Becca

I found Dietland an easy and compelling read, but I'm still a little unsure how I feel about it in terms of who its intended audience is and what it was designed to do.

It's hard to take Dietland out of the context of its author – Sarai Walker has a PhD in gender studies, with a thesis focusing on how body weight policing intersects with feminism. Dietland clearly arose out of that interest and is done with an extremely scholarly bent.

There are two intertwining narratives: Plum (Alicia)'s self-discovery narrative, where she emerges from a spiral of self-hate, yoyo dieting and living in the future. This part is beautifully done – even as a woman who has never been overweight, I'm embarrassed to admit how much Plum's hoard of clothing that didn't fit (yet) and delay of activities until she could be her ideal (thin) self resonated. I think everyone puts off things until the time is right/they are better people/there is more money, but for women, the synonymy of ideal self and thinner self seems persistent. I felt that this was a really important area to explore. The narrative especially focuses on Plum's use of the “Baptist” diet plan (a thinly veiled Jenny Craig clone) and the way that this diet plan keeps women addicted and prevents them from really slimming down. Verena Baptist, the daughter of the founder of the Baptist plan is a health at every size advocate who shows Plum that she can be her “real self” while being fat. In the meantime, she also inducts Plum into a feminist collective.

The second narrative is about a group of female vigilantes who retaliate against sex criminals and the sexualization of women. Many people seem to feel repulsed by this part of the narrative, but Walker's main focus seems to be the thought experiment about if people were truly punished for the objectification of women, would that then empower women to speak out? In the process, Walker highlights the many daily ways in which women are degraded. Although I consider myself a staunch feminist, I was shocked about the things to which I've become enured: the commercialization of making women feel self-conscious about their bodies and the double standard of the use of the female body for advertising in particular.

My uncertainty is this: Walker, it seems, set out to write an Important Feminist Novel. Dietland is also fun and easy to read. However, I'm not sure it has much of a voice beyond the feminist community, where it's kind of preaching to the choir. It's hard to imagine someone who didn't already identify with Walker's message getting through even the first 100 pages of Dietland. Perhaps it will hit home to “choice feminists.”
In addition, I thought the fictionalization of the Baptist Plan really trivialized the many important criticisms of the weight loss fascination in America. I wish that Walker had used a real example (as she did with the lingerie store V—— S—–). In particular, I was really disappointed that in the “suggested reading” section Walker listed many fictional resources, but no non-fiction ones.

This was such a lovely little book (it's actually quite thick – but it reads fast.) Chambers writes a lovely interstellar setting, with seemingly endless diversity of alien cultures, anatomy and biology. I really felt that the world building was stellar and that I could delve into each of the alien races. I also really liked that humans were kind of a lesser-race in the galaxy – nice twist.

As billed, the best part of the book is the chosen-family relationship that develops among the crew of the Wayfarers, despite interpersonal tension, major cultural differences and occasional fights. Their care for each other and the way that they all learned to understand each other was really evident. There's something really satisfying about reading about characters who are deeply-developed and obviously well-loved by their author, and I'm constantly complaining about the dearth of literature on platonic non-familial relationships.

And while I'm annoyed that most of the races in the galaxy were bipedal and used DNA (why DNA? Fine, if it's going to be nucleic acids, RNA, novel sugars, novel bases? There have got to be more self-replicating molecules in the galaxy. Geneticists of the future, I'm jealous.) but at least Chambers lamp-shaded how unlikely this is, and I felt like it was genre-aware.

Don't be swayed into thinking that this book is perfect: it read pretty disjointed. Each chapter seemed more like a TV episode in a semi-serial show than a book chapter – often characters or plots were limited to a single chapter to be explored, concluded and discarded. The character and setting development definitely outshone the plot.

Overall, a really nice debut novel – perfect warm & fuzzy reading, especially for Firefly fans.

