Jul 01 2022

Garden Of Earthly Bodies by Sally Oliver

I must say, the American title is much better than the painfully generic The Weight Of Loss this novel was saddled with across the pond. Garden Of Earthly Bodies at least hints at the speculative fiction plot contained within these pages.

That plot is the story of Marianne, who is grieving the death of her beloved younger sister Marie. She lives with her boyfriend Richard in London, but feels a growing alienation from him as her depression and perverse refusal to listen to her doctors drives a wedge between them. When she wakes up one day to find a strange black hair growing out of her back, she doesn’t really want to see anyone about it, since she mostly ignores medical advice anyway. But when efforts to remove both the first and subsequent hairs that begin springing up along her spine lead to a temporary madness, even she realizes that this is something way beyond her capacity to deal with on her own.

Her GP recommends a residential retreat in Wales called Nede. Upon arrival, Marianne decides that she decidedly isn’t a fan of Nede’s wellness menus or sanatorium vibe, but will admit that the forest-bathing aspect of the place is soothing. Finding a face from the past feels like finding a lifeline, but as the retreat’s strange practices begin to get to her, Marianne starts looking for a way to escape this remote estate. Trouble is, the hairs on her back, now longer and more lush than they were before she arrived, seem to want her to stay…

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/07/01/garden-of-earthly-bodies-by-sally-oliver/

Jun 30 2022

Ralph Azham Vol 1: Black Are The Stars by Lewis Trondheim

with colors by Brigitte Findakly and translations from the original French by Kim Thompson and Joe Johnson.

I’m not sure what I expected when I cracked open this volume of anthropomorphic animals living in the countryside. From quite early on you see that our title character Ralph Azham is a bit of a loser, the town’s pariah and scapegoat after he was sent back from Astolia as a teen, his status as a Chosen One rescinded despite the manifestation of powers that turned his bill (he’s vaguely duck-like) and hair blue. Since then, he’s helped his Dad eke out a living and tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to stay out of trouble, an endeavour not helped by his smart mouth and slacker attitude.

But trouble is coming for their village in the form of Vom Syrus and his militant Horde. When plans to defend the village go awry, Ralph and another survivor, young Raoul, take off to find the Emissaries who will hopefully bring them back to Astolia and give them a second chance at being Chosen Ones who can help protect their kingdom. But not everything is as it seems among the Emissaries, and Ralph will soon discover that he’s leapt from the frying pan straight into the fire. Will he be able to rescue himself and perhaps countless others on his journey from being a maladjusted weirdo to becoming perhaps the only person who can save the kingdom from enemies without and within?

Despite the cartoony art style, this feudal adventure is not a kids’ book, and is indeed fascinating for telling a story without clear-cut good and evil. While Lewis Trondheim and I differ on one key point of what constitutes a ghost, I found the murky morality of the story altogether convincing. Ralph as a protagonist is both compelling and annoying, taking no responsibility for anything so that he can claim innocence in all things. This stems less from maliciousness than from a laziness and lack of maturity that is rooted, ultimately, in a refusal to conform. While this is not a bad thing per se, it is a deeply and understandably irritating thing to the people around him.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/30/ralph-azham-vol-1-black-are-the-stars-by-lewis-trondheim/

Jun 29 2022

Cosplay: A History by Andrew Liptak

Wow, what a comprehensive look this is at the past and present of cosplay!

I’ve always loved dressing up, ever since my parents bought me a gorgeous Snow White dress that I was forbidden to wear except on Special Occasions, so I maybe got to wear it twice before outgrowing it as a child (which absolutely underscores for me the fact that you shouldn’t save your pretty clothes for other people’s “occasions” but should wear them when you feel you want to.) But wearing fancy dress or even a costume is quite different from cosplaying in this day and age. The closest I got to it was me being entirely meta and cosplaying as my own original character Soshi Idaurin after she made her way onto a Legend Of The Five Rings card, my prize for winning a role-playing competition at Origins some time before. I had no say in the art on my card, but did my best to combine the outfit depicted there with my character’s later RP developments for the costume I eventually wore to GenCon a few years later. People stopped me for photos and I had a lovely time, tho cosplay was 100% incidental to why I was there. And in fairness, my outfit was more for the purposes of LARPing than anything else, tho I imagine in my case that there was a pretty thin line between the two to begin with.

