Becca

I feel a little unsure about Borderline. There's a pretty standard urban fantasy plot, centered around an unapologetically, no-holds-barred borderline personality disordered protagonist. And I felt towards it the way that years of being in the medical profession has drilled me to react to borderline personality disorder: man, it's kind of fascinating, but best observed at arm's length. The portrayal of borderline personality disorder is eerily accurate, but also extremely sympathetic. The book has received much accolades on its portrayal of BPD, and I think a lot of that is deserved: this is clearly the best portrayal of BPD in the literature, one of the few protagonists I know of with BPD and its take is quite nuanced. However, at some point, I also felt like Millie got too much of a narrative pass for her behavior and it was pretty clear to me from the writing that the author herself had BPD (indeed, she does.) The way that this is clearest to me is that there's a sense when you're around someone with BPD that their behavior and actions are amped up to a hundred to the point that no one around them has any space, and the book completely treats Millie that way – all of the other characters are flat and under detailed. Even the plot grinds to a halt to serve Millie's internal churning. Perhaps that's part of the realistic portrayal, but it's kind of off-putting as a reader. What redeems the book for me is Baker's portrayal of Millie's inner self, her suffering and her (meager) attempts at getting better.

Overall, I found this book a fascinating insider's view on borderline personality disorder, but kind of flawed as a novel.

The central theory is interesting: that politics has become a central identity point in America that predicts everything about us down to where we live. Since 2008, that has largely become conventional wisdom, so long lists of things that political identity predicts (including ones that feel obvious because they're political, like school choice and book bannings) feel a little obvious. The conclusion that polarization of physical places resulting in people never meeting those with differing political views, and that this increases polarization and extreme opinions is important, but no solutions are suggested.

But to a modern reader, the changes of the last 16 years since the book was published make a lot of the premises feel silly and shallow. “There will never be political violence in the US” is a claim that looks pretty stupid after 2021. 2016, 2020 and 2024 have a lot to say to the “hyperpolarization of the 2004 election”. Indeed, I started reading this book in 2016, and couldn't quite stomach it and the distance between my reality and where the book was, and have struggled every time I've picked it up for the last 8 years.

This book about the ways in which being over-driven, over-ambitious and over-scheduled is sucking the life out of teenagers may have been novel when it was published, but to my ear it has all been discussed to death already in many other fora. What set this book apart was the individual case studies that Robbins did of students at her Alma Mater, Walt Whitman. Although she refers to them as “Overachievers,” it was honestly my opinion that with a couple of exceptions, they were pretty average students, with a small handful of extracurriculars and GPAs in the high 3's. Nonetheless, I found myself drawn to them and their stories.

The researched portions felt pretty redundant and Robbins didn't have much novel to add in them. Also, I found her breathless scare tactics a little dated, given that it's my experience that now that the overachievers are old enough to have kids of our own, it's a huge status symbol to underschedule your kids, put them in play-based preschools or opt out of preschool entirely and not pressure them. Who knows if that'll stick as our kids get older, but certainly the horrors of Baby Einstein and Baby Galileo are remnants of a past era.

I also found that there were some parts that stuck out – that in the drive to make a point, Robbins just put in everything that sounded like it fit, whether or not it was a good idea. For instance, she complains about summer homework. Summer homework and summer curriculae are the best evidence-based interventions to bridge the gap between lower and upper class students that develops over summers. Similarly, she decries full-day kindergarten, which I see as a necessary invention in the women's liberation movement. I also wish she had talked more about the effects of burnout on long-term career success, which scored only a glancing mention at the end.

Still, I found it a kind of fun and easy to read what was essentially a rant about a topic on which I mostly share the same view.

I loved the setting and the concept of this book – the idea that the thousands of stories of children going to another world and then coming back either like no time had passed, or like years and years had passed in a day are all true. And then exploring what happens, psychologically to those kids. I always love it when a book takes a well-known trope and turns it on its head by asking the questions we all should have been, but took for granted. I also really like books that exist in a dialogue with other books and only really make sense to prolific readers.

Multiple people recommended this to me, and one of them talked mostly about how the main character actively sought to understand and develop empathy for people who were different from her. I don't appreciate that theme as much as she did, but I did like that there was a co-mingling of characters from a bunch of different genres and an exploration of how that works, and how it works if two people both went to The Underworld but it wasn't the same.

