Mar 18 2026

Korobá: The Case of the Missing Kolo by Alaba Onajin

This clever and adorable children’s graphic novel series debut is an immersive delight from start to finish!

Koroba is a young girl who lives with her mom and two younger siblings in the fishing village of Makoko, Nigeria. Most of her school holidays are spent helping her mother catch, prepare and sell seafood, tho she’s not above occasionally teasing her younger brother Taju as well. Her dog Popi is her constant companion, whether she’s with family or with her best friends Saidat and Joba.

The annual Makoko Harvest Festival is just around the corner, and everyone is excited to celebrate. The kids, especially, are anticipating the traditional breaking of their kolo boxes. In the months leading up to the Harvest Festival, the kids save money in wooden piggy banks called kolo, that are often decorated in paint and colorful beads. A few days before the festival itself, the kids gather together to smash their kolos open so that they can use their savings to buy holiday-appropriate clothes and shoes, as well as treats if there’s any money left over.

Three days before Kolo Breaking Day, Koroba heads to Saidat’s house to return some money her mom borrowed from Saidat’s mom. As expected, the best friends’ chatter turns to talk of the upcoming festivities. Koroba is surprised that Saidat hasn’t bothered decorating her box, but their discussions are interrupted by Saidat’s grumpy cousin Risi, who hates that she’s been sent here from the big city. Saidat’s father Alhaji advises the girls to go spend time outdoors as Benson the carpenter is coming to fix some floorboards. Saidat thus accompanies Koroba first to visit Joba, then to help her sell spicy shrimp by boat. It’s just another long, fun and productive day in Makoko, if somewhat marred by the dispute between Alhaji and Benson that the girls witness as Koroba drops Saidat off in the evening.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/03/18/koroba-the-case-of-the-missing-kolo-by-alaba-onajin/

Mar 17 2026

Mob Justice by Chad Boudreaux (EXCERPT)

Hello, dear readers! Today we have an exciting new excerpt for you from thriller writer Chad Boudreaux’s latest novel, Mob Justice!

This explosive sequel to Scavenger Hunt finds our hero, Justice Department lawyer Blake Hudson, taking on a new enemy: the Chicago mafia. Heading from Washington DC to Chicago plunges him into a world far different from both his experiences outwitting terrorists and the depiction of mobsters he’s only ever encountered on the screen. Al Capone might still cast a long shadow, but organized crime has evolved into something more profitable and more dangerous than ever.

At the heart of the Chicago Outfit is the polished, cunning consigliere known as Enzo Renzi, who is Blake’s main target when the latter arrives in the Windy City. A meeting of several prominent Mafia families is in the offing, and Blake plans to have his boots on the ground to help build up a federal case to help take them down. But shadowy characters are gunning for both Enzo and Blake. Soon, Blake will have to put his life on the line once more to stop something far more sinister and pervasive than the usual mob violence.

Read on for a scene-setting excerpt! (with the caveat that I, too, am a fuddy-duddy who believes in leash laws, primarily for the safety of the animal):

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/03/17/mob-justice-by-chad-boudreaux-excerpt/

Mar 16 2026

Olivia Gray Will Not Fade Away by Ciera Burch

Oh gosh, I don’t even know how to write about this book, but I strongly suspect that it was just not For Me, as I struggled to empathize with the main character (not a problem I ordinarily have!)

And I get it, middle school friendships are hard and occasionally stupid and definitely prone to sudden splintering at that age. At thirteen, my friends and I had a weird falling out over, of all things, where we wanted to play rounders during recess. The pressure for conformity is perhaps most brutal — and most deeply felt — at that age. Relationships shift and fracture, sometimes for good.

Adding diverse sexualities to the mix can make kids feel even more alienated. In progressive circles, not being heterosexual is no longer something to be shunned, which is a great thing in and of itself. Unfortunately, this puts pressure on kids who just don’t care about that kind of thing to pretend that they do, since there’s no longer an “excuse” for being quiet about their crushes (tho in reality, there’s always an excuse, if your crush is taken or older or otherwise not socially acceptable.) Jerks will pressure kids who don’t have crushes to conform, while the more well-meaning will assure them that liking someone will happen eventually.