Anyhoo, this is all to say that I’ve never super felt interested in dressing up as someone else’s character but I can absolutely understand the impulse to get dressed in costume when it is, perhaps, less than socially acceptable to do so. Fortunately, it is getting more and more socially acceptable with the rise of geek culture, as Andrew Liptak masterfully illustrates in this very thorough look at the hobby. From the first European masquerade balls where Jules Verne encouraged attendees to dress as characters from his novels, to the first science-fiction fan conventions in mid 1900s America, to the very coining of the term “cosplay” by a Japanese writer seeking to translate the American scene for manga- and anime-loving readers back home, Mr Liptak vividly describes the birth of cosplay and its struggles towards mainstream acceptance along the way.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/29/cosplay-a-history-by-andrew-liptak/

Jun 28 2022

The Casagrandes #3: Brand Stinkin’ New by The Loud House Creative Team

Another charming installment of the comic book series adapted from the Nickelodeon cartoon The Casagrandes. Volume 3: Brand Stinkin’ New has the added bonus of being entirely comprised of vignettes written especially for this book!

While that does mean fewer Loud family shenanigans from, particularly, Lincoln and Lori making cameo appearances here, this does give the Casagrandes and their friends in the city more time to shine. I greatly enjoyed how most of the stories here were loosely tied to the idea of something new. A particular favorite was the one where Ronnie Anne Casagrande and her upstairs neighbor and best friend Sidney Chang experimented with making fusion food, combining Mexican and Chinese delicacies for some truly scrumptious new dishes… and some perhaps a little less than appetizing. I also really enjoyed the denouement of the story where Carlota Casagrande was trying to persuade her overly sentimental mother Frida to participate in a closet purge, and how that birthed something wonderful and different.

Frida also provides a very relatable Mom punchline for the story “Blanket Statement”. I really like watching style-conscious Carl have more room to grow in these pages, too, as I felt like he got shorter shrift in previous books. And, as always, it’s wonderful to see CJ, who has Down’s Syndrome, star in his own stories. The representation in these books is always terrific and this volume was no different.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/28/the-casagrandes-3-brand-stinkin-new-by-the-loud-house-creative-team/

Jun 27 2022

Die, Vol. 3: The Great Game by Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans & Clayton Cowles

Tho I’m a ginormous fangirl of both this series and its creative team, I must say that I’m glad that this installment was passed over for the Hugo nomination (for purely temporal reasons) because things definitely start to fuzz out of cohesion here.

So! Our intrepid heroes were originally, literally sucked into the twenty-sided world of Die back when they were bored teenagers more or less interested in playing a fantasy role-playing game run by their friend Sol. When they managed to emerge, somewhat the worse for wear, they found that years had passed and that Sol hadn’t returned with them. Almost three decades later, having grown older and wiser and sadder, they get pulled back in again by the lure of rescuing Sol. Trouble is, in order to leave Die for the real world once more, they all have to agree to go. They don’t.

Ash and Izzy, the Dictator and Godbinder respectively, want to stay in order to fix what they’ve done and to make Die a better world for its people. GriefKnight Matt and Neo Angela want to get the hell home. Chuck the Fool doesn’t really care either way, while Sol — or what’s left of him — is Ash and Izzy’s prisoner. While Ash and Izzy struggle to retain control of the land of Angria, Angela, Chuck and Matt go questing for fae gold in an attempt to gain enough power to stealth into Angria and, um, well, they don’t really have a plan (in a realistic reflection of many, many role-playing games.) Mostly, they’re trying to figure out how Die and the Fallen managed to exist before and separately from the game Sol started and what the implications of this are for the future.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/27/die-vol-3-the-great-game-by-kieron-gillen-stephanie-hans-clayton-cowles/

Jun 24 2022

Clementine, Book One by Tillie Walden

It’s become vanishingly rare for there to be anything new to say about the zombie apocalypse. This book is no different, but will likely hit the sweet spot for fans of the subgenre, and especially for those who don’t think that there’s enough teenage angst already in the existing corpus.

