I wasn’t even sure if I would like this book, but I spent two days swept up in the big queer soap opera of it all. It’s emotional, scandalous, romantic, and tawdry in all the most captivating ways. Worth the long wait, even if I probably should have jumped on the hype train sooner.

Full disclosure: I am, to use a highly technical term, a giant lesbo, so I’m not exactly the target audience for this one. I don’t seek out romances between men and women anymore, not since I came out. But I picked this one up because of the trans rep, and I’m glad that I did, because Penny Aimes is one hell of a writer. She took me for a whirlwind emotional ride and introduced me to the most intense book crush I’ve ever had.

Because jeez, April had me pining from page one. A tall, nerdy sub who plays D&D and drops Terry Pratchett references? I was a goner. I wanted to give her the world. And watching Dennis, a supremely good guy, work for the relationship and to make her feel like she deserved the world, kept me turning the pages. I rooted for them both so hard, and seeing them succeed in their lives together and separately was so satisfying. (Even though I was jealous of Dennis and wished I could be a romance novel millionaire instead of a humble real-life librarian.

After a certain point, I couldn’t stop reading because I was afraid a twist I did not want to happen was coming, and I had to find out. Thankfully, it didn’t happen, so I can confidently recommend this book as a page-turning mystery with characters so likable that after awhile I cared far more about their well-being than whodunnit.

If I have a gripe, it’s that I wish books with autistic protagonists would just be up front about that instead of calling them different or special or refreshing or any of the other adjectives autistic people get assigned (when