most forewords don’t do a whole lot to adequately contextualize the books they’re introducing, but David Choe absolutely hits it out of the park with his no-holds-barred examination of what it meant to be a Good Asian in the West in the 20th century. In short: when you have nothing, you keep your head down, work hard and accept whatever abuse you must take until you’re rich and powerful and can fuck up all those people who tried to hold you down. The opening scene of worldwide phenomenon Crazy Rich Asians tells you the exact same thing, but plunges forward into a beautiful present day where that wealth and power has been achieved, for some of the protagonists at least. This graphic novel, on the other hand, is squarely situated in an era where equality, never mind anything more, was still a distant dream.

Peppered with the historical anecdotes that inspired the series, this stylish noir comic follows the travails of the fictional Edison Hark, perhaps the only Chinese police detective in America as the story opens. In San Diego as a favor to the rich white family who brought him up after the death of his mother, Edison is on the trail of a missing maid whom the Carroway family patriarch has tender feelings for. Ivy Chen abruptly disappeared after going to meet her mother one evening, and Edison has been flown in from Hawai’i to help find her. Unfortunately for Mason Carroway, Edison’s investigations are revealing an Ivy who seems far from the innocent maidservant the older man knew and adored. As Edison delves deeper into Chinatown’s seedier side, aided by his appearance as a local instead of an “American” (and boy did that hurt to read every time this historically accurate if no less racist assumption that “American = a certain kind of white person” was brought up in the text,) he discovers that little is as it seems, and that the Carroways are even more deeply involved in what happened to Ivy than he’d ever thought possible.

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Jun 04 2023

The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes

It’s not difficult to guess Orlando Figes’ brief for The Story of Russia: write a history of Russia, accessible to the interested and educated public, acceptable to specialists; keep it under 300 pages; emphasize links between Russia’s deeper past and the government of Vladimir Putin. There is value in the book’s relative brevity, though I wonder how well someone completely new to Russian history would be able to follow the parade of names and places through the centuries, even with the aid of several well-executed maps. Maybe the intended audience is people with a passing familiarity with European and Russian history, but who would like to deepen that knowledge. Figes obliges with what feels to me like a relatively standard division of Russian history into periods: origins, Mongol conquest, the rise of Muscovy through the death of Ivan the Terrible, reforms under Peter the Great, war with Napoleon, imperial crises in the nineteenth century, revolutions and the end of the empire, and Soviet futurism versus Old Russia.

The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes

He closes with two chapters that I found odd. “Motherland” begins at the end of the Great Terror, takes in World War II, and runs all the way through the end of the Soviet Union, including the Khrushchev thaw, Brezhnev stagnation, and Gorbachev’s reforms. That’s a lot of contradictions to cover in 34 pages, and the title fits less and less as the years go on. Because so much of this period is still within living memory — indeed, within Figes’ own adult lifetime — and because so much of today’s Russia is shaped in reaction to the choices of these eras, they deserve longer consideration, even if that means the book would run to 320 pages or so.

The final chapter, “Ends,” covers the thirty-plus years since the end of the Soviet Union, and I found it even odder. Figes asks, “How does the story of Russia end?” (p. 268) Well, it doesn’t. Vanishingly few important European powers have stories that end; Prussia is the only one I can think of. The European empires that were tsarist Russia’s peers are gone, but their legacies live on, from splinters of Austria-Hungary throughout Central Europe to the ongoing wars of Ottoman succession in the Middle East. Fortunately, Figes follows with more sensible questions about how far Russia’s past will shape its future (or more accurately, which parts of Russia’s past will shape its future) and why, in his view, Russia returned to autocracy in the twenty-first century. Less fortunately, Figes completed the book in the early months of Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine. He felt compelled to offer some views, and while they are not as bad as his 2014 assessment that “Russia is no longer an aggressive state. Russia does not start foreign wars.” they are also not very good.

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Jun 03 2023

Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

Well, I was charmed.

What do D&D adventurers do when they’ve decided that they’ve quested their last quest and crawled their last dungeon? In the case of Viv, the orc barbarian who’s ready to hang up her greatsword Blackblood, her heart’s desire is to bring to the city of Thune the wonders of a fabled drink she encountered among gnomes in a faraway city: coffee. “I told you I came across it in Azimuth, and I remember following the smell to the shop. They called it a café. People just sat around drinking it from these little ceramic cups, and I had to try it, and … it was like drinking the feeling of being peaceful. Being peaceful in your mind. Well, not if you have too much, then it’s something else.” (p. 33)

Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree

Before the beginning of Legends & Lattes, Viv has researched what’s needed to open one of these cafés in a city that has none, that has never in fact heard of coffee. Or at least she thinks she has. She even sets up her party’s last adventure to secure a magic item that she believes will bring good fortune to her new venture. That acquisition is dispatched in the introduction, along with the item’s previous owner. She forgoes any other loot from the expedition, leaving her fellow adventurers somewhere between bemused and suspicious, depending on their character. But she soon forgets that detail in her relief at retiring from the melees and in her excitement at her new tasks.

