The Hate U Give is about racism, family, and figuring out how to keep living after the teenage MC sees a friend shot in front of her by a cop. 

The plot flows really well, conveying the several-month wait between the shooting and the eventual verdict with sections spaced out over time but with smaller and smaller page counts. It mean that the immediate events felt very condensed but the focus was always on when something updated for the MC (whether in her persona life or the case). That pacing also worked to show how the two parts of her life were separate by having them actually feel separate for over half the book, then gradually bringing them together with enough time passing for the finale to feel natural. They had time to grow (or to choose not to), and even minor characters felt more complete because of it. 

I love the way that the MC’s relationships with members of her family are handled, particularly with her mom. There are a lot of conversations where it conveys that the other person has different information or life experiences behind their reactions in a way that sets them up as separate people without diminishing the MC’s sense of her own agency. It consistently conveyed that other people around her were doing things and having conversations that may or may not intersect with the main plot and helped them feel like main characters who just happened to not be point-of-view characters. Her relationships with them and her understanding of them as separate people also changes throughout the book, as the often literally life-or-death situations which arise (the shooting itself and the tense events afterwards) push her to see different side of them and to reassess things she already knew. 

Heads-up that there are a lot of references to H*arry P*tter because this was published before JKR’s transphobia became mainstream knowledge. 

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August posits a strange version of mingled mortality and immortality, possibly repetitive, but capable of ending without warning or recourse.

I like the way the MC changes throughout the narrative. He's in very different mental states at different points in time, and the text does just enough to convey that without having the narrative voice shift in potentially jarring ways. Because it's told from one very specific point in his timeline, it grants a clarity of hindsight to experiences which range from euphoric to literally torturous. It also means that there's a bluntness to his descriptions, as the MC is remembering terror or joy, sometimes with little transition between the two. Chapters which are right next to each other may have very different moods in their detail, but his mood mostly changes between reflective and purposeful. The MC doesn't shy away from bloody descriptions, but he speaks about terror and torture without asking the reader to experience it with him.

One thing I think it gets right is that different kalachakra (a word which feels uncomfortable and stinks of cultural appropriation, though I hope I’m wrong) or ouroborans have very different reactions their status. Some want to explore the world, some embrace how full of war the 20th century is and get as much of it as they can, some stay home and keep things going for the future ouroborans to have a better start. It also embraces the idea that the MC, living so many lives in an era when travel is suddenly easier than in prior centuries, would do a great deal of travel across his lives. The story stays pretty focused in Europe, Russia, and the USA, but has snippets of time spent other regions of the world in a way that attempts to demonstrate the breadth of his travel without making the main story drag. It's also repeatedly concerned with ableism and how the mentally ill are treated. Since the MC and his friends have a perspective which is frequently mistaken for mental illness, I'm glad it doesn't shy away from the potential impact of that.

The narrative has a nice balance between mostly linear bits of narrative and digressions to other points in his personal history, it was engaging to read and I love the way it kept from giving away the ending (and the specific context of it) despite the whole thing being told in media res. The discussions of what one in this position of intertwined mortality and limited contextual immortality would do with oneself, and I come away from it feeling as though I've absorbed both a very good story and the summaries of several philosophical papers; mentally stretched in a good way. It's concerned with what the ouroborans actually do as much as it is with what they think about it, so the philosophical digressions are complete enough to be interesting to anyone who cares, but are usually placed so that they further the story and are shortly backed up by action.

I like this book, but I have a few reservations about recommending it. Spoilers are somewhat unavoidable in this discussion, but it concerns the handling of queerness in the story.

I think it would have done better to either avoid queerness altogether, or to actually address the reality of the AIDS crisis with more than a passing mention via killing off a character with it. It irks me even more because that character is possibly queer, and I say possibly since she is implied to have AIDS because of drug use in this life, but in a previous one she didn't sleep with the MC because she was "giving homosexuality a go". The narrative treats it as noteworthy only as one of two reasons she didn't have a relationship with him in one life, the other was a life in which she was married. The other time queerness is explicitly discussed within the text is when the (male) MC is considering whether he should allow himself to be seduced by the (male) villain. No seduction is attempted, and thus it remains a thought exercise of hypothetical homosexuality, mostly notable for the MC's musings that he must be feign being appalled by any such attempt because of the era in which he was born.

American Hippo is a fun and bloody duology of heists and rescues while riding hippos in an alternate version of the 19th century USA. I love the full story as collected in this book. Anyone who has already read River of Teeth could read the short stories at any point since they’re prequels, but they would lack context without having read the first novella so they’re well-placed at the end of the book. The two novellas really are two halves of a whole and I’d recommend this to anyone interested in “what if the USA actually went through with that hippo-ranching plan but did it a few decades earlier” and who loves a deadly heist story.