Lisa Genova invented the genre of “neurofiction,” which seems to be a mash-up of pedantry about neurologic diseases and kind of banal fiction. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I didn't know anything about Huntington. Since I almost certainly know more about Genova does about HD (in that I'm a board certified clinical geneticist and she's...not.) I just got a kind of run-of-the-mill family tension novel.

As part of my job, I get referral e-mails from our international medicine team, bulky with attachments of clinical charts from all around the world. Often this results in me reading them while pacing my office and swearing as the diagnosis dawns on me and I can't tell if the referring team has figured it out. That's how I felt for the first 90 pages of this book: a laundry list of textbook symptoms of HD that seemed to happen absent plot or character development. To the point where I could see it in my own e-mail shorthand in my head: “40s yo m w new onset invol mvmts and labile emotions, ?subacute duration up to 10y. Fhx notable for mother w poss same. High concern for HD, rec urgent appt w genetics for counseling & HTT repeat expansion analysis.” Needless to say, I found those 90 pages stressful rather than enjoyable.

Once the HD cat was out of the bag, the novel swung to focus on Katie, the youngest daughter, stopping along the way to rack up treacly family scenes. Katie was supposed to be the audience self-insert character, but I found her paralysis and self-absorbed self-pity infuriating rather than sympathetic. After the HD textbook checklist had been marked off, it kind of felt like HD could be replaced with basically any family tension McGuffin and the book just felt really generic.

My other complaint was the portrayal of the genetic counselor. As the only authority figure appearing in the book, it really annoyed me that he was a man, while most GCs are female. It seemed to be done on purpose for sexual tension between the GC and Katie, which is just so inappropriate and gross.

Reviewing it, I think it sounds like I hated the book; I didn't, I just found it really bland. I also think this genre is important for encouraging more awareness of HD and genetic disease in general, but I didn't need it.

This is a hard review: I'm goodreads friends with the author, so I'm hesitant about what I say here. But this book was...not good.

Let's start with the positive: this is a quick read. There are multiple narrators telling intertwining stories about the same period of time from their perspective, which is an interesting narrative device, filling in what seems like a subplot in the first narration. Each of the characters has different flaws, coloring their narrative slightly (although each seems to be a reliable narrator. I think unreliable narration would have added a lot here.)

And the negative:
For me, the most difficult was how flimsy the characters were. Each was a very classic stereotype, most to the extent that I have never seen in relief, despite having gone to medical school, residency and fellowship myself and having a facebook feed that is literally full of doctors: one character is girly, obsessed with her long distance boyfriend and not very smart; another is ultra-feminist, but just needs to be laid by a good guy; another is an ultra-gunner who will go out of their way to set back others in the class, even going so far as to poison her boyfriend. Another is an insanely rich child of doctors, looking to be a plastic surgeon. Another is A Nice Guy. I just...these aren't characters, they're archetypes. And the one we're supposed to feel the most sympathetic for is the ditzy dumb one, which didn't work out in my life.

The details are also lacking: The rich one? Has a doctor dad and a stay at home mom; the idea that someone could be so filthy rich from having one working parent who was a doctor is kind of hilarious.) The gunner? Wants to go into emergency medicine...at Yale...because her father's Parkinson's disease was late to diagnosis you know, that ultra-competitive specialty where you get to focus on making hard diagnoses?

The next biggest problem is the pacing: just as I felt I was getting into each character's story, the narration would switch. And not in a way that built tension and was rising action, just in a way that was disruptive. Ultimately, the book led up to this huge climax, and then we had to hear about the climax from several characters points of view (although to be fair, some of them really helped flesh that part out) and a totally unnecessary epilogue

The pacing was a big deal from the mystery standpoint, too. The central mystery? That there was a suicide every year and that's why it was called suicide med and how was this happening? Med students get depressed. The end. Another one of the side mysteries: that bodies got turned upside down and no one knew why? The anatomy professor was running a public tutoring session during which they reviewed the back muscles. Mysterious....