In this expansion on Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead universe, Clementine is on her own again, using crutches to compensate for the makeshift prosthetic she’s been using since losing her lower left leg. It’s after breaking this substitute leg that she reluctantly agrees to accept help from a nearby Amish settlement. The doctor there fits her up with a nice new prosthetic but she’s too wary to stay overnight, despite all the help they’ve freely given her.

While on the road north the next day, she crosses paths with Amos, an Amish teen who fought to be allowed to go on Rumspringa, the first of their community’s since the apocalypse shut everything down. He has a dream of traveling to a Vermont town to help rebuild a mountaintop hideaway, after which he’ll be rewarded with a real life plane ride. Clem is skeptical of all this, but eventually accepts a buggy ride and helps take turns driving and keeping walkers away. As the days pass, Clem starts to grow fond of Amos’ sunniness, not that she’d ever admit as much out loud. When they arrive in Vermont and find the mountain he’s been heading towards, she decides to stick around for a while just to make sure everything is legit.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/24/clementine-book-one-by-tillie-walden/

Jun 23 2022

The Last Session Vol. 1: Roll for Initiative by Jasmine Walls, Dozerdraws & Micah Myers

So on the one hand, I love any book with an inclusive portrayal of role-players and depictions of how out of game dynamics can affect in-game performance. On the other, yikes, these people need to play something that isn’t Dungeons & Dra– I mean, Dice & Deathtraps. I guess it’s unfair of me to stereotype ppl who play only D&D as being predisposed to the wildly immature behavior on display here but woof, maybe try something that encourages less grandstanding than cooperation and it’ll help with the attitudes? Disclaimer: I run and play and enjoy D&D on the regular but have found that ppl who don’t care to diversify aren’t the best adjusted, ijs.

Tho I guess that since these are all basically college kids who first got together in high school, I can’t really expect a display of full-fledged maturity. And in fairness, Shen and Cassandra are both quite level-headed. I just… well, I felt a little personally angered by Lana’s character because, in my experience, players like her don’t change for the better. They enjoy gatekeeping and it takes A LOT more than what happens in this book to get them to grow up.

Anyhoo, the story is that Jay has been running a Dice & Deathtraps game for their friends — Drew, Lana, Shen and Walter — since the days of getting together for their high school’s Gender Sexuality Alliance. Now that Jay’s girlfriend Cassandra has moved to the East Coast, they want to introduce her to the game by inserting her Dragonkin Bard into this original, long-running campaign. Lana, Shen and Walter are on the cusp of moving away, and Lana especially is dealing with the idea of change poorly, lashing out at Cass for not being “good enough” at gaming to meet her bizarre standards. Everyone else starts sidelining Cass too, until catastrophe strikes the party because the rest of them ignored her character’s warnings. Can they salvage the campaign and fix their friendships before ruining everything for good?

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/23/the-last-session-vol-1-roll-for-initiative-by-jasmine-walls-dozerdraws-micah-myers/

Jun 22 2022

Chloe #6: Green Thumb by Greg Tessier & Amandine

Combining two volumes of the original series, translated from the French, this volume follows middle-schooler Chloe Blin as she navigates two very of-the-moment issues: environmental friendliness and cyber-bullying.

The first half of this book sees Chloe and her friend Mark roped into helping start an eco-friendly vegetable garden at school by their far more enthusiastic best friend Fatouma. While Fatouma is totally gung ho about everything to do with setting up the garden, Chloe is more half-hearted, especially when she realizes exactly how much work it entails. It doesn’t help that her nemesis Anissa has also been recruited for the project, and seems alternately more intent on making catty comments about everyone else or positioning herself the star of the show. But as Chloe slowly gets more into gardening, she also gets super bossy in the way only self-righteous middle schoolers can be. When an attempt to shame Anissa backfires, her school principal cancels the project and declares the garden off-limits. Can Chloe and her friends figure out a way to get him to change his mind?

