Excellent look at religious homophobia and the horrors of conversion therapy that centers a character at a surprising point in her relationship to her queerness. Some of the lore didn't quite make sense, but that was okay. I loved how Rose's autism came through in the writing style. It was very friendly to me as an autistic reader. 

Fun and gay and silly.

Really excellent remix of Little Women. I loved almost all of the choices. I just wish it had been longer.

More complete thoughts are in the So Many Beginnings Episode of the It's Super Important! podcast. 

Very cute and gay and seasonal. Would recommend.

Honestly, I get why people recommend Mort as an intro book to the Discworld. Here, for the first time, the world feels fully-fledged. Things are going on that are unrelated to the main characters, the main plot, or anything we have seen before, and at the same time, the elements we've already seen are twining together with the new ones. The world has started to have a true identity with rules and lore and history outside of satire or one-off stories. All of that is excellent.

Unfortunately, I cannot stand Mort. He might be my least favorite Discworld POV character. He annoys and bores me by turn. And the plot of this book is only fine. Fortunately, Death mostly manages to make up for it, and it's still a fun read despite some unfortunate moments of misogyny etc.

Favorite quotes:

Returned to library. Hopefully I'll have the stamina to read the rest of it at some point soon.

Incredibly well-researched, and a lot of the information was useful. Unfortunately, the analytical framework was incredibly lacking, and I felt like the author could have done a much better job of putting the threads together and reaching new conclusions based on them. The very best chapter, Chapter 10, focuses on violence against indigenous women and on the legacy of colonialism in Australia and the United States. If this lens had been extended to the rest of the book, it would have benefitted hugely. Unfortunately, the author just didn't quite go far enough in terms of critiquing the police and discussing white supremacy's role in domestic violence across the board. There was also a lot of weird anti-China bias? Still a useful, if difficult, book that I would recommend to a lot of people. Just lacking in some areas for me.

I wish I’d liked this book more. I LOVED D’Vaughn and Kris Plan a Wedding. This one just seemed kind of… incomplete?

What I liked:

What I didn’t like:

It was fine. I had fun. Not much in the way of character development, but there was some for Grover. Also random Sally backstory? That was fun. And lots of wild Hecuba lore. Otherwise just a silly adventure featuring familiar characters and a ton of timeline inconsistencies. Honestly, I would think the book was ghostwritten were it not for the fact that a ghostwriter probably would have kept better track of which characters were alive/had which weapons/etc at this point in the timeline. Or at least would have done some cursory research. Definitely not Rick Riordan's best but I did have fun.

Excited to run some version of this at my local game store.