Finally, a big grief that I have with the book is the sci-fi plotline. It's kind of out of place in what's supposed to be a realistic thriller. It doesn't really relate to anything else going on, and it makes every narrative event including that character seem jarringly out of place and unrelated to the central narration. and while a form fruste of conjoined twin manifesting as only a single eye with some attached brain matter seems plausible, the idea that the host twin would lose significant executive control when the conjoined twin was removed does not...the host twin had no apparent conjoining of his brain matter and his brain matter was unaltered.

So overall, a fast light read, without much there there.

A cute memoir interspersing one person's life with her learning about and meeting octopuses, primarily in the Boston aquarium, but also learning to SCUBA. It's definitely not an expert work on octopus physiology, and while it touches on consciousness, it's definitely not a philosophical work either. But it's fun, the otcopuses pictures are beautiful, it just overall seems a little shallow. I think I would have preferred a slightly deeper work.

There's a lot to explore in the field of autism, and Silberman did a yeoman's effort for a complete layperson. There are so many misconceptions – such as the idea that “autism” is a single diagnostic entity, or that there is some explosion in people with autism, or that vaccines (or GMOs or gluten or the pseudoscience du jour) causes autism. So the idea that there could be a book to systematically explore autism and related topics was deeply appealing. However, this is not that book. Silberman's work is so uneven that it's hard to even analyze as a single volume. There are very intently focused parts (mostly, the history of Asperger, and the way in which he isn't a Nazi) and very shallowly explored parts. The use of illustrative individual case histories is helpful, but with such a shallow lens, people blend together.

Some key topics that Silberman touches on will be very interesting to people who have not been previously exposed to the issues: the fact that the autism spectrum is and has always been a spectrum; the intrinsic nature of autism to the personality of autists and the embracing of autism by many adult autists; the idea that “autism” is not necessarily a disorder, but that in many cases is a personality style that could be embraced and that the increased incidence of autism is almost completely accounted for by changing diagnostic criteria. Most of these topics have been widely explored elsewhere, and perhaps the most interesting: neurodiversity, is giving only glancing treatment by Silberman. Overall, the history portions were interesting and well done, and the rest would have benefited from more exposure to the topic.

This was fascinating— Ronson combines personally interviews with people notoriously shamed on the internet, work with psychology experts and a ton of first person journalism to explore shaming and our responses. There's no easy answers here — in the afterword he says basically “some people prioritize ideology over humans; I prefer humans” and that captures a lot of this book: there's a lot of humanity here. Which means a lot of care for human beings and thoughtful approaches to not what “feels right” but actually helps people do right. There's not shaming of shamers, either — Ronson is also honest about his own temptations to scoff at people over the internet. For such a firebrand of a topic it's calm and personalized. And very readable.

So my “recommended to me” notes for Uprooted were “ A feminist twist on an Eastern European fairytale with interesting characters and a compelling magic system” and, it's...mostly as billed. But my personal kryptonite is immortal (or super old) character falls in love with a teenager. It bursts through my suspension of disbelief, my engagement with a book and just makes me want to set everything on fire. To add insult to injury, Uprooted also repeats the “guy is super dismissive to girl and she falls in love with him anyway” trope that I first met in Spinning Silver. In Spinning Silver it was haunting and evocative of the frozen tundra of the setting. Seeing it again from the same author? I think it's just her schtick and it made me not like Spinning Silver as much in retrospect. I resent that a lot.

But there are other parts of Novik's schtick I like: the interaction between magic and a place; the way a place shapes a people; strong female friendships between female characters with complementary strengths and profoundly evocative settings. Do they balance? Hard to say.

I...didn't get it. Honestly, that might be all there is to say. There were a lot of moving parts and a lot of evocative language, but ultimately, it didn't go anywhere to me. I felt like the pacing was so odd, there were topics that Gibson really perseverated on, like: someone broke into Damien's apartment! The apartment was broken into! Was the apartment broken into? We think someone broke into Damien's apartment! All of a sudden, it just occurred to me that the apartment might have been broke into and I need to process it because we've never discussed it before!
The pacing with characters was even stranger: Bigend's ex-girlfriend - who was never introduced on-screen, but was supposedly Cayce's best friend, who would spontaneously send e-mails and I had to remind myself who she was every single time. A lot of characters (like Magda and her brother, Ngemi and Hobbs) appeared from nowhere but somehow were implicitly trustworthy and part of the party?

