The Frumious Consortium

"Begin at the beginning, go on to the end, and then stop."

[thefrumiousconsortium]

The Russian Cage (Gunnie Rose #3) by Charlaine Harris

The Russian Cage (Gunnie Rose #3) by Charlaine Harris (@realCharlaine) reviewed by @dvaleris who really wants to read more books about this kickass heroine and her fascinating alternate history universe.

Hurray, Lizbeth Rose is finally on her way west! Unfortunately, she’s going after receiving news that her one-time partner Eli — or Prince Ilya Savarov to the rest of the denizens of the Holy Russian Empire — has been thrown into jail for reasons unknown. The news has been conveyed to her via a coded letter from her younger half-sister Felicia, who’s being trained as a wizard in exchange for…

View On WordPress

[thefrumiousconsortium]

The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gessen

The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gessen is a stark portrait of the Poisoner of Underpants and Autocrat of Some of the Russia, writes Doug (@bagatsen).

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Poisoner of Underpants, Autocrat of Some of the Russias, in Gessen’s reckoning probably the son of a secret policeman, was born in Leningrad in 1952. Like any proper villain — but also like anyone born in that place in that year — he has a tragic backstory. Hitler’s army completed its encirclement of Leningrad on September 8, 1941, and the siege continued for 872…

View On WordPress

[thefrumiousconsortium]

A Longer Fall (Gunnie Rose #2) by Charlaine Harris

A Longer Fall (Gunnie Rose #2) by Charlaine Harris (@realCharlaine) reviewed by @dvaleris who loved how this second book in the series was even more of a page-turner than the first!

The hallmark of a successful second novel in a series, I feel, is that you turn the pages even faster than you did the first one. While I very much enjoyed An Easy Death, the series debut, it did feel like a lot of time was spent introducing the alternate history 1930s milieu. With the follow up, A Longer Fall, we jump into the action faster for a thrill ride that is unafraid to critique both…

View On WordPress

[thefrumiousconsortium]

X-Venture Xplorers #2: Clash of the Titans by Slaium, Meng & The Black Ink Team

X-Venture Xplorers #2: Clash of the Titans by Slaium, Meng & The Black Ink Team (@gempak_starz) reviewed by @dvaleris who continues to enjoy this light-hearted, educational look at animal conservation.

Another lighthearted, if educational, look at animals and world conservation, told through the eyes of six children and their two adult mentors, the easily riled and super buff Dr Darwin and his long-suffering assistant Mr Smith. This volume opens with Taizen, the Sumatran kid who grew up in the wild, being dropped off to spend time with his family. Little do his teammates on the X-Venture…

View On WordPress

[thefrumiousconsortium]

Amelia Unabridged by Ashley Schumacher

Amelia Unabridged by Ashley Schumacher, reviewed by @dvaleris who was disappointed by the execution of this YA romance's (refrigerator) cool premise.

Honestly, this reads like J. D. Salinger fanfic. But, y’know, I didn’t think I’d like Joanna Rakoff’s My Salinger Year either, especially with its dreadful prologue, and I’ve since taken to evangelizing that excellent memoir and hoping the upcoming movie does it justice. Ashley Schumacher’s Amelia Unabridged shares a tendency towards gorgeous writing with Ms Rakoff’s book, particularly in the…

View On WordPress

[thefrumiousconsortium]

The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien, with a note or two from Doug (@bagatsen).

Yes, Boromir failed. But he was far from alone. Denethor failed in sending a war leader on a mission meant for a diplomat. Aragorn and Gandalf failed to give him his due, and after that they failed to recognize that they were freezing out their proud companion. Despite their supposed wisdom, they did not see that being right is not enough. Yet the last words that Boromir hears are words of…

View On WordPress

[thefrumiousconsortium]

An Easy Death (Gunnie Rose #1) by Charlaine Harris

An Easy Death (Gunnie Rose #1) by Charlaine Harris (@RealCharlaine) reviewed by @dvaleris who loved this alternate history take on the Weird West.

I always vastly underestimate the amount of reading I need to do for work, but I did bet on the fact that I’d be able to catch up easily on Books 1 and 2 of the Gunnie Rose series ahead of the impending release of Book 3, due solely to the fact that Charlaine Harris is a consistently entertaining writer. And y’know, for someone most famed for her contemporary paranormal and mystery novels, her…

View On WordPress

[thefrumiousconsortium]

The Future Is Yours by Dan Frey

The Future Is Yours by Dan Frey, reviewed by @dvaleris who loved the middle 70% but has questions about the first and last 15% of this otherwise wildly entertaining sci-fi novel.

The reading experience of this was really interesting to me: I spent maybe the first and last fifteen percent of the book deeply skeptical but was absolutely immersed in everything in between. The premise is simple, for a science fiction novel. Two best friends from college found a Silicon Valley startup after one of them develops a machine that allows people to look for information up to a year…

View On WordPress

[thefrumiousconsortium]

Feathered & Fabulous: Wit And Wisdom From Glamorous Birds by Alison Throckmorton

Feathered & Fabulous: Wit And Wisdom From Glamorous Birds by Alison Throckmorton (@AlisonArethusa) reviewed by @dvaleris who thoroughly enjoyed the frivolity of this delightful little volume.