Where this fell down for me was the plot. The murder mystery just wasn't super compelling and I felt like the social contract of the book was broken twice, which really broke the metafictional spell for me. The first was when magic turned out to work all along in the real world, when the boy played his bone flute and then again when it turned out that Jack would be capable of resurrecting Jill, kind of making the whole murder mystery thing a little shallow.

Overall, though, I found this a beautiful and atmospheric novella.

“weird” seems to be the word to describe this book. When I was a kid, there was a restaurant that set up these miniature tableaus that you could view through an eye viewer. I'm super short, so I could only stand on my tiptoes and catch glimpses of the edges of the scene. That's how this novella made me feel: Mieville created an expansive world and showed us slivers of it. There was no clear setting, the thinnest characters and definitely no plot. But there was atmosphere in spades. There will be fragments and passages that stick with me for such a long time.

In your life, you write three books. This is the one for a reader because some things can't NOT be written. But you can still have secrets.

This is the book that reminded me that reading is in and of itself a skill. This was challenging to follow and catch snippets, but so rewarding to read.

My original note said “Connie Willis wrote a new novel! It's about telepathy and our overcommunicated world! “ It's also about helicopter mothers, social media, Joan of Arc, sugared cereals, Bridey Murphy, online dating, zombie movies, Victorian novels, and those annoying songs you get stuck in your head and can't get rid of!” I want it RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” So, let's be clear: I think it was literally impossible for any book to match how high my expectations got.

And it is a good book: Connie Willis at her Connie Willis-est: using some soft sci-fi, comedy of manners and a heavy dose of rom-com to develop a pointed parable on Issues of Our Time (in this case, cellphones and over-connectivity.) And it's fun, but perhaps because I've read basically everything she's ever written, it felt like re-reading a Willis novel, rather than its own brand new thing. I knew the beats, I could predict what would happen at each turn. And it was warm and cozy and fun, but not new.

Also, the genetics were crap. That's not what recessive means and the telepathic pedigrees definitely weren't compatible with an AR gene. Next time, go for autosomal dominant with incomplete penetrance – great for most hand-wavy situations. Even better, Connie, next time you want to write a novel on the genetics of telepathy? Call me! I still love you!

Let's recap briefly: [a:Rainbow Rowell 4208569 Rainbow Rowell https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1342324527p2/4208569.jpg] wrote a book ([b:Fangirl 16068905 Fangirl Rainbow Rowell https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1355886270s/16068905.jpg 21861351]) about what it was like to be a Big Name Fan and in order to capture this experience she made up a fictional Harry Potter series, which the protagonist of Fangirl wrote a fanfic about. Then, Rainbow Rowell decided to actually write this fictional Harry Potter series, which is Carry On. Meta'ed out yet?But, honestly, this kind of makes sense, because the Simon Snow snippets were the best part of Fangirl. Rowell is nothing if not wicked clever, and it shines the most in the way that she used the fact that everyone knows and understands Harry Potter to include huge swathes of background in a couple of paragraphs, which gave her inversions and subtle changes context. One of the coolest feats of literatures someone's pulled off in awhile, but I was worried that it was not particularly sustainable in a stand-alone novel.Good news, bad news? The way in which Harry Potter provides a context and background to Carry On is probably the strongest part. The whole book exists in a dialogue with Harry Potter and the two most interesting themes of the novel grow from here:1. Doesn't it kind of suck to be a mage in a magical/muggle world? The way HP is set up, you can only be a wizard if you're a wizard (you don't get the basic education required to be anything else.) What if you want to be a doctor or a mathematician or a chef in a big restaurant? Suck to be you: wizarding world or bust. But in the HP world, no one discusses this. Rowell actually explores this concept and how much magic destines people.2. If you're a mage in a magical/muggle hybrid world, and you get to go to magic school, the rest of life is a downhill slog of hiding and never being around your people. Another thing Rowell does great is evoking the culture and community of teenagers and it's really on show here: the sadness of graduation is clear in a way that Rowlings did not succeed at.3. I love the loyal opposition. That you can be boyhood enemies and play kid games, but if there's going to be a war and its going to be real, how does that change and mature your enmity. Because so much of childhood opposition is the loyal opposition: the person you depend on to antagonize you and play the foil.So, cool. This part is fun. Bad news: The book reads like Harry/Draco fanfiction. Not that I read fanfiction (only pro-singularity propoganda, [b:Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality 10016013 Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Eliezer Yudkowsky https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1293582551s/10016013.jpg 14911331].) But still. So still some good news, in that those of us who have spent the last 14 years and 7 books growing to love the Harry Potter characters will be invested off the bat. But on the downside, very little actually happens. Literally, the first 20% of the book is HarrySimon wandering around HogwartsWatford looking for Baz. The majority of the rest is Simon and Baz mooning at each other. Also, it reads to me like Cath actually wrote it, i.e. that it was written by an 18 year old girl: Is falling in love with your sworn enemy actually a thing that happens in real life? Just one minute you're fighting and the next you're swooning and then a second later you're “snogging”? OK...Also, I talk a lot. I think in words. I need to talk to process my thoughts. My friends get sick of hearing me think out loud. Both the thinking and the talking. I get told “most people don't think that much; they just do” a lot. In Rainbow Rowell's world, I am both basically selectively mute and impulsive. Her characters talk about everything always and at length (usually sounding like self-important teenagers in their word choice and punctuation.) I have never in real life met someone who articulates quite so many thoughts, and definitely not a 17 year old boy who does so. Finally, despite having read approximately 20 pages of Baz's thoughts on Simon's hair, I still have no idea why they actually like each other in anyway. (Besides the hair. It seems easier to have your boyfriend wear a wig than to date your sworn enemy because he has nice hair.)So, in conclusion, its a fun romp, with interesting commentary on the world of Harry Potter and school fantasy in general, and it's the only book you'll ever read that's a fictionalized version of a fanfic of a fictional novel, so there's that.

