CALCULATED RISKS was a dream book for me, with a new dimension, giant arthropods, and cuckoos as zombies. The way it balances introspection, ethical ponderings, and tense action is fantastic. I knew I'd like it because I've liked everything I've read so far by Seanan, but now I want my own giant spider to ride. I love most of the stuff which was probably supposed to feel a bit like horror because I'm very excited by the prospect of spiders the size of horses, tame mantids big enough to to use as steeds, and excellent use of "our zombies are different". The very large arthropod-like creatures have a consistent presence in the book and I had the best time reading all of it. The bipedal characters are great too! Sarah is an excellent narrator, I'm warming to Mark, and it was interesting to see a different side of Annie and Artie after experiencing each of them as narrators (plus, uh, the memory thing). The changes felt like they fit the level of mental adjustment made to the characters. I really like stories where a character becomes different because of changes to what they remember (or how they think about what they remember), and this was really great all around. 

This wraps up an extremely major thing left hanging from the previous book. The entire point of this one is to figure out how to undo or at least mitigate what happened in the cliffhanger from IMAGINARY NUMBERS. There's a very major thing which is introduced and resolved in this book, and a really cool storyline which was introduced here and wasn't present previously (Greg is the best!). It leaves a bunch for future sequels to pick up, and I'm very excited for what might happen next from the interpersonal changes made here. The main character (Sarah) was one of the narrators from IMAGINARY NUMBERS and her voice here is consistent with her previous appearance. This would not make sense if someone started with CALCULATED RISKS and didn't already know about the series. It feels a bit like IMAGINARY NUMBERS so fundamentally changed what the characters thought they knew about Johrlacs that if someone tried to jump in any later than MAGIC FOR NOTHING (the first book where Antimony narrates) they wouldn't get what's happening (or if they do get what's happening in a literal sense, it wouldn't have the emotional weight and context from the previous books). 

Some stuff in how the magic works reminded me of MIDDLEGAME (same author, different series), but they're very different stories and it was nice to know that there's more room for "math as magic" since it's a really great idea done well here (and done differently than MIDDLEGAME, for all that they both involve writing large equations while trying not to die).

I love this and need to know what happens to REDACTED in the next one. By "REDACTED" I mean a specific character and also secretly all of the characters, as I am already excited by the prospect of the sequel.

 This was a little about Comic-Con and a lot about Antimony's relationship with Verity. It was nice to see them together for more than a brief scene, even if most of it was tense with Antimony reacting to the idea of Verity as much as the actual person. 

I love Fae and Greek mythology, so when I realized this was going to give me Tisiphone and the High Court all in one book I was intrigued. Ultimately I’m stopping because it feels like it’s trying to do too much, and by trying to remember the many characters and track the complex blend of two already massive paradigms/pantheons... it got to be overwhelming. The Furies are great, and the Furies plus the Faerie Courts would be really cool, but the Furies, the Greco-Roman creation myth, complex systems for inheritance, political machinations, a serial murderer (or murderers), and the marginalization of the faeries (which are different from the Fae), and the persecution of the Ironborn (which could variously be considered Fae, Faerie, or human?)... it’s a lot. It would be a lot for even a trilogy to establish gradually, it begs for the room to have major details conveyed simply at first and then expanded, distorted, and recontextualized over the course of two books minimum. You can do really cool narrative things with “knowing” something then finding out your information was wrong and it changes how you think about what came before. Here things were established, rebutted, and adjusted so quickly I’m not even sure if they were supposed to be changes at all. I made it just over a third of the way through and I feel overwhelmed by the world and underwhelmed by the plot.

My one regret by not finishing this is I won’t know how things resolve for Tisiphone, but there’s too much extraneous stuff around her very interesting backstory for me to get fully into this one thing I like.

Getting the point of view for both the protagonist and antagonist was cool at first, but now it feels like I’m waiting for the protagonist to figure out a mystery where the antagonist handed me the answer a hundred pages ago. It’s a particular kind of tension which I just don’t like, and which makes me too anxious to keep reading. I think what happened is that while both HOLD ME CLOSER, NECROMANCER and NECROMANCING THE STONE are horror, the first felt enough like a creature-feature for me to like it, while this one is designed to convey the slow creeping dread of a great horror movie where the audience put it together already and they watch, helplessly, as the protagonist(s) fumble because they just don’t know what’s causing everything. I think it does it well, it’s just doing very well a thing I can’t stand, so I’m stopping.

FIREBREAK is a heart-pounding story of scarcity and danger in a place controlled by warring corporations. Mal is a young streamer trying to impress her viewers enough to make it through each day and avoid ending up in the company dehydration clinics, when . 

Because major parts of the plot revolve around resource control and water scarcity, there’s a lot of discussion of water-insecurity and shortage. That was stressful to read but also deepened my immersion in the story. The way Mal’s thoughts did or did not revolve around this essential resource at any given moment matters to the story. The book involves an in-universe MMORPG (multiplayer online game that most people are either playing or watching when they’re not working), and at first I thought that the plot would focus on some objective in the game world, but a little ways in it reveals that the main stakes are bigger and more important than the game, while simultaneously retaining the game’s importance to the story. I loves the shift where technically the game doesn’t matter, but what the game belies means everything.

The world-building is really good, both for the game and the real world. They mutually reinforce each other both in terms of narrative events and the actual structure of life under the Corporation. The idea and reality of resource scarcity is constant, especially early but it never goes away and is very important to the plot. 