Other details are more in her line. She has a keen eye for talent, scoping out a potential carpenter for the repairs to the building that will house her café by going down to the waterfront and watching who’s handy with tools and economical with the motions of his work. That turns out to be Calamity — “call me Cal” — who’s half her height and a hob, definitely not a hobbit. He’s taciturn but friendly, knows his business and knows the city. He’s the first of a new kind of party she assembles, one dedicated to building rather than looting.

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Jun 01 2023

Kids Ask About: Bears by Christopher Nicholas

with terrific wildlife illustrations by Pedro Julio Gonzalez.

If your kid ever goes through a hyperfixation stage on bears, then this is absolutely the book to get them. Chock-full of fun facts and interesting data, this slender volume is the perfect gift for any kid who wants to know more about the omnivorous mammal. Presented in an easy to read question-and-answer format, this nonfiction tome will enrapture any reader who loves the natural world, and might very well beguile readers who have yet to discover its joys.

Christopher Nicholas’ writing covers each of the major species of bears, briefly describing why they’re called what they are. I hadn’t even realized why grizzly, sun and moon bears had those names! The book even tells you what species aren’t bears, so pandas: yes, red pandas and koalas: no. Kids Ask About Bears gives an overview of where each bear lives, what differentiates them from one another, and just what’s so special about each kind. It’s a very thorough survey given the relatively scant number of pages.

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May 31 2023

Witch And Famous by Angela M. Sanders

I do so love how this mystery series goes from strength to strength, as our librarian heroine Josie Way learns how to control her witchy powers while helping out the citizens of the small town of Wilfred, Oregon. Bibliomancy isn’t just about recommending the right books to the right people at the right time, but it certainly is a large part of the duties that she gladly embraces as a truth-telling witch.

Her library is actually in a bit of a tizzy as Witch And Famous opens. The owner of the local watering hole has taken off for a tour of the South, leaving Wilfredians with few options for congregating. As Patty, owner of the This-N-That store, has decided to specialize in home appliances this season, she’s happy to host the occasional cookout on her store lawn, where her enterprising grandchildren Thor and Buffy squeeze as many dollars and cents from the adults stopping by as possible. But the hot weather also spurs the townsfolk to spend time in Josie’s library, which was converted from a manor house after a generous bequest. Josie doesn’t mind lively conversation and light refreshments during open hours, but draws the line at gambling tables and hard alcohol in the library’s kitchen fridge, no matter how many attempts at both are made in contravention of her rules.

Things get even more calamitous when a movie star and her entourage roll into town. Hollywood actress Daphne Morris has selected a romance novel pseudonymously written by Roz, Josie’s assistant librarian, as her next book club pick, a selection that is sure to boost Roz’s sales. Daphne is even more gorgeous in person than on-screen, and soon has Wilfred’s men swooning at her feet. To Roz’s chagrin, this includes her taciturn boyfriend Lyndon. Even Sam, the local sheriff — as well as Josie’s neighbor and long-time crush — seems to have had his head turned by the superstar’s arrival.

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May 30 2023

Ava’s Demon, Book One: Reborn by Michelle Fus

The hallmark of a great graphic novel is that even in the wordless panels, you can still hear precisely what’s going on. There’s a big, climactic battle scene near the end of this book that’s entirely devoid of the written word, yet I could hear every single thing that was happening and to loud, orchestral effect. It was an absolutely stunning cap to an absolutely brilliant graphic novel.

In fact, the art throughout this first volume of Ava’s Demon is so freaking good! Michelle Fus Can Do Hands, y’all. It’s actually really odd that the cover looks so juvenile/rudimentary in comparison. The art inside is way more sophisticated than the weirdly flat cover images.

In addition to Ms Fus’ amazing art, I also love how she pokes fun at her own style with her joke about the bad drawings inside Wrathia’s journal. Objectively, they’re gorgeous drawings, but the meanings are 100% too opaque for Ava, so in that sense they definitely fail. It’s a wonderful little commentary on art and audiences that I greatly admired.