For sensitive asexual/aromantic kids who already feel overlooked and unseen, this can feel like erasure to the point of invisibility. And that’s pretty much what happens to our title character Olivia Gray. Her older brother was her best friend until he got a boyfriend and no longer has time for her. Her group of school friends all seem more interested in boys and social status (powered by the unlikely new app KruShh) than in whatever it was they used to talk about. And her favorite school adult, the now-former librarian, has retired without a word to her.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/03/16/olivia-gray-will-not-fade-away-by-ciera-burch/

Mar 13 2026

Tantalizing Tales — March 2026 — Part Two

Welcome to the second week of March, where my part of the world experienced all the temperate seasons over the course of two entire days. I’m used to being tired all the time (I do, as my friends constantly remind me, A Lot) but being sick on top of everything has really poleaxed me these last two cold months. Hopefully, this latest in a series of illnesses is the last, and I can enjoy my upcoming Aidil Fitri celebrations in the best of health.

And in the meantime, we have so many wonderful books to read! I just received Natalie Haynes’ No Friend To This House and I am Obsessed. Perhaps not quite as obsessed as our main character, the legendary Medea, is with vengeance, but certainly in the vicinity, as Ms Haynes explores and unpacks the myth of that monstrous mother in her latest exciting novel.

Much as with the original tales, the Medea of this book is a princess of Colchis and renowned healer. She agrees to help the hero Jason in his quest for the Golden Fleece that her father guards. In exchange for her aid, Jason promises to marry her and take her away with him once the Fleece is won. After a series of deadly adventures, they escape Colchis with the Fleece, and eventually settle in Corinth, married and in love.

Ten years and several children later, Jason announces that he has the chance to move up in the world by setting aside Medea and their children, and marrying Glauke, the princess of Corinth, instead. Unwilling to accept this fate, Medea plots to bring as much pain to Jason as he has to her. Death ensues.

I’m so excited to see what Ms Haynes will do with this material. She’s got a terrific reputation for reworking classical myths for modern audiences, and I can’t wait to read her interpretation of one of the most feminist and audacious legends of the Ancient Greeks.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/03/13/tantalizing-tales-march-2026-part-two/

Mar 12 2026

Hail Mariam by Huda Al-Marashi

Every time I think parts of my Malaysian Muslim upbringing were strict, I run up against really weird shit from other Muslim cultural denominations and I’m all “wow.” Which isn’t to run them down at all! And perhaps nowhere is this sort of reflection more appropriate than in a book about a twelve year-old Muslim girl enrolled in a Catholic school, who has no idea how to navigate what feels like the religious minefield in front of her.

Mariam is an overachiever whose physician parents don’t think that the local California public schools are challenging enough for her. They enroll her instead in a nearby Catholic school, and tell her that it’s important for her to be a good ambassador for both Muslims and Iraqis (no pressure, kiddo!) while she’s there.

Mariam takes these words to heart, but is constantly and understandably anxious about whether she’s committing sins by even looking at icons (considered idolatrous by the Muslim faith) and, later, by accepting the role of Mary in the school nativity play. It doesn’t help that the curriculum is, indeed, challenging and that she’s behind the other students in certain key areas.

When her beloved younger sister Salma falls ill, Mariam begins to think that maybe if she’s more religious, Allah will cure her sister. But playing Mary is the only way she knows how to get the recognition she craves from her schoolmates. What will Mariam do to satisfy these warring desires in her soul, of wanting to please God (and heal her sister) and wanting to please the voice inside her that cries out for attention?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/03/12/hail-mariam-by-huda-al-marashi/

Mar 11 2026

Forty The Fortune Teller by Drew Daywalt & Kevin Cornell

Oh, man, now I want to make a fortune teller (or a cootie catcher as some places rather bizarrely term them.)