Also, pilates. So much pilates. And yes, I really side-eye books where the male author spends a lot of time discussion the female protagonist's clothes and workout habits. Also, seriously, what is the obsession of male authors with destroying female character's clothing? This seems to be a trope of male action authors and it's dumb. How does Cayce manage to destroy two priceless jackets, one of which she's had for years in the course of a couple of weeks?

But my biggest problem is that it never went anywhere: the footage, Cayce's surreal logo allergy, her father-the-spy's mysterious disappearance: all of these gorgeous starting pieces didn't grew thematically, didn't grow together and ultimately never felt satisfying on a plot level, metaphysical level or thematic level.

I've had a growing curiosity about Orthodox Judaism (as I first discussed in my review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1785091630) from my continued professional proximity to the frum community. I have friend who's prone to the same flights of curiosity that I am and we sometimes egg each other deeper into bizarre obsessions: we've spent far too many Monday nights browsing the Orthodox fringe of the internet. Far from my previous misguided notion that “Lubavitch” was a synonym for Chasid, I've come to learn that there are dozens of different Chasidic groups, each with their own flavor, mores and mysticism. Shulem Deen joined the strictest and most isolated of them, the Skvers.

This is truly Judaism as I do not know it. A world where children can barely read and write English; teenagers marry people that they've met for only a dozen minutes and books of all stripes are looked at askance unless they're literally siddurim or one of the accepted commentaries. The idea that people could pass into this life as a baal teshuva, or pass back out and come OTD (with good enough English to write a memoir) is basically unthinkable.

But beyond the voyeurism of getting to see a slice of life in the punnily named New Square, I found Deen's memoir haunting. I found his relationship with his wife, Gitty, unspeakably sad. I was touched by his insight into the experiences of his estranged children. And I was moved by his struggle to find a place for himself in Judaism.

What really struck me was the subsistence life Deen was given – his bare kollel stipend, struggling to make ends meet over a perpetually expanding family, the disdain he received for leaving the kollel. And the emotional subsistence: the distinct limitations on with whom he could interact, what he could do for leisure, what he could do for work; every interaction within his marriage carefully scripted. I found it terribly sad, and I found Deen's writing very evocative of his confinement.

I got into a fight with someone on the internet, who said he wished American Jewry were more Israeli: “where the synagogue you don't go to is Orthodox.” Deen's memoir made me think of that – to me, non-Orthodox Judaism is this beautiful place, where there's room for a spiritual and Jewish life, while simultaneously exploring any range of beliefs about the existence of G-d, and gender and math and secular jobs. It made me sad that for Deen his ability to have an identity and existence meant abandoning that.

OTD memoirs are in vogue lately, but it's clear there's a reason that this is the most famous – Deen is a truly gifted writer and his talent with words is matched only by the depth of his soul-baring introspection.

You know how sometimes the end can completely ruin the rest of a book? It's like that, only in this case, it's really the entire second half slowly prepares you for the way the ending is a fizzle.

I started Find Me knowing that it's ranking on goodreads was awful. But it sounded so freaking cool, that I had to do it anyway. In fact my to-read notes were: “A woman immune to the impending amnesia-plague uses it as a chance to rewrite her life, but supposedly it's terrible?” As billed.
OK, that's not fair: the first half was far from terrible. In fact, while I don't think even the first half would have wide-based appeal, I thought it was fantastic: just a touch of surrealism, beautiful language, The central discourse –the interconnection of current self and the people we've been in our lives; how memory matters (or doesn't) and whether we choose to be who we are or are shaped – was interesting and I felt van den Berg really had a lot of new ideas on this well-worn topic and certainly a new way of showcasing. A side note on “beautiful language:” I think there's a fine line between “lyrical” and “purple prose” and often the more beautiful the language is purported to be, the less I like this book; van den Berg steers well-clear of this problem. She is a master of English. Her sentences are gorgeous, thought-provoking and clear. They build her story, rather than detract from them. It's honestly the only reason I finished part two – she's truly superlative.