Anyway, this story is about Ava, a seemingly young girl who’s been plagued by a demon for the last fifteen years of her life. Her demon is an asshole who’s made her very existence miserable, constantly urging her (successfully) to say awful things and (less successfully) to kill herself. Just as the demon is about to get her kicked out of her Titan-run school, a cataclysm occurs. Ava runs after a former friend, who’s being either rescued or kidnapped by a besotted stranger, and thus manages to escape the destruction of her planet.

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May 26 2023

I Have Something To Tell You―For Young Adults: A Memoir by Chasten Glezman Buttigieg

I’d never had any interest in reading the memoirs of a political spouse till after I picked up this book. It’s an adaptation of Chasten Glezman Buttigieg’s 2021 autobiography, originally written for adults, but with a message that’s so, so necessary for younger readers, too.

I mean, even for a grown person like myself who is older than both Mr Buttigieg and his more famous husband, this was a much needed look at how much better life has gotten for queer people in the United States in the last fifteen to twenty years alone. The author candidly discusses how he went from being a closeted, unhappy teen in a Traverse City, Michigan high school that had no out queer students, to returning as an adult to speak to their LGBTQ+ Club. Mr Buttigieg’s honest recounting of his own experiences and feelings underscores just how awful things used to be only a very short time ago.

But the memoir isn’t just a stark, if necessary reminder of how things were (and, obviously, what any person with an ounce of empathy and human feeling should seek to avoid going back to.) It’s also a great example of how much we can change things for the better in only a decade or so. While the book doesn’t go into the kind of activism necessary for such change, it does set a mostly good example in being true to yourself and following your dreams, as young Chasten figures out who he is and what he truly wants to do with his life. It’s a tough road and he inevitably stumbles along the way, but he navigates it with heart and a hell of a lot more forgiveness than I’m personally capable of.

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May 24 2023

Tell-Tale Bones by Carolyn Haines (EXCERPT)

Read an excerpt from the newest book in Carolyn Haines’ sassy Sarah Booth Delaney Mystery series! Tell-Tale Bones is the latest spooky installment, involving cold cases and a reputedly haunted grave. We were graciously given permission to let you take a look inside this 26th book in the series, with a passage from Chapter 2!

From Tell-Tale Bones by Carolyn Haines. Copyright © 2023 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

2

Since Zinnia didn’t have a bookstore, my first stop was the library. I was tempted to call Tinkie to meet me there with Maylin, but I resisted the impulse. I’d tell her all about it later. It didn’t take me twenty minutes to find an anthology of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories and to open it to “The Tell-Tale Heart.” I’d remembered the visceral power of reading the story in high school and the chilling effect of the beating heart. The guilt—or insanity—of the narrator. How the heart, buried beneath the floorboards, made them tremble.

It was as though Tammy had shared the dream of a murderer with a long-dead writer.

Tammy was incapable of any unkindness, especially murder. But if my hunch was correct, then she’d dreamt a portion of Poe’s chilling short story. But why? Of all the people I knew, Tammy had no reason to carry guilt, and she certainly was sane. Why was she dreaming of the beating heart of a murder victim?

And why had she chosen to tell me about it?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/05/24/tell-tale-bones-by-carolyn-haines-excerpt/

May 23 2023

Peculiar Woods: The Ancient Underwater City by Andrés J. Colmenares

Oh gosh, I immediately fell in love with the beautiful colors of this whimsical comic book even before I began to enjoy the fun story it tells. The art feels very cartoony in a modern way — I wish I was more cognizant of current trends in animation so I could explain it better, but the art here feels very on trend with today’s pop culture.

The story itself follows young Iggie as he moves away from the parents who raised him to live with the woman who gave him to them to raise. Jill is his birth mother but was unable to care for him after his birth, asking instead that her sister and brother-in-law take over until she was ready to do so herself. That time has come, and Iggie, understandably, doesn’t know how to feel. It’s not just that he has to learn to live with this woman he’s always privately thought of as Aunt Jill. He also has to navigate life in a new town and school where he has no friends.

A misadventure on his very first night has him running into weird objects that should be inanimate but disconcertingly come to life and talk to him. An acquaintance he makes at school the next day informs him that their town, Peculiar Woods, is known for its poltergeists. Is that what he keeps encountering as he tries to figure out his new home?

Befriending a baby blanket and a curmudgeonly chair soon prove wise, as he’s drawn into a royal adventure that has him exploring a part of town he’s been even more expressly forbidden from than anything else so far (Jill is not the most experienced parent, and doesn’t do the best job of weighing her words when trying to tell him what he can and can’t do.) Will Iggie’s investigations uncover more about this strange place he’s found himself in? Will they also put him in the crosshairs of a sinister force with a grudge against people like himself?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/05/23/peculiar-woods-the-ancient-underwater-city-by-andres-j-colmenares/