Despite my super mixed feelings on [b:Wonder 11387515 Wonder R.J. Palacio https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1309285027s/11387515.jpg 16319487], Auggie really stuck with me, so when I saw that these novellas were available from the library, I decided to get some closure on Auggie's story. The Julian Chapter immediately took me back to my strongly positive feelings about Wonder: the way in which RJ Palacio captures the nuance of bullies. Not of bullying, but of bullies as people. The way that a ten year old can seriously think “Aw, shucks, but I didn't mean anything by it” as a defense to even terrible actions, which seems unfathomable to most adults. I liked the way that fear informed a lot of Julian's actions, and I liked how his parents were well-intentioned but contributory.As the narrative of the books shifts away from Auggie and the events in Wonder, they lose a sense of having a center of gravity and become very light and fluffy: The Shingaling is a cute little story about Charlotte learning how to make friends across the social divides, which does really capture a tween girl social dynamic, but is more shallow. And then finally, Pluto is basically a plutoid: the shape is a little irregular with story parts sticking out – Christopher used to be Auggie's best friend and there are lumps of flashbacks that don't add much, to the small little nugget of story about Christopher's band friends.

Aw, this was cute. Yes, all of the characters had their moments of idiocy, which were painful to read about, but accurate to adolescence. I thought the handling of trans issues was done well. This would be a good introductory book to trans issues for a teen or parent of a teen, but didn't come off as overly didactic.

Dahlia Moss is billed as WOW meets Veronica Mars, and honestly, that's pretty apt, sans the hard exterior. I found the fast-paced mystery enjoyable. Wirestone is heavy on the allusions – I can imagine the book is almost illegible to people who aren't part of at least one fandom – but he draws from a pretty diverse pool, so it's not like you have to specifically play MMORPGs to find it enjoyable. Besides the general geekery, I found the mystery well-built, with some nice clues, some nice distractors and overall good pacing. The characters were all pretty shallowly depicted, but each was quirky and fun.

I thought where the story showed some depth was in exploring the ways in which Dahlia had separated herself off from a social life when life didn't turn out how she planned, and how she managed to find her way back to having friends and accepting herself how she was. I think it's a pretty universal story of the mid-20's and this is one of the most honest depictions I've seen.

It's imperfect: some of the allusions felt a little forced and the witty repartee felt a little on the nose, but overall, I found it a completely enjoyable, fast romp (I read nearly the entire thing over the course of a 90 minute flight) and I'll probably read the next books in the series.

The start is slow, but the middle and end come in a fast, stream-of-consciousness torrent. Appealing to the sense of airports of liminal places, Dear American Airlines is the story of what happens when you are forceably removed from the world for a while, and have nothing to do but think.