My favorite character's very description is a spoiler so I can't talk about him much, but I loved the strange rapport between him a Mal, a kind of uneasy peace from someone losing everything and everyone he trusted (which was a short list to begin with). 

The ending is emotionally devastating, coming together in a strange blend of bleak and hopeful. It perfectly cements this as the kind of book where I need everyone to read it so they know what it put me through. There's a sense of finality, inevitability, which suffuses the latter part of the story. Watching everything play out and hoping it won't quite end up as bad as it looks. 

FOLLOW THE LADY is very focused on connecting together various bits of backstory in an interesting setting. It works well in combination with IMAGINARY NUMBERS since my main question after that book was "how did Antimony get home?" and this is a very important piece of that journey. Seeing the guys' reactions to Alice was a treat, and I love the bar. 

IMAGINARY NUMBERS is the kind of book you wait all series to get, but can only achieve so triumphantly with the necessary eight books of prelude to make it all so satisfying. The cryptids all other cryptids fear have turned their attention to Sarah with a problem only she can solve. Is anyone truly ready for the answer?

This is my favorite so far. I think I've said that for the past few reviews, and I still love Antimony as a narrator, but I've been waiting for everything in this book since the beginning. It has Johrlacs, it has Sarah, it has Artie. It has Artie and Sarah! I've wanted Sarah as a narrator since she was first introduced to the series, Babylon 5 lent her a moral code and it gave me my love of telepaths, so this was very exciting for me personally. I'm glad to meet Artie in the context of Sarah, since the series has teased the reality of their close friendship and the potential of a romantic relationship so much without giving many details about what Artie is actually like. It was a little strange to be centered around a different branch of the family with everyone's titles shifting around, but I got used to it pretty quickly.

This wraps up a few things left hanging from the last book, but the main thing that is does in terms of continuing existing plot threads is finally introduce Sarah's perspective, and give a lot more information about Johrlacs. I've been waiting for Sarah's in particular for a long time, basically since she first appeared at the beginning of the series. The main storyline starts here and wasn't present in the last one, but the setup before the inciting incident is the culmination of events from almost the beginning of the series. I'm having a little trouble assessing whether it has a major thing introduced and resolved here, because it has a real "part one of two" feeling, especially given how it ends. Lots of major things are introduced, and then transformed, but not all the way resolved. It's far enough into the series that I'm very happy about this, it's time for a cliffhanger and the series can handle it (whether I can handle it is a separate question, I need the next book immediately). The narrator changed, we actually get two narrators this time. I won't spoil who the second one is. Occasionally I had trouble telling who was narrating when it switched, but I generally knew within two pages. It only switches at chapter breaks, so that helped. This would not make sense if someone started here and didn't know about the series already. As I mentioned previously, this follows up something that had a very dramatic start early in the series and has been developing in the background for a long time. It then uses that to set up a bunch of information that anyone who's been reading along will be very excited to learn... but would feel like a massive and possibly unwieldly infodump for anyone who tries to start here. Sarah's story has been so important to the other stories, even if she's just in the background (like in Antimony's books) that this will read very differently to anyone who tries to make this their starting point.

I loved the new information about the Johrlacs, it's spread out through the text enough to be very satisfying for anyone keeping up with the series. It's everything I've wanted to know and more, and it's all so so relevant to the plot.

This has a really great and funny way to casually learn that a minor character is queer, it's a tiny moment but I think it's my favorite non-traumatic thing in the book.

I think the ending is perfect for the book, but it's emotionally terrible for me because I hate having to wait for cliffhangers, so I'm glad I'm reading this when the next book is already released. It's truly the best way for this to end, because the stuff set up here is too much to have fit neatly into one book. It needs room to breathe and this gives it that narrative space... and I'll be reading this next one as soon as I possibly can.

In BLACK WINGS BEATING where there are no good options and death is only a poorly-timed argument away, two siblings must brave the mountain to capture the eagle which killed their abusive father, and perhaps find themselves.

This is an emotional roller coaster. The main characters are really well established early on and then their needs and desires just... crash into each other over and over until they finally start to work together once it gets through their heads that being right might be less important than making it out alive. There are occasional scenes from other characters' perspectives, but the main two are the twins, Kylee and Brysen. The sibling dynamic between them felt tangled and genuine and I like getting both of their perspectives as narrators. The emotional core of this book is that strained sibling relationship, and what it means for them to keep going after the all-consuming presence of their abuser is gone. They start the book not wanting him back but also not quite knowing what to do with the pieces left behind and the spaces he no longer fills. It's messy and complicated, and I love where the story goes with it. 

The siblings' relationship is particularly good, but there are a lot of relationships and they're handled with nuance. Some of them are pretty positive and some are extremely negative, but they're all complicated. They hit the sweet spot of being complex enough to imply a lot of emotional depth that there might not be enough time to explore fully, while also being very easy to sum up. Everything from "probably unrequited crush" to "sister thinks her brother's older boyfriend is just using him", they have space to develop. There's definitely a theme of loving someone who can't or doesn't love you back, explored in a bunch of different ways.

This is a bloody book with a very high body count. It maintains the tension that anyone could die by following through and having a lot of people (and birds) die. I never felt like the violence was gratuitous in terms of what the narrative needed, the most gruesome scenes were establishing important things about various characters' approach to violence and their relative willingness to kill to make a point. 

I loved this and I'll definitely check out the sequel, I'm very interested in what happens next.