The second half, though, is rough. It's basically a travelogue through the post-apocalypse, although just how apocalyptic is kind of unclear. The problem is that without a solid plot to support everything else, the surrealism and existentialism become overwhelming and repetitive. This part both drags and is actively painful to read. I kept hoping it would get better, but it doesn't: it just ends, all of a sudden, after completely abandoning narrative and leaving a very surreal passage. I'm not even totally sure what happened in the end.

My six-year-old has developed this very polite habit of calling things she doesn't like “not my thing.” This was “not my thing.” It's hard to say quite why: I like fantasy and strong female protagonists and good world building, but. Here's the good: the world building was amazing. I loved the idea of the four Londons, and it felt truly original – each felt real and whole. Schwab really excels at invoking a feeling of a place. But. The protagonists fell flat. There was too much violence – pretty much anyone named and not protected by plot armor died within the chapter, and when that happens it's hard to get attached. The plot felt flimsy.

Also, I know it's itself derivative to accuse a fantasy book of being a Lord of the Rings derivative, but the MacGuffin was an amazingly powerful malevolent artifact that enervated the users, but whose possession and use was addictive. Using the MacGuffin (primarily to be invisible) allowed the enemy to spy on them. The main quest was to return the MacGuffin to the place where it was made in order to destroy it.

Yeah, not my thing.

So there are some really strong points to this book: I thought the coming of age was really well done, with a very nuanced protagonist. I thought Nix was a very realistic teenager, who despite her challenges being very particular to the fantasy setting, dealt with them in a way and had an emotional development arc that really spoke to adolescence. I really liked the evolution of the relationship between Nix and Slate - and a paternal relationship as the central relationship to a story is new and interesting. The Hawaiian setting is gorgeous, lush and ethically gray.

I really liked the concept of the Temptation – a ship that could travel to anywhere where there was a map. I thought the idea that the past is mutable, and the “true past” that they go to is whatever the map drawer believed to be true. What does it mean for the past to be “real” versus “fantasy” and who gets to decide? I wish the rules were drawn a little more clearly (what's to stop them from drawing their own maps whenever they wanted to return somewhere?)

But the book was imperfect. They circled around the central plot again and again without bringing any new information to it and without every resolving it. Which I think I took harder from a debut novelist -- how can I trust her to resolve it in the sequel? I would have totally read a historical fantasy set in 19th century independent Hawaii, but that was not the book I was billed: I was billed time traveling tall ships. So I was disappointed that they spend way less than 10 percent of the book in any other locale at all, and I was also disappointed that the map illustrations didn't match the maps in the narrative. I also thought that the romance arcs were lackluster. People are so into Kash, but I found him very bland and generic love interest. Blake was a little better in that he actually had character development and a strong perspective, but, yeah.

I'll probably read the second book in the series, but I gave this one a lot of credit for being a debut; I'm expecting the sequel to be substantially better.

An artfully portrayed, character driven novel that deals with the topic matter of intersex conditions respectfully, but without kid gloves.

Concepts such as a child standing up for a parent versus a parent standing up to a child were poignantly explored and the difficulty of choosing between parents. The centerpiece of the book is what different parents give us. That being said, the narrative device of a near death experience was trite and did not actually add anything. All of the moving interactions with his mother truly happened in the flashbacks and could have been kept there without that aspect. The surprise twist at the end was anticlimactic, not to mention unnecessary and the culmination of Chick's relationship with his daughter felt added on in the end. Far from Albom's best work.

This is a cute exploration of the world in which Lock In is set, how it functions and how the pandemic spun out of control. Does it feel a little bleak to the 2020 reader to read about the denial and spread of a pandemic? Sure does. Does it feel even bleaker to read about the nation coming together to respond...