I can tell when a book is a true masterpiece because when people ask what I'm reading I feel compelled to provide not just a title but also sentences like: “Did you know that the very first dictionary wasn't until the 1750's?” and “Did you know that the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary predated words like ‘typewriter' and ‘schizophrenia'?” and “The OED was published in installments like a Dickens novel, taking over 40 years to publish?”

The story is just fascinating. From the very beginning – the question of how and why to make a dictionary. Like many of the standardizations that begun in the 16th and 17th century, the idea that words should have standard spellings and meanings is pretty intuitive once you've thought of it, but requires an almost unimaginable amount of work. It's hard from this side of the google revolution to imagine how one even conceives of doing this much work. The group asked volunteers to read books from specified centuries, note down the words they found, the sentence it was in and send it in with citations. It was the complaints of poor handwriting and water damage that really hit home to me the intense work required in this plan. These scrips of paper were then sorted by the few OED editorial employees, selected, and set to the printing press(!) I was equally fascinated that a dictionary came so late in human history and that they managed to have a comprehensive dictionary so early.

Winchester intends for this to also be the story of Dr. Minor, who was one of the most important volunteer contributors, from where he sat incarcerated in an insane asylum, diagnosed with “monomacy” for his paranoid delusions. I found the story of a learned doctor, insane, but with preserved cognitive function, obsessively cultivating entries for the OED fascinating, but the story definitely lost steam when it deviated from being about the OED. In particular, the chapters of Dr. Minor's backstory and the chapter of Dr. Minor's dotage dragged. But overall, the story was fascinating and I learned a lot from this slim and readable book.

When I was a tween, I had a generalized tonic-clonic seizure. It's bookended by flashbulb memories: one of sitting down to play a video game and the other of waking up and the sinking realization that I had lost at least half an hour of time – that apparently before the seizure, I'd been acting perfectly normally for at least thirty minutes after the last thing I remember. Tweendom is a pretty existential time at the best of times, so I doubt it's very surprising to say that this experience left me obsessed with the idea of personhood and memory: who are we if we can't remember ourself? Is continuity of personhood an illusion? These are the questions that are really at the heart of Wondering Who You Are. Sonya Lea's husband suffers complete retrograde amnesia following a (life-saving) experimental cancer therapy and anoxic brain injury.Some readers complained that it is a completely internally focused narrative of Lea – the wife of the actual patient – and that's kind of the point. The book is really an exploration of who you become when you don't remember yourself and how that affects the people defined by their relationship to you. I found it brave, introspective and thoughtful. Lea doesn't flinch from examining the hardest parts of herself. Unlike in [b:Are You My Mother? 11566956 Are You My Mother? Alison Bechdel https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1511409644s/11566956.jpg 16507555], where I found this cringeworthy, Lea's narrative voice is removed enough that it works. She discusses her own alcoholism, her husband's physical abuse of their children, and who these truths change in a world where his former self is lost.If I have a criticism it's that Lea's insight was curiously silent when it came to her privilege, which was on display in spades: they move to California from Seattle on a whim, only to then spend four months in France and another several months “housesitting” in California wine country. Lea spends an entire year doing nothing except exactly what she wants (as a physician parent, I sometimes feel overly indulgent spending an hour doing only things I want to do.) and the throw gads and gads of money on holistic medicine, faith healers and other therapies. Money, time and job obligation problems are usually looming for people with major medical challenges, out of work on disability, so for them to be so strikingly absent was distractingly notable.Which I guess is my last point: Lea is definitely not the sort of person I'd be friends with if I ran into her in real life. I found her flighty and gullible. But you don't have to like someone to learn from and admire them, and this is a fantastic book. Lea is unflinching when discussing the difficulty of being a caretaker and I think she has a lot to say not just on disability, but on relationships and personhood.

The premise is pretty darn cool: A 70-something doctor in Laos is forcibly made into the national coroner when it is revealed that the communist revolution doesn't believe in retirement. The undertone: he's old and probably infirm and the party will be able to control him. The reality: he's spunky and thoughtful and decides that if he's going to be thrust into a three-quarter-life crisis, he may as well embrace it. He's read a few mystery novels himself, and he decides: what the heck, I'm going to solve mysteries!

And solve mysteries he does, aided by Geung, his assistant with Down syndrome and a near-eidetic memory (one of the best literary depiction of trisomy 21 I've ever seen, by the way) and Dtui, his nurse, who bribes him into letting her be the assistant coroner. And a fairly large cast of eccentric, but not over-the-top wacky characters who really help flesh out the life of post-communist revolution Laos. And certainly, the setting is the main draw here: the politics/politicking of the recently formed communist power, the rich culture of Laos, the tensions among Southeast Asian nations in the late 70's – both critical to the plot, but more importantly critical to the feel of the book.

What I certainly didn't expect (and the back of the book doesn't tell you) is that Dr. Siri is also heavily aided by the mystical: visions of the dead, messages from the dead, prophetic dreams, being the embodiment of a resurrected Hmong spirit figure such that he is able to speak fluent Hmong when the plot calls for it and many other examples. I've never been a big fan of magical realism, and it's particularly jarring here as the book was billed as “Holmesian sleuthing.” Yes, there is deduction, but almost every case is solved by a major clue from the magical realm.

The weakest part of the book to me is the pacing: there are at least three major mysteries (three dead Vietnamese men, the natural? death of a party bigwig's wife and the suicide? of said bigwig's girlfriend, and the deaths of four soldiers out near the Hmong village.) These three do not intertwine in any way except temporally, often interrupting the plotlines of each other.

This is a fun, light read; definitely recommended for anyone looking to learn more about Laos, but light on the mystery.

I didn't realize it was possibly to be simultaneously deeply self-indulgent and also selfless, but that's what we have here. I just can't in good conscience recommend this book. It's selections of introductions to other works, speeches, verbal introductions and other miscellany. Two objections stand out: firstly, few readers will be familiar with all of the works discussed (or even a majority). It's quite dull to read an introduction to a book that you have never read and don't have access to, quality of writing notwithstanding. Secondly, in general, a collection of essays always wants for strong editing, especially when the topics of the essays are overlapping. In one case this was done, but in the others there are numerous redundancies – sometimes entire paragraphs lifted from one to the other.

That said, if you look at this as an encyclopedia of Stuff Neil Gaiman Recommends, it becomes more useful – I know I will seek out several of the introduced books here.

Finally an extra star entirely for the moving essays about Diana Wynne Jones. I have long found their friendship extremely touching. Gaiman has never wavered in his admiration of her and even when his fame far outstripped hers he advocated for her.

It says a lot of good about Neil Gaiman that he used this fame-backed ploy to talk up his own favorite books, regardless of their own fame. Nonetheless, it is a fame-backed ploy.

This was the vacation of disappointing reading material. There's little redeeming about the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Perhaps the best thing I have to say about it is that it's fast paced, and once you actually get to the mystery, it's a little compelling to at least see what comes of it.

That being said, there's a lot not to like. Let's start with the fact that absolutely no progress is made on the central mystery until page 294, when the character all of a sudden announces that he's found three clues. What happens until then? Lots of backstory on totally extraneous materials and three very explicit sexual assaults that have literally nothing to do with the main plotline (and never really come up again.) The pacing is particularly awkward, because we're usually subjected to all information once in the main plotline, regurgitated a second time (often verbatim) by the private investigators and then a third time either in a newspaper article or quoted from the main character's book. Similarly, the book extends for over 100 pages after the mystery has been solved. These pages are ostensibly to wrap up the sketchy finances plotline, but pretty much exist to tell us that the main character is drinking coffee and not going into work for a 100 pages until an authorial fiat fixes the financial plotline.

Want to talk about characters? The main character is a flimsy self-insertion, who is adored by all women, hired to solve a mystery on the basis of zero credentials and seems to just manage to stumble into evidence ignored for the previous 50ish years. Perhaps the most damning thing is that after figuring out who the murder is, despite the Mikael knows that the murder knows who he is and has already tried to kill him twice, he decides to go over to the murder's house without any backup or anyone knowing where he is, passing the gasoline and rifle used in the previous murder attempts on the way to the front door. That, friends, is a suicide attempt.

His sidekick is not just a quirky anti-hero. She's a bona fide psychopath who gets revenge on a predator by sexually assaulting him. Um, not awesome. Also, her deep secret on how she's such a good private investigator? She's a hacker. That's so lame it doesn't even deserve spoiler tags. It keeps getting repeated – Oh no, someone might find out that Lisbeth is a hacker! Newsflash: every fictionalized private investigator since 1985 has hacked in some form or another.

