Dec 04 2021
Because I had enjoyed Sumi so much as a character in Come Tumbling Down, I picked up Beneath the Sugar Sky, which I had somehow missed when it was a Hugo finalist in 2019, expecting to find more of her and of Confection, the Nonsense world where she found her proper home. That turned out …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/12/04/beneath-the-sugar-sky-by-seanan-mcguire/
Dec 02 2021
I honestly think it does a great disservice to this book to consider/market it as YA. For starters, I very nearly bounced off it in the first few pages when a main character, who we’re clearly meant to feel sympathy for, brutally kills an unarmed man. Had I gone in thinking this was a regular …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/12/02/the-mermaid-the-witch-and-the-sea-by-maggie-tokuda-hall/
Nov 27 2021
Sarah Gailey gets to have all the fun of writing a Western while avoiding all the cultural baggage of writing one in the twenty-first century by moving the story into a dystopian future in which the United States has broken down enough that towns are isolated and most travel is by horse or by foot, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/27/upright-women-wanted-by-sarah-gailey-2/
Nov 26 2021
Though it contains tales of considerable violence, The Empress of Salt and Fortune remains in my mind as an almost restful story. It’s set at a secluded compound near Lake Scarlet, a nearly perfectly round lake formed by a falling star, and named for a glow that sometimes appears at sunset, starting faintly and then …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/26/the-empress-of-salt-and-fortune-by-nghi-vo/
Nov 25 2021
Many things have transpired at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children since I read the debut novella, Every Heart a Doorway, but I did not feel lost at all. My thanks to Seanan McGuire for making subsequent installments of her series inviting even to people who do not hang on its every word. The Home …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/25/come-tumbling-down-by-seanan-mcguire/
Nov 21 2021
Who hasn’t wondered whether all those twists on the path through Ikea might not lead somewhere else entirely? In Nino Cipri’s Finna, the Ikea stand-in LitenVärld (it means “little world” in Swedish) has a recurring problem with wormholes opening within its stores and leading to LitenVärld analogues in parallel universes. Not that management tells anyone, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/21/finna-by-nino-cipri/
Nov 17 2021
Like, I knew this was a portal fantasy of two exes navigating the multiverse that opens up in an IKEA-style store, but the blurb and the cover especially did not prepare me for the excellent hijinks that ensued! I’m also a bit ashamed to admit that I really want to go visit IKEA again after …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/17/finna-litenverse-1-by-nino-cipri/
Nov 16 2021
Meet Daisy Sparrow, a young peasant witch living in Elizabethan England. Together with her beloved Mum, she brews and sells potions and other assorted concoctions at market fairs. But she wants more from life than just helping people who probably didn’t need that much help to begin with, even if she’s painfully shy when it …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/16/the-queens-favorite-witch-book-1-the-wheel-of-fortune-by-benjamin-dickson-rachael-smith/
Nov 15 2021
Sarah Gailey has long been on my Want-To-Read list, so when I saw their latest novella nominated for a Hugo, I was super excited to finally have the opportunity. Plus, a story about female librarians braving the Wild West to bring books from settlement to settlement? Sign me up! Upright Women Wanted certainly delivers on …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/15/upright-women-wanted-by-sarah-gailey/
Nov 14 2021
I read Invisible Cities ages ago when I worked for a bookstore in Atlanta and was reading more consciously literary things. I picked it up again recently thanks to a Twitter thread. Jo Walton had been doing a series of 50 manipulated images of Venice. As she wrote, “In honour of Italo Calvino’s Le Citta …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/14/invisible-cities-by-italo-calvino/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire