I really enjoyed this; the pacing was fast but not so much necessarily that it felt too fast. The mystery was tight but also solvable for sure, and the world just felt so rich even if at the end of the way I only got a taste of it. The queer rep was pretty good too, nice to see and just a part of the background of the story in a good way that I know many people are looking for. Definitely want to look for more in this universe; it was just delightful and like a good snack of a story, with so much room for growth. If that's what you're looking for, definitely check this out!

Just incredible--thought-provoking, and really makes me want to be more attentive to like my entire life. I think if you've read many of the women of color feminists she cites, you might feel like this book isn't saying much new, but it draws all of these lines of thought together in such a slim little volume that is ultimately pretty accessible. (I would say maybe a challenge to undergrads without much experience, but I think they could definitely take to it with interest if it was done carefully.) Just so many good explorations and such a rooted sense of theory and praxis. Really strongly recommend to all folks!

This book was just INCREDIBLE. It's like a book that is truly about love at the end of the day, but also very specific kinds of love, love that is painful but we can't turn away from. And it does it from this very specific position; this book is so deeply rooted in Two Spirit-edness and being Two Spirit in the present, and its veneration of Native women is powerful. There are so many beautiful moments, beautiful sentences, and explorations of what it means to live, and I feel so grateful to get to read it. Really an incredible book, and so deserving of all the awards it has won.

This was a revisit, though I'd never heard the audiobook before, and I will say the narrator did a great job with all the voices; her voice for Neal was my favorite of all (but I'm biased because Neal is my favorite of all, period.) It's probably the nostalgia speaking that got this five stars, but I find this just so charming; Kel is such a good character, her sense of justice is so real and adorable, and I know this is like sacrilegious but I LOVE ALL THE BOY CHARACTERS IN THIS BOOK (well, the good ones.) It was just a wonderful throwback to a story I loved very much growing up, and I had a really good time listening to it.

This is a book I think I would rate higher if I was smarter/had read more of the source material. Robinson is relentlessly thorough, and this is a book I'm going to have to go back through again and again probably to get a real sense of. Nonetheless, I found especially the latter chapters about DuBois, James, and Wright really interesting, and it's made me want to go back and read and reread the works of Wright in particular through a new lens. I'm going to be working through what James means by the Black Radical Tradition for a while, I think because it's deliberately nebulous in a lot of ways, but it was definitely compelling and worth reading!

It took me a hot minute to get into this--I appreciated having Morrison's commentary at the front, because it let me relax and just flow with the story. Once I was able to do that, and especially once I understood what was going on narration-wise, it was a really beautiful and lovely book. I'm not sure it's one I'd start with--Morrison makes reference to this being a kind of spiritual sequel to Beloved so it probably makes sense to read that first even if the content isn't a direct corollary. Regardless, this really was a beautiful book and I'd love to talk about it with other people!

Maybe more like 3.5, just given some Things and also the fact that it took me a long time to finish because I was reading it at night and sometimes would just fall asleep instead (the latter is totally my fault!) The worldbuilding on this was really compelling, but also pretty confusing at first--it took me a long stretch to really get into it. I would say this book benefits most from sitting down with it for long stretches--it flows really well when you read it that way, and it's easy to get caught up in once you let that happen.

Sometimes it does suffer from certain Fantasy Tropes (Lila escapes a rape attempt, for example, which is supposed to Tell Us About Her Character) but much like other Fantasy books, that doesn't mean I wasn't sucked in by the end and desperate to see if they would make it! That being said, I'm not sure I feel SUPER compelled to keep reading the series--the ending felt pretty neatly tied up honestly? But we'll see.

This books was really incredible--it hurt but there's also so much heart and I literally couldn't put it down. I read it in like two hours in the middle of the night, and couldn't sleep for a little bit afterwards because it had wriggled into my brain and the narration style wouldn't leave me alone. It like. Oozes compassion, which is a bad word to describe it, but that's all that comes to mind. The compassion like seeps out of this book and into your brain and I walked away from it wanting to think more about compassion and justice, about compassion and survival, and about how that survival is made, like its very building blocks. I feel so inadequate writing this review, but it was so good and I just want more people to read it and feel their own versions of what I felt reading it.

I think this book probably deserves all the praise it's gotten--certainly making the mass murder and extreme violence something that more people know about is admirable. It's pretty well-written, and flows nicely.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, I have Beef. The first has to do with Hochschild's sense of inevitability when it comes to colonization; he uses word like "guaranteed" when it was at no point guaranteed. It seems small, but boy did it rankle--the question of inevitability regarding colonization supports larger structures of white supremacy in really subtle ways. (We won't get into the numerous references to "American Indians" and that whole mess, but needless to say: yikes.)

It struck me also, reading the afterward to the anniversary edition, how different this book would have been if Hochschild wasn't determined to write it in this specific way, ie that thing where popular history writers do the biographic deep dive on every important player in the book. That, more than anything, seemed to be his stumbling block on including African people in his narrative, but what would the book maybe have looked like if he wasn't so tied to that structure? I know, at this point it looks like I'm asking for a different book, but I think it's an important question to ask in light of his obvious responses to "where are the voices of African people in this book?"

(Also quick sidebar: his repeated insistence that colonization is not the only reason that countries in Africa struggle today, and that in fact it has more to do with the cultural patriarchy that exists, is really pretty gross and also holds the "democratic" nation-state as the measure by which we hold success. Relying on the Enlightenment as the Reason why European nation-states are doing better is a deeply slippery slope, my dude.)

Regardless, I can see why people read this, and why it's so popular in classrooms; it is at least a decent introduction to the violences that make up colonization, especially extractive colonization as in this case. Paired with some other work, it could be really instructive, and at the very least is promoting the knowledge of the violence to more readers than before.

Folks, this is the best Star Wars pilot book that exists, period. End of story. It's so good. The plot is tight without feeling like it moves too fast, all the characters are so nuanced and frankly wildly well-developed, and the FLYING. Honestly even as a person who enjoyed the Rogue Squadron series, I find flying sequences kind of hard to read, but this has the BEST PILOTING SEQUENCE IN ANY PIECE OF STAR WARS MEDIA THAT HAS EVER EXISTED, HANDS DOWN. I'm sorry for the caps lock but it's true. Seriously, this might be my favorite new canon book I've read so far; it's so, so good and I can't wait for this story to continue.