How about the writing? The translation is definitely clumsy, but it can't camouflage the underlying clumsy writing. My two pet peeves? Larsson's decision that it is necessary for us to know everything that a character does at all times (at one point he tells us the time a character wakes up, the time he drinks his coffee and how long he waits before leaving the cabin.) The second is Larsson's need for us to know what brand of object is in use. It's like if I made sure you knew that Becca wrote this review on her husband's Dell laptop, having used her Android phone to use the Goodreads App to select this book at the Borders bookstore inside the Cleveland Hopkins Airport.

The graphic crimes, especially sex crimes depicted have been very controversial, and I don't feel I can review this completely without mentioning them. I'm far from squeamish, but both the crimes themselves and the statistics about violence against women in Sweden seemed to have no purpose to their inclusions. For an author who complains in his book about the use of sex crimes in literature for titillation, well, the lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Well that was quite odd. The basic premise of the book was well-done: a psychiatrist's descent into psychosis. Here Dr. Galchen's medical background really shines from the accuracy with which she portrays her protagonist's failed reality checking and lack of insight, to the subtle historic clues that suggest a schizophreniform personality (excessive paranoia, overvalued ideas), Galchen parades nearly every possible positive psychotic symptom. Leo experiences thought insertion, overvalued ideas, pressure speech with train of thought patterns, hallucinosis, and delusions of every flavor. It's all done organically, realistically and from a first person perspective. While unique and originally fun as a concept, once Leo finishes his descent into psychosis, the plot doesn't really go anywhere, and I found the last 25% or so of the book dragged.

What really struck me though, almost immediately, was the inclusion of Tzvi Gal-Chen as a character. “How odd, Gal-Chen, that sounds familiar,” I thought, then remembered that the book was by Rivka Galchen. I then checked the acknowledgements, yup, she includes Tzvi in there. A quick google search revealed that Tzvi Gal-Chen is Rivka's (deceased) father (But no information about the surname spelling discrepancy). The pictures of him in the book, citations of his research and figures from his papers are all real, as is the description of him and his computer programmer wife living in Oklahoma with their two kids (Google has no opinion as to whether Rivka and her brother were indeed spoiled, bad at soccer, and good at math). In an interview, Rivka mentioned that readers rarely notice but for her the inclusion of her father is the largest part of the book. Well, I noticed and for me, it loomed large, as you can tell by the amount of googling it provoked. It's just such a strange decision: why include one's dead father in an otherwise non-autobiographical novel, as the hallucination of the psychotic protagonist? To make the reader feel like they're going crazy and overvaluing ideas? To invoke a Freudian feel wherein the reader sits around asking “but what does she mean by her dead father?” It's so very weird and it completely broke my ability to otherwise concentrate on the novel at all.

What I did appreciate even more knowing that Rivka grew up with a meteorologist for a father was her obvious love of language. It was clear that she had been rolling around words and turns of phrase in her head for a long time, taking them in and out of context, so when she got the chance to explore every possible meaning of every phrase, she really made the technical language sing.

This book may make sense for people who enjoy music, but without that context, it dragged so very much. Valente is a whimsical font of imagination and world building, but even that couldn't save it for me.

I really enjoyed this parable on evolution, emerging feminism and honesty. You'd think that a speculative fiction book about a girl's role in society, the tension inherent in being a natural scientist while being clergy (as most Victorian scientists were), the Victorian obsession with death, and evolution would be pretty scattered. However, I found The Lie Tree to be one of the most tightly woven books I've ever read: no subplot was left unresolved, and barely a sentence was included without being tied back to one of the central themes of the book. This smoothness may be a turnoff for some – in places, it made the book feel a little juvenile to me – but I couldn't help but marvel at the artistry.

And at the end of the day, my favorite themes are women's place in science, the marvel inherent in natural science, the importance of uncomfortable honesty and speculative fiction, so I enjoyed this thoroughly.

I enjoyed the introduction of Presger translators (so very alien in culture). Also, more ships, a conclusion! But reading the trilogy straight through made me feel a little over the Imperial Radch setting, which I think, again is on me, rather than Leckie.

The best heist movies are filled with intricate planning, last minute challenges thwarted by “actually we meant to do that” reveals, and a cast with a diverse set of strange backgrounds that make them uniquely equipped to pull the whole thing off. So in that sense, Six of Crows is up among the best of the best. The generic fantasy world is SOOOOOO generic and the ethnicities are very real world, painted over with excessive apostrophes so you know it's fantasy, which at times felt a little uncomfortable (like the exotic fantasy version of Roma), but you can tell Bardugo means the diversity earnestly even if she sometimes gets it wrong. And the heist was so very heisty.

This was the most adorable. Exactly what I needed in a cozy, lazy dark days of December. I'm not usually one for a rom-com, but throw in some astrophysics, an existential plot about fitting in and some high school bully revenge fantasy and now, you're speaking my language. This reminded me in all the best ways of [a:Lydia Netzer 4886414 Lydia Netzer https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1384708162p2/4886414.jpg]'s book: a book about nerds told from the perspective of someone who clearly loves nerds, a dry sense of humor and a heavy hand of astronomy as both critical plot driver and also metaphor for trying to find one's place in the world.

This was fine – what really sticks with me is the imagery of the forest and feral magic. A dark little red riding hood with a powerful female protagonist was a nice twist on a faerie tale retelling. I also really like books that have characters that are morally ambiguous and grow and work through that. But despite that, the characterization is a little shallow and inconsistent. Also, love triangles are Not My Thing.

Dr. Gregorio is a urologist by day, turned YA author by night. She set out to write a book inspired by her first patient with a disorder of sexual differentiation. It's a cute book that clearly thinks of itself as An Important Lesson On Tolerance, and as such comes off a little on-the-nose. There's “flavor” added to try to flesh out the book, but a lot of it is pretty shallow, and of course the happy ending includes the main character finding (heterosexual) romance, because it's not a book to challenge the status quo of 17-year-olds-must-have-boy-friends-to-be-happy. But it is a cute YA novel in which both the adults and teens are ultimately well-meaning. So if feel-good YA romance is your thing, cool! I wanted a little more nuance.

P.S. Ahhhh, why did no one offer the protagonist herniorraphy without gonadectomy? She was freaking out about having visible hernias. Those can be repaired before you make a decision about gonads. I'm pretty sure a urologist knows this better than I do. I got very distracted about this.

I expected the book to come as billed: “An intricately intertwined set of narratives hiding a shocking family mystery.” Instead it was
1. Snippets of an interesting science fiction story, told by unknown lovers, padded with
2. An excruciating story of two young, insipid, girls and their coming of age. The beginning of the lives of the girls was interesting to develop setting and character, and their adulthood (the end of the time described in this part) was predictable, but at least relevant. However, for the middle 300 pages, this becomes an interminably long day-by-day description of everything that they ate and wore. In addition, because these girls are so completely insipid we are treated to the details of how they hate absolutely everything and aspire to nothing, which is a little less than endearing. However, this is still not the most insufferable of the three parts, because the remainder of the book is
3. The nominal framing device. Less a story on its own and more to remind us how “clever” Atwood is in her prose style, this framing device seems to consist of determining how many ways the narrator can find to remind us that she's old and her heart bothers her. She goes to eat donuts. She reads the graffiti on bathroom stalls. She has chest pain, a lot. She tries to do her laundry. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Even without much in the way of plot (that which there is having been telegraphed 300 pages in advance), this book could have had literary merit if the characters had been at all interesting. But instead Laura and Iris are the most frustrating characters known to my literary world. For example, Iris complains bitterly about getting married away to a rich man, for which one may have sympathy, had she not spent the proceeding 100 pages explaining how she wanted to be rich and she expected to marry money to get there. Laura is flighty and “spiritual,” and disobedient, in such ways as to be maximally irritating but accomplish nothing. However, if Laura ever directly told anyone anything there wouldn't really be a book, so there is that.

The other most frustrating part of this book is the “unknown lovers” framing device for the Blind Assassin story. It is obvious to the reader who the unknown lovers are; however the characterization in this segment is so drastically different from that of the others (in that the female protagonist of this section, unlike every other female character in this book, has opinions, expresses them and acts on her will.) It is unclear whether this is done in a futile attempt to obscure the identity of the unknown lovers, or because the story is being told by an unreliable narrator (which makes little sense, given the final identity.)

Addendum, 12/11 - having finished Oryx & Crake it feels nothing short of criminal that Margaret Atwood spent time writing this book when she is clearly capable of so much more.