Anyway, maybe not the best 2020 reading, but well put together and a solid piece of world-building.

To get it out of the way: this book is not for people who think that books should only feature likeable people. (This review is not for people who think that books should only feature likeable people; this reviewer is not for people who think that books should only feature likeable people.) But if you're like me and you like unlikeable people in your books, you'll like this book.

I was thrilled by the first part of this book: unreliable narration is one of my favorite literary techniques; unreliable narration being used to make the narrators look good is even more fun and a pair of unreliable narrators each distorting the narration in their favor was compelling reading that went beyond the normal tenets of mystery novels to speak to the distance between who we are and who we want to be. In this first part, both Nick and Amy, taking turns narrating are both completely unlikeable and completely relatable. One of the parts that sticks out from here: Amy complaining that she's mad at Nick but she doesn't want to be mad so she ends up even madder because she's mad that now he made her mad. Chilling: clearly terribly emotionally manipulative, but at the same time I think most people can relate to that feeling where you had planned on handling a difficult situation calmly and maturely and it doesn't end up that way and the spiral that ensues. I like that by the end of part one, it was really clear to me that my two major suspects in Amy's disappearance were the narrators and one of them knew something that they weren't telling. It was clever and novel.

The second and third parts of the book are just less interesting. The narration stops being unreliable (except for maybe Amy's relationship with Desi -- I was definitely skeptical of her depiction) and I found the solution to the mystery less interesting: sociopaths are the stuff of fiction but for a novel that is trying to be gritty and show compellingly, realistically flawed characters, true absolutely-no-empathy-do-whatever's-in-my-best-interest sociopathy really has no place (I decided not to spoiler tag this: I don't think it actually gives anything away.) I wanted the culprit in Amy's disappearance to be, like the first part of the book, a flawed but ultimately relatable person.

Overall, I'm glad I read it; it probably deserves the hype for trying some very cool and original ideas in terms of narration, and I'll be interested in reading Flynn's other work.

This kind of was missing the Veronica Mars je ne sais quoi for me. It was kind of a standard mystery, without much that makes the VM franchise. Also, I think it was gutsy for Rob Thomas to take on a rape victim who's an unreliable witness after the reception that Season 3 got. The best parts for me were the sideplots revisiting core VM characters, such as Weevil's arc.

(I also like neither Logan nor dogs, so your mileage may vary.)

This is honestly my platonic ideal of comfort reading. The mystery is tricky enough to not be predictable, but also not so obscure that the plot twists were frustrating. The main characters were fun and witty with snappy dialogue. I liked the exploration of Haden syndrome and the meaning of disability and virtual communities. I should read more Scalzi

This book is the ur-nerd tome. There is no pretending: you either are the sort of person who is mathy enough, physics and astronomy-obsessed enough and all around nerdy enough to find this fun...or you aren't.

To give an example, most days, because I'm busy being a doctor, I spend a lot of time pretending that I'm not a nerd. But recently, I joined a lab where my boss is about as nerdy as I am. So comparing weekend notes, he says: I spent the weekend solving a Rubik's cross. And I said: I spent the weekend reading the new What If XKCD book. I won that competition.

To be honest, I'm not particularly motivated to write much of a review: if you're that nerdy of a person, you've read the webpage version of what-if xkcd and understand the joy that is Fermi Problems (and probably the annoyance that happens after you do a Fermi problem and you spend the rest of the day unable to stop doing Fermi problems), absurd questions about nuclear physics, random statistics and clever stick-figure illustrations.

The key points are these: I religiously read What If XKCD every week, and have read every single one published on the web. The book still had plenty of new things that I had never seen before. There are some extras in the book: one line answers to particularly weird questions. I was anticipating a major drawback of the book to be the loss of hover text and footnotes that appear in the online version; this is replaced by captions and the old-school form of footnotes (i.e. footnotes). However, this is not a great book to read far apart from the internet: it's impossible to get through the whole thing without having strong compulsions to google side questions.