When I was first pitched this book for review, I was sent a pdf copy. Suspecting that I needed to hold this book to get a better idea of its worth, I requested a physical copy, and oh dear reader, it is absolutely the difference between seeing a picture of a bird and being gifted one! For this is definitely a gift book, a beautifully produced confection of glossy, imperious bird portraits paired…

View On WordPress

[thefrumiousconsortium]

The Iron Raven (The Iron Fey: Evenfall #1) by Julie Kagawa

The Iron Raven (The Iron Fey: Evenfall #1) by Julie Kagawa (@jkagawa) reviewed by @dvaleris who was not prepared to enjoy this fun fantasy romp as much as she did!

I’ve never read the original Iron Fey series Julie Kagawa is famed for, and as far as I can tell given my tastes, that’s actually for the best. The original books are a YA fantasy romance revolving around Meghan Chase, a human teenager who discovers that she’s the daughter of the Summer King of the Faery. Given that those novels were written a little over a decade ago, it should come as no…

View On WordPress

[thefrumiousconsortium]

Drive Your Plows Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

Drive Your Plows Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk might be her most pedestrian work, writes Doug (@bagatsen), who wants to try some others instead.

Nobel laureate, Polish literature, what’s not to like? It turns out that for me the more relevant question was what’s to like? Tokarczuk’s first-person narrator and protagonist, Janina Duszejko lives alone in a small group of houses on a plateau in southern Poland, hard up against the border with the Czech Republic. Most of the houses are only seasonally occupied, when people from Poland’s larger…

View On WordPress

[thefrumiousconsortium]

Blind Spots: Why Students Fail And The Science That Can Save Them by Kimberly Nix Berens

Blind Spots: Why Students Fail And The Science That Can Save Them by Kimberly Nix Berens (@KimberlyBerens5) reviewed by @dvaleris whose eyes were definitely opened by this insightful, science-driven book.

As someone who grew up studying under the American, British and (the absurdly simplistic) Malaysian New Curriculum systems, as well as a mom to kids with special needs, I found this book endlessly fascinating in how it interrogates mainstream educational thought and offers solutions to the continuing problem of falling student standards. With primarily an American focus — understandably given…

View On WordPress

[thefrumiousconsortium]

Sisters by Daisy Johnson

Sisters by Daisy Johnson (@djdaisyjohnson) reviewed by @dvaleris who devoured this elegantly written, high concept horror novel.

This is one of those books that’s so propulsive that you want to devour it in one sitting, even as the harrowing nature of what you’re reading is telling you to maybe put it aside and take a nap, for the sake of your own mental health. Sisters follows September and July, two teenage girls separated by ten months in age, as their mother Sheela takes them away from their Oxford home after a school…

View On WordPress

[thefrumiousconsortium]

Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins written by Eric Kimmel

Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins written by Eric Kimmel and illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman is a wonderful and clever classic, writes Doug (@bagatsen).

Kid One first fell in love with this book as an elementary school student, a Protestant child living in an Orthodox country enjoying a very Jewish story. And what’s not to like? Hershel of Ostropol wanders into an unnamed Central European village on the first night of Hanukkah expecting celebration and hospitality. Instead, he finds that the place is tyrannized by goblins, who forbid most…

View On WordPress

[thefrumiousconsortium]

Real Men Knit by Kwana Jackson

Real Men Knit by Kwana Jackson (@kwanawrites) reviewed by @dvaleris who's thrilled to kick off Black History Month with what's hopefully the first in a contemporary romance series!

Happy Black History Month, everyone! I’m so excited to have just read a strong slate of contemporary novels featuring Black protagonists and casts living their best lives, whether it’s via superheroics, sleuthing or, in this latest case, shop-keeping while falling in love. Real Men Knit follows Jesse Strong, the youngest of four very different adoptive brothers. Mama Joy, the mother whose last…

View On WordPress

[thefrumiousconsortium]

Marvel's Black Panther: Sins of the King by Ira Madison III, Geoffrey Thorne, Tananarive Due, Mohale Mashigo & Steven Barnes

Marvel's Black Panther: Sins of the King by Ira Madison III, Geoffrey Thorne, Tananarive Due, Mohale Mashigo & Steven Barnes, reviewed by @dvaleris who thought this entertaining @serialboxpub production definitely worked better as audiobook than ebook.

I feel like a dope for admitting how confusing I find the marketing/formatting of this product. It’s an audiobook, but I read it, and you can only get text samples from the website at the time of writing? Oh, wait, depending on what link you use, you can access both the text as well as audio narration by Chidi, I mean, William Jackson Harper (but honestly, I can see Chidi standing at a…

View On WordPress

[thefrumiousconsortium]

The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

Doug (@bagatsen) doubts that he has added anything new to writing about The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien but did it anyway.

Well this time around — the first in at least eight years — I read the Tom Bombadil chapter, and I’m glad I did. I had gotten in the habit of skipping it, so it had lodged in my mind as both much longer — turns out the chapter is only 15 pages — and far duller than it is. (Though I still skip or at most skim the poetry and songs in LotR.) Tom’s important, though, both narratively and mythically.…

View On WordPress