The second story involves Chloe turning cyber-detective to figure out who’s harassing her classmate Miriam. When a video of Miriam slipping down the steps goes viral, she quickly becomes the target of mean jokes in real life and awful comments on social media. Kind-hearted Chloe leaps to Miriam’s defense but soon finds herself in the crosshairs of the main troll, who goes by the name LOL. Efforts to solve the issue on her own cause her to become secretive and start doing poorly in school. Will Chloe be able to overcome her own paranoia in order to unite a group of unlikely allies for the purpose of taking down this vicious internet bully?

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/22/chloe-6-green-thumb-by-greg-tessier-amandine/

Jun 21 2022

Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire

Across the Green Grass Fields is the first of Seanan McGuire‘s Wayward Children series that I have read that’s entirely waywardness, and I liked it that way. There’s no mention of Eleanor West’s Home, nor do any of the characters from the previous five novellas in the series appear. I didn’t miss them at all, which I suppose means that I like my fantasy perfectly fine without a portal to tie it to this world.

McGuire’s main character, Regan Lewis, does need a portal. At seven, she sets great store in being normal, and she is a perfectly normal, happy child who likes reading, spinning until she gets dizzy, loves her parents and doesn’t even mind much that she doesn’t have any siblings. “But most of all, more than anything else in the world, more than even her parents (although thoughts like that made her feel so guilty the soles of her feet itched), Regan loved horses.” (p. 10) Fortunately, an unreasonable love of horses is an approved quirk because “strange was something to be feared and avoided above all else in the vicious political landscape of the playground, where the slightest sign of aberration or strangeness was enough to bring about instant ostracization.” (pp. 10–11)

Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire

That terrible fate is visited on one of Regan’s two best friends by the third in their charmed circle. One day Heather brings a small snake to school, and Laurel had been horrified. “‘What is that‘ Laurel had demanded, in the high, judgmental tone she normally reserved for bad smells and noisy boys.” (pp. 11–12) Heather’s joy at sharing something interesting with her friends turns into confrontation and an irreparable break as Laurel insists that girls don’t play with things like snakes. She pulls Regan away, and Regan doesn’t react quickly or strongly enough to mend the rip in the girls’ social fabric. In the months that follow, Regan sticks with Laurel. Even when Heather and her mother come to Regan’s house — and Regan’s own mother reminds her how cool she found holding a python at the fair — Regan chooses Laurel.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/21/across-the-green-grass-fields-by-seanan-mcguire/

Jun 20 2022

The Past Is Red by Catherynne M. Valente

This is one of those books that I can appreciate, even if I don’t like it. And there’s a lot to like here, so maybe it’s just a me thing. I just… I feel like Cat Valente has a lot to process in terms of abuse and marriage, and that her issues spill out way too messily on the page for me to pretend that her writing isn’t a far too personal peek into a private life that requires a lot more therapy. I totally understand using fiction as a coping mechanism, but I feel more trauma-dumped than entertained every subsequent time she writes about a victimized woman or a fucked-up marriage, both of which feature in this novella.

I originally read the first part of this book, The Future Is Blue, in the excellent John Joseph Adams anthology Wastelands 3. TFiB is a striking short story: a young woman growing up on a floating trash barge in a post-apocalyptic Earth does something so terrible that she’s subject to unthinkable punishment. The Past Is Red moves some years into the future to see what’s become of that young woman, whether her actions were validated and how she survives.

So, first, what I thought was good: the use of Garbagetown as a metaphor for Earth, and the gentle admonishment against leaving it for pie in the sky promises. The critique of consumerism is also pointed and valid, and leads to much of the book’s humor, just in wry observation of how very unnecessary and over-the-top much of corporate branding and marketing is. And I very much liked the idea of our heroine Tetley as a futuristic Candide, tho she’s arguably more Panglossian given that she never rejects optimism, no matter how terrible her circumstances.

The mediocre to bad: the critique of survival mechanisms, and an inability to differentiate between rationing and hoarding, particularly for the purposes of political power. It felt like a clumsy critique of private health care, a deserving subject which was conflated here with the very existence of pharmacies, which exist for a very good reason! I was also a little annoyed at the mini-rants against private ownership when Tetley’s few belongings were both clearly valuable to her and things she was unwilling to cede to others.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/20/the-past-is-red-by-catherynne-m-valente/