Forty isn’t your usual paper fortune teller. Abandoned on the playground, she decides to get up and look around and see what’s up. That’s how she meets Chip, another recess cast-off who was dropped when the bell rang almost immediately after a kid took a bite out of his head. His plan now is to take the bus up to Canada where no kids will be able to finish off his delicious potato chip self.

But all talk of planning is interrupted by their discovery of a stray bolt that has somehow escaped the slide. While Forty and Chip certainly don’t want to get consumed by the kids, they don’t want those kids to come to harm either, so decide that they’d better put the bolt back in its place before doing anything else (and before the next recess bell sounds.) Their journey, however, is not without its obstacles, as Chip and Forty encounter all manner of hostiles as they trek across the playground. Will their grit and ingenuity help them complete their task and get away clean?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/03/11/forty-the-fortune-teller-by-drew-daywalt-kevin-cornell/

Mar 10 2026

Just Between Us by Adeline Kon

If you’re not ready for the magic of Milan-Cortina’s Olympics figure skating to be over yet a/o you’re looking for something to tide you over till your next Heated Rivalry fix, then do I have the wlw graphic novel for you!

Set in the world of competitive figure skating, this book revolves around Lydia Chen, the driven Asian American figure skater whose athleticism lies at the heart of her approach to the sport. Her technical perfection, coupled with her standoffish demeanor, have earned her the nickname The Ice Queen. For Lydia, figure skating isn’t about making friends or having fun. It’s about excelling, and thereby helping support her single mom and their small family of two.

When she first crosses paths with Malaysian figure skater Elaine Yee, she’s taken aback by how friendly the other girl is. While Elaine doesn’t have the jumps that Lydia does, her grace and performance skills showcase how much she loves skating, making her a top competitor in the field. Lydia doesn’t have time for friends — besides Helen, the daughter of her coach, who doesn’t skate and therefore isn’t a rival — so she’s relieved that her encounter with Elaine is brief. She’s even more vindicated when she beats Elaine at the first Grand Prix they skate in together.

Fast forward several years and Lydia is shocked to learn that Elaine is moving from the Canadian rink where she’s been training to join her own coach in Boston. She’s curious to see how her rival has been performing behind-the-scenes, but definitely doesn’t want to let her get too close. As sparks fly between them, however, both women will have to start reevaluating their relationships, not only with each other, but with the people they love and the sport that unites them.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/03/10/just-between-us-by-adeline-kon/

Mar 09 2026

Head Of Household by Oliver Munday

God bless short stories for how easily digestible they are, having stripped away so much extraneous matter to properly capture a mood and make a point, at least, tho not exclusively, in the literary genre.

Oliver Munday’s new collection of ten short stories exemplify this, almost to the point where I wanted more from several of the stories and felt that those works would have been better served as longer pieces. This is, tbc, different from feeling that the story could serve as the basis for a novel despite feeling complete in and of itself: fortunately there are far more of this latter than the former kind here. The opening story Fists, for example, is perfect as a tone piece about a father not knowing how to deal with the loss of his own youth, as he and his teenage daughter go on one of their annual vacations together. Would I love to read more about what happens next? Yes. Was it perfectly satisfactory on its own? Also yes.

Sterling, on the other hand, was one of those stories with too much build up and not enough denouement. Perhaps I am biased in this, however, as a committed Washington DC-lover who wanted to know exactly what happened at the end of the story. I was also far more inclined to feel kindly towards the older heroes (yes, all men) of these pieces. I had a lot more sympathy for the destructive — self or otherwise — urges of the parents who’d been through a lot and were still trying to cope as best they could. For example, Tom, the protagonist of Pizza Party, has to go through a mortifying destruction of the ego before he can find grace, as does the unnamed narrator of the collection’s closing story Dependents, tho in a very different way. Their struggles felt far more earned to me than the thrashing about of most of the younger protagonists showcased here.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/03/09/head-of-household-by-oliver-munday/