River of Teeth is a heist steeped in danger and death. It’s a very fun story to read, but it establishes very early on that it’s set in a dangerous place and the characters are embarking on doing a dangerous thing (or several). It makes the stakes feel very real early on. I love the MCs, they don’t totally get along but they’re pulled together by money, grief, revenge, and other personal goals in the way that a great group heist thrives on. I like the ending but I’m glad there’s more with these characters because I want to read about them doing more things! I love Hero and Houndstooth, they’re well-developed as separate characters and their relationship feels so genuine and fun to read. The sparse descriptions keep it from slowing down the main plot while still establishing and reinforcing this budding romance in the middle of the heist/revenge plans. - CW for

racism (minor), transphobia (minor), blood, gore, violence, animal death, child death, major character death, death.

Taste of Marrow gracefully handles the transformation of a betrayer from the first book into a protagonist in the second. The way Hero and Houndstooth’s relationship was handled in River of Teeth meant that the dynamic in ToM is completely believable despite their relatively brief acquaintance before this point. If RoT is characterized by grief and revenge, ToM adds sorrow and rage to the mix, as the heist which pulled them together is over and they’re dealing with the aftermath. While the characters are in suspense, I’m grateful that as a reader I wasn’t in the dark about whether or not certain characters were alive. That meant a lot of the suspense and anguish was over whether they’d find out the answers, and what they’d do about it, not what the answers were. Please don’t mistake this for a lack of tension or uncertainty, there’s plenty of that, with long stretches where I was on the edge of my seat, but there’s particular feeling of being lied to as a reader, and this story avoids that. The scenes between Hero and Adelia, especially when Hero finally talks about why they retired... goddamn I love that scene. This is a quieter story than the first one (at least until the finale), and as much as I loved the heists from before, I love the quiet moments between characters who might not like each other personally but are committed to being their own kind of decent. - CW for

intrusive thoughts, illness, blood, violence, kidnapping, animal death, torture, death.

Worth Her Weight in Gold is a brief and fun bit of backstory for a detail anyone who’s read River of Teeth will already know about Ruby. - CW for

death (not depicted).

Nine and A Half is full of quips and brandished guns, recounting the nine times Archie has saved Houndstooth’s life while living through time number nine-and-a-half. - CW for

guns.

 Taste of Marrow gracefully handles the transformation of a betrayer from the first book into a protagonist in the second. The way Hero and Houndstooth’s relationship was handled in River of Teeth meant that the dynamic in ToM is completely believable despite their relatively brief acquaintance before this point. If RoT is characterized by grief and revenge, ToM adds sorrow and rage to the mix, as the heist which pulled them together is over and they’re dealing with the aftermath. While the characters are in suspense, I’m grateful that as a reader I wasn’t in the dark about whether or not certain characters were alive. That meant a lot of the suspense and anguish was over whether they’d find out the answers, and what they’d do about it, not what the answers were. Please don’t mistake this for a lack of tension or uncertainty, there’s plenty of that, with long stretches where I was on the edge of my seat, but there’s particular feeling of being lied to as a reader, and this story avoids that. The scenes between Hero and Adelia, especially when Hero finally talks about why they retired... goddamn I love that scene. This is a quieter story than the first one (at least until the finale), and as much as I loved the heists from before, I love the quiet moments between characters who might not like each other personally but are committed to being their own kind of decent.

 Worth Her Weight in Gold is a brief and fun bit of backstory for a detail anyone who’s read River of Teeth will already know about Ruby. 

The House on Mango Street uses vignettes to show snippets of a young Latina's life in a new neighborhood.

I like the way this book is structured, getting to know the MC and the people in her neighborhood a little at a time. I don't think we're ever told her age, but it has a feeling of her growing up a little, of some time passing but not more than a year or two. The characters feel distinct because the MC describes them in unique ways, with enough detail when previously mentioned characters reappear to let the reader keep track of everyone. She feels like a kid, with a kid's attention to people and ways of describing adult things without always knowing what they are. It handles some pretty traumatic events with care for the reader, sometimes through just mentioning that they happened, and sometimes by showing the MC's reaction without describing the details of the trauma. A lot of it is joyful, and while the sudden shifts in tone can be jarring, they fit the vignette style and it works well overall. The way it jumps around feels like the way someone might describe a year or so of living somewhere, so it's either a style you'll like or maybe it's not for you.

A few things keep this from being a book I can highly recommend, but I have no trouble seeing why this book would be praised. Now I would hesitate to recommend it because of racial slurs and stereotypes which may have not been commonly understood as slurs at the time, but now definitely are. They were jarring to come across and their use repeatedly pulled me out of the story. There was also a way of assuming large bodies were grotesque in a way that adds up to feeling very fatphobic. These weren't always portrayed with malice from the characters, but they are enough of an issue that I'd give a caveat along with any recommendation of this book.

DNF 36 pages in. It was dry and very slow, replicating the ableism and racism from the original plus adding some sexism (I'm not sure if the sexism was in Robinson Crusoe or not, since it's been a while since I tried reading that). Maybe it was going to examine some of those problematic aspects, like colonialism, but I wasn't ready to stick around and find out.

In The Vanishers’ Palace is about grief, agency, and joy; about learning how to make decisions for oneself and give others space to do the same.