P.S. The worst part of this book is in the acknowledgements when he says he already has an expert on genetics. Note to self: scheme to take out previous genetics expert and become Randall Munroe's personal brilliant geneticist...

I don't know what it says about me that I found Bonk much more cringeworthy gross than Stiff or Gulp. But it's true. I found myself crossing my legs and making uncomfortable faces more than laughing guiltily through it, like I did through Mary Roach's other work. Perhaps part of that is that the lurid fascination with sex in society meant that a lot of her insights were less novel than in her other books. Perhaps Roach had not yet found her narrative voice. Perhaps I wasn't in the right mood.

Nonetheless, Bonk is a decent book and would perhaps be even more well-liked by those new to Roach's work, with preset high standards. Roach certainly knows no limits in taking an active role in journalism, going so far as participating in a study on 3-D ultrasounds during intercourse. But I agree with my goodreads friends, who felt like Bonk had fewer “Wow!” moments than Roach's other works.

Most novels ostensibly about math feature math as a [a:Dan Brown 630 Dan Brown https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1399396714p2/630.jpg]-ian McGuffin, approximately equivalent to magic: we take these numbers and then Do Math and then the secret to the universe pops out-style. That is not the Mathematician's Shiva. This is a book written by someone who clearly loves and understands math. The whole novel is basically a love poem to math, and cold Wisconsin winters, supported by knowing winks at academic culture and a heavy dose of Madison in its setting. Out of that comes a charming family story, staring all middle-aged+ protagonists (shout-out to Jon, who's into that sort of thing), as well as some thoughtful exploration of the meaning of religion, and specifically Judaism to a bunch of hard-nosed skeptics who don't literally believe but still gain value, the difference between intelligence and genius and the areas of the world where gender discrimination is alive and well.I'm not totally sure who this novel was actually for, but as an academic Eastern-European Jewish math-enthusiast, cross-country-skiing-enthusiast who was born and raised in Madison, I enjoyed it largely as a “hey, look at that, someone wrote a book just for me!” I'm not sure whether a broader audience would appreciate it.

I almost gave up on this book when I realized that there was magic. It seemed like cheating – I loved [b:Broken Harbor 13123877 Broken Harbor (Dublin Murder Squad, #4) Tana French https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1330675374s/13123877.jpg 15718578] for its grittiness and realness and I was worried that would be lost in The Secret Place. But it turned out that for me, the key to really getting Tana French books was embracing the magical realism here. The mental gymnastics I had to do to reach a place where magical realism was okay for me in her books led me to realize that there's a flavor of magical realism in all her books. Not literally, of course, but her books are to traditional murder mysteries the way that magical realism is to traditional fantasy: they aren't about murder, they use crimes as a lens to reflect upon the traits in real life that are difficult to explore in pure “literary” fiction.And in that context, French is a genius. The Secret Place uses its central mystery to explore the tight friendships of teenage years, and how empowering and close they can be. The four main characters are depicted perfectly, achingly nuanced – almost like someone that I've known and drifted away from myself. The overall effect was one of extreme, almost overwhelming nostalgia, so much so that the

I loved Ancillary Justice SO much and then I desperately needed to take on the rest of the series IMMEDIATELY. I kind of regret rushing through the series rather than savoring it. Nonetheless, I think Sword, while struggling a little with the pacing problems of a middle book in a trilogy, brought a lot of unique strengths to the series. I particularly liked Leckie's take on colonialism. I felt like she captured the ways in which SciFi can be a lens to reflect back on the issues of today, without weakening her own imaginative and unique setting. This is definitely a smaller book than Ancillary Justice – more focused on Breq and her crew, their interpersonal relationships, contrasted with the interpersonal relationships of those on the station and downwell and how those ultimately result in systemic flaws. I liked to have this lull in the series to really bathe in Leckie's universe and its social rules.

This is a beautiful nugget of a story. It captures the setting of the southwestern desert beautifully and mixes it with what feels like such a traditional faerie tale in a truly unique way. I'd never heard of Ursula Vernon before, but I'll seek her out in the future.