Mar 08 2026

Jakob von Gunten by Robert Walser

Well I suppose that Jakob von Gunten is a bildungsroman because it follows its young and eponymous first-person narrator through his later school years and ends with his departure from the Institut Benjamenta. On the other hand, its 144 pages raise some doubts about whether it qualifies as a Roman, although the Süddeutsche Zeitung published it in the newspaper’s second set of great novels of the 20th century. I’m also not sure how much Bildung goes on. While most of the novel takes place inside the Benjamenta, I think it shows even less of classes and lessons than The Confusions of Young Törless, and that was precious little. Jakob’s progress shows mainly in his interactions with the school’s namesake director. It is a peculiar book, which is fair, because Walser led a peculiar life.

Jakob von Gunten by Robert Walser

The novel is set more or less at the time of writing, which is to say 1909. Walser turned 31 that year. He had led a peripatetic life as a young man, leaving Biel, Switzerland where he grew up for Stuttgart, where he had a brother, and then later moving on to Zurich, where he worked irregularly in various office jobs. Following Zurich, he lived in Thun, Solothurn and Winterthur (all Swiss) and Munich; he did his mandatory military service, and then in 1905 he moved to Berlin, to which his brother had in the meantime moved. Walser had been publishing stories in various magazines, and in 1904 he published his first book, a collection of essays. This was a time when it was possible to make a living — sometimes modest, sometimes precarious, for a fortunate few quite tidy — writing for the numerous newspapers and periodicals in the big German-speaking cities. At its more esoteric end, this milieu shaded into the settings described in Herr Dame’s Notebooks; at its more carefree, the kinds of light adventures described in Castle Gripsholm by Kurt Tucholsky, who is counted as an admirer of Walser. In 1905 Walser attended a course to become a servant at an aristocratic castle. The years just after the turn of the 20th century were still a time when European nobility continued to openly wield power from castles large and small, and training such as Walser had could lead to an actual job. The school shared characteristics with the fictional Benjamenta, but Walser as a 27-year-old trainee would have been very different from teenaged Jakob von Gunten.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/03/08/jakob-von-gunten-by-robert-walser/

Mar 07 2026

Soviet Metro Stations by Christopher Herwig

with an introductory essay by Owen Hatherley

After two books on Soviet bus stops, an eccentric topic from a world that’s receding into history, photographer Christopher Herwig turned his attention to a slightly more expected topic: stations of various metro systems across the former Soviet Union. This book echoes its predecessors in size and style. It has the proportions of a postcard, but it is a bit bigger in both height and width, and it runs about 250 pages, most of which are given over to full-page or almost-full-page photographs.

Soviet Metro Stations by Christopher Herwig

One nice aspect of the book is how much space it devotes to the systems outside of Moscow. The Moscow Metro is amazing, both monumental and functional — I used to commute on it — an epic achievement now within sight of its centennial and still growing. It is the longest system anywhere in the world outside of China; at some stations, trains arrive every 90 seconds. Moscow could fill the book with plenty of material left over, but Herwig and his essayist Hatherley have wisely chosen to look more widely, to consider Metros and their meanings across the full territory of the former USSR. Hatherley’s essay begins with Moscow, the first Metro and the model for all the others, and then proceeds across the former USSR in the order that the systems were built. The second section is on St Petersburg and Kyiv, both in cities that had different names when their metros were started. The stages of the systems’ development reflect first the state of the Soviet system that built them and then later the moods and capabilities of the post-Soviet era. For example, the oldest stations on St Petersburg’s Line 1 continue the epic and peculiar grandeur of the early Moscow lines: palaces for the people with art depicting heroic labor and the inevitable triumph of the communist system. Stations that were designed during the Khrushchev or Brezhnev eras are more prosaic, reflecting the larger shift from monumental constructions to improved material conditions for a larger share of the population.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/03/07/soviet-metro-stations-by-christopher-herwig/