I like the way we learn about the eponymous "Vanishers" through context and what they left behind, with almost no discussion of what they were like because they're not the point: the focus is on the people and world they left behind.  I tend to enjoy books which immerse me in a setting and expect me to keep up, and this one is full of that. It doesn't tell us really what the Vanishers were, and I didn't need it to. It's a quieter story, managing to feel deep and slow-paced while being a short book that didn't take very long to read. There are themes of community, isolation, and what fear leads people to do when they have incomplete information or ignore what they should know. It stays pretty focused on the relationship between the MCs, but the secondary characters are very important to the story in a way that made it feel like a small snippet of a full world. 

I particularly love the way language is used here, making it clear that the characters are not speaking English (the language in which I read the story) by briefly describing the way the way gendered language is used by the characters in how they refer to themselves and each other, indicating that a character spoke only one word when what appears on the page is a phrase with two words, etc. This is the kind of thing that could have broken the immersion, but I liked having reminders that when they spoke to each other in this post-apocalyptic situation that they had language and references which I wouldn't share, it made their world feel more complete while still giving me the information I needed as a reader.

Apparently this is a queer retelling of a classic tale (

Beauty and the Beast

). I'm glad I went into it without that specific knowledge because it let me like the story for what it is, rather than comparing it to something else. Now that I know what story it's retelling, the parallels are pretty clear and I think it did a good job, but it felt like a fresh story when I was reading it and I like it on its own terms. 

Fledgling is a vampire story about racism and ableism in a community which thought they were immune to such concerns. A persistent search for justice in a supernatural community.

This is a book built of quiet moments and aftercare, processing trauma and building a new life from the ashes of the old. It’s also a damn good vampire story, with a rich mythology and a kind of vampirism built on community and family history, rather than the usual legacy of sires and victims. I love this book, it's a quieter read than most of the other vampire books I like (normally I lean into urban fantasy), but the way it pays attention to people is subtly powerful. 

This book has a version of polyamory which was intriguing. The presence of vampires mingled with humans and the way that complicates questions of consent is explored really well. The MC is not a child in human years but has the appearance of a child, this might make some readers uncomfortable when she engages in adult behaviors (like sex), so please take care of your boundaries when reading. 

Because the MC has memory loss and does not remember any of her personal history from before the book opens, there are a lot of explanations which can feel repetitive. She's quick to pick up on things, but has to justify herself and her current state of existence over and over. Sometimes this is because of ableist reactions from people around her, assuming that because she has lost one thing (memory) she therefore is unable to do other things (like reason soundly with the information she does have). Her fresh perspective makes this into a story I would recommend for people who are new to vampire stories and people who are very familiar with them because it's a version of the mythos which is new enough to be interesting for those who already  like vampire stories, but it also explains enough to keep newer readers from being lost. While some of the repetition can be irritating, that's obviously on purpose because of the effect it has on the MC and the way different secondary characters ask similar questions. The way this book handles questions of racism in a people who (until now) thought they were categorically immune from it begins subtly and then grows more and more overt as it becomes clear what's happening and how they're wrong about being unable to be racist. The way the MCs age, skin color, lineage, and recent disability are used by some characters to discount her and invalidate her personhood is made explicit in the book without losing the story at all. That's because dealing with the aftereffects of the events right before the book started is the story, it's not some side plot or distraction. It's important and central to the story, and the role which racism plays is crucial to the book. 

*I received a free review copy in exchange for an honest review of this book. 

The Mistletoe Connection is about connection and relationships while snowed in with strangers who are all doing their best on Christmas Eve at an airport.

I had a great time reading this, even the few characters I didn't like as people were perfectly suited to the story and it felt like they all had space to grow. The tension was in how they'd use this opportunity to be stuck with each other, whether they were strangers, old friends, family, or co-workers. 

There were a lot of narrators but it was actually pretty easy to keep track of who was who, people were introduced gradually, with the early POV characters showing up the most, then other secondary characters getting a section or two from their POV later on once their place in the larger narrative was better established. The awkwardness in some of the couples was extremely relatable. I wasn't ever worried that something was going to turn out badly, but I didn't know what each couple's version of "okay" was going to be so there was a nice level of tension without it getting too stressful. Each of the pairs had very different dynamics without it feeling too much like a coincidentally different ensemble. Part of that is because they're at different points in life and thus have different kinds of relationships, so even pairings which could have felt similar due to some shared characteristic were instead pretty distinct. There were secondary characters who weren't in any of the couples which helped it feel like a real group of people at an airport and not the Coincidence Relationship Gauntlet. I especially loved the little girl who kept talking to people, every time she showed up it was wonderful and she reminded me of some little kids I've known. 

I like how the characters’ peripheral awareness of each other helps build a sense of space within the mostly closed setting. They’ll notice strangers near them or in passing and then the reader can realize it’s one of the POV characters. The web of relationships between the people in the snowed-in airport feel natural and become gradually more complex as the evening wears on. It felt like what would really happen if they were stuck together but weren't really forced to interact. The way that all the characters worked through something and got to a better place felt good. The endings felt appropriate for each character, as everyone ended up with a resolution appropriate to the amount of revelation possible in a single night, and most of the endings are happy, or at least more positive than their beginning.