I loved the first part of the book and I truly love the writing, I just can't read about other people's dysphoria right now. 

 It’s told in chunks, creating at feeling of jagged edges and snippets of a story. I liked it at first and then got to the

back-to-back detailed descriptions of birth and a stillbirth/miscarriage

, which is a hard no for me. Even if the rest of the book is fine I need to stop. 

THE KINGDOM OF COPPER cashes in on the tension heralded by every political machination and twisted promise in THE CITY OF BRASS. Nahri, Ali, and Dara are at cross-purposes with each other and almost everyone else as Daevabad's brutality towards the Shafit begets more violence.

THE CITY OF BRASS set up a complicated system of alliances, slights, centuries-old grievances, and current injustices. In THE KINGDOM OF COPPER, the web gets a few more strands like slave auctions and mass murder of the oppressed, then pulls the strands tight to slaughter whoever gets in the way. It’s intricate, filled with conflicting allegiances, friendships, and hidden family. There’s some political theater, but almost every gesture carries behind it the threat of real violence against a plethora of minor and secondary characters, stacking death and misery higher and higher until the main characters can take it no more and the bloody showdown commences. There’s always another way that someone was terrible a long time ago and now a new person is ready to kill in the name of the long-dead. Three protagonists, all utterly convinced that their way of doing things is the one that will work, and a bevy of secondary characters all with their own deadly plans that cross and combine in unexpected ways to drench the city in blood.

I love the world building. A lot of the backstory was set up by the first book, but they live long lives and the pace at which new revelations occur is just right. In a world where there’s someone who knows what happened and might even have been there, it’s a matter of having the right protagonist ask the right question of the right person at the proper time… usually after a different protagonist tried to learn the same thing and was rebuffed. It’s a layered style that keeps any one character from knowing everything while making sure that by the time the reader gets the answer there’s been enough of a build up that it feels like a revelation. It even works when one character keeps trying to figure out something one of the other two already knows. Ali is my favorite, but together he, Nahri, and Dara combine to cover enough of the story’s angles to leave me very happy as a detail-hungry reader.

The pacing is excellent, the conclusion is stunning. I loved every minute and I’m ready to read the final book.

NETWORK EFFECT finds Murderbot summoned to help various associates and not-friends who are in danger and in need of help, with lots of Targets to shoot and interfaces to hack.

As the first full novel in the series, Network Effect handles the transition from novella to novel beautifully. It expands the scope and feel of the characters while still keeping things connected to the earlier books. My favorite thing was the addition of new point of view characters, it was strange but cool to get perspectives other than Murderbot, especially since they have some very specific similarities while obviously being distinct characters. Murderbot itself was delightful as always, it’s really grown throughout the series in terms of relating to other entities and figuring out what it wants, slowly becoming proactive rather than reacting against what it was ordered to do before. As usual for Murderbot there’s danger, rescues and heist things, which were all great. It really feels like a longer version of a Murderbot book, which is perfect.

This doesn’t specifically wrap up anything from the previous books, but it does continue developing the definitely-not-friendship between Murderbot and Dr. Mensah, which is noteworthy given how little time they spent together this time around. The main storyline starts here and wasn’t present previously, it’s definitely its own story, with the main plot being pretty self contained. It’s not the last book, and at the end it clearly leaves something for later books to pick up as Murderbot starts to picture a life for itself and gets an unusual offer. I mentioned before that there are some additional narrators, because of plot reasons they have a lot of similarities to Murderbot, but they are differentiated in some cool ways. This would make sense if someone started here and didn’t know about the rest of the series. The first four novellas were a set telling a complete story, while this volume is pretty self contained. Everything you would need to know in order to understand what’s going on gets explained, partly because Murderbot has to provide some explanations since the other characters mostly were not around in the other books. That means that Network Effect technically could be read by itself, but if the plot description intrigues you you should definitely start with the first novella.

This is a great entry in a fun-to-read series about sentience, personhood, and self discovery in space and on various planets.

EQUAL RITES is the origin story of Discworld’s first female wizard, and her journey to grudging acceptance in magical society.

The narrative style is wry and witty, the unnamed narrator assuming that the reader is from our world and not Discworld, which provides space for funny comparisons, metaphors, and other observations. The narrator knows more than the characters in an absolute sense, but consistently uses that knowledge to provide humor and context. 

Most of the characters start out with some sexist assumptions about how things ought to work, and the point of the story is them realizing the shape of those assumptions and questioning their validity in the face of a child whose existence refutes them absolutely. The cadence of the physical journey and the mental transformation blends together into a well-paced story. I liked it and I’m looking forward to later developments in this slice of Discworld.

I must briefly review a few caveats, however. This stands out as a book with several canonically fat characters but it does not equally mention when characters are thin, leaving the impression that fatness is strange and noteworthy. There’s also a comment about weight loss that technically fit with the moment but was uncomfortable to read and really unnecessary. The other thing is there’s a character with an obvious stutter who is portrayed as being grateful for other people interrupting to guess his next word for him, and then the stutter is magically cured at the end of the book. There are several scenes of him being interrupted while speaking, making it a running gag that ends abruptly once he’s cured. When compared with the subtle portrayals of characters gradually confronting and untangling their sexist prejudices, the handling of the stuttering character stands out as likely being ableist rather than being a fictional portrayal of ableism.

THE CITY OF BRASS is a fantasy balanced on a knife's edge, with a prince and a con artist working at occasionally-aligning purposes in a city filled with djinn and Daeva, with the partially human underclass just trying to survive.

This generally avoids infodumps by making sure that, when exposition is necessary, it comes in the form of telling someone information that’s truly new to them. Sometimes that’s a briefing for an unfamiliar situation, other times it’s a story around the fire. A lot of these explanations happen early on, and it seemed like a bit much at first (there are a lot of tribes, for one), but the main narrative only demands consistent recognition of three or four tribal names so it wasn't overwhelming once the story got going. The two main characters have very different lives and knowledge bases, and that works together to give the reader a fuller picture of the world and the secondary characters. 

I love the political wrangling and intrigue. Ali is pretty blunt, surrounded by much more subtle players with complicated aims, and there are a few places where people use insider terms to tell him what’s going on but he doesn’t realize that a double meaning is involved. Later when Mahri becomes immersed in it she's a much savvier player with the information she does have, and I'm looking forward to how she handles things as the the trilogy progresses. I love heists and thieves, so having Mahri the con artist as a protagonist is a treat. She's self confident but wary of the situation, and that blend of prowess and uncertainty is truly delightful. There's something great about taking a person highly skilled in one arena and dropping them into a wholly different one that brings out their known and unknown strengths in intriguing ways. Dara isn't a point of view character, and I think that's because he knows too much to be a good narrator. The story is so much richer for his presence, but he's stingy with information, doling it out only when he thinks Mara needs to know something, which is often well after he's acted on the knowledge. This leaves her to pick up the pieces each time, in turns fond of and exasperated by him as he drifts in and out of the scene.

The ending is rather shocking, managing grief and triumph as Mahri and Ali have to deal with sudden changes in the last chapters. It's not a twist of plot as much of the inevitability of consequence, as things that had been a little bit wrong for a while suddenly get out of control. I'm excited for the next one, I need to know what happens now.

SHATTER THE SKY features a teenager on a quest to rescue her girlfriend and hopefully bond a dragon along the way.

The worldbuilding is good, it errs on the side of not giving much information. It suits the somewhat sheltered protagonist but does mean that I didn't come away feeling like I could say much about the setting beyond a history of conquest, imperialism, and the use of dragons to consolidate and maintain power. Since this is a quest undertaken by someone leaving home for the first time with rescue of a loved one as the main goal, it didn't need a whole lot more than we get, and it works. As for that quest, Maren matures and changes at a significant but believable pace, I like the relationship that develops, and the stuff with the dragons is handled pretty well. If you want a queer fantasy about subterfuge and dragons that doesn't overwhelm with backstory, definitely try this. I generally prefer something a bit denser, but this was a lot of fun. My favorite part is right after Maren enters a town for the first time and has to figure out how to look and behave in a new place pretending to be someone she's not. A lot of important context is conveyed very skillfully and quickly in a few brief scenes, and it's great.

I love the ending, I'd been worried that one of the relationships was going to get dropped once the questing portion was done but it looks like this book sets up the possibility of even more in book two. I'm looking forward to reading whether the sequel delivers on that promise.

A WIZARD'S GUIDE TO DEFENSIVE BAKING is about a city so broken that the only one who can save it is a teenage baking wizard who should never have had to step up.

There's a lot of fun moments here, with many cool and strange ideas like "sentient sourdough starter" and "wizard who controls bread", though it's ultimately not a lighthearted story. It's sometimes zany, but the more Mona has to do to save everyone, the more she asks why it has to be her. Ultimately the answer is that everyone else who should have done something fucked it all up. That tension creates a mix of desperation and whimsy that is entertaining, thought-provoking, and very fun to read, then full of exhaustion as Mona is stretched beyond what she can bear with very little relief.

This author mostly uses this pen name to write thrillers and horror, so at first I was confused that something with this premise was published under T. Kingfisher. And then the other magickers began disappearing and I understood. With a little different focus and without the big battle, this would easily be a horror story. As it stands, it starts with a murder and continues steeped in death but doesn't quite have the full atmosphere (nor is it trying for that genre). It's dark and strange, in a "laughing while trying not to die" kind of way, with a meditation on the idea of medals and heroism that is truly moving.

I loved it and I wish it had a sequel, but for Mona's sake I hope this land never needs another hero.

 The opening is exhilarating and immersive, explaining things in a way that makes sense for this character and this world. I felt thrown into the story with a lot of context to pick up quickly and it works really well. Unfortunately I just can't handle reading a book right now which has an epidemic as a central feature, especially not one that has vastly different effects along class divides. Hopefully I'll circle back for this one in a year or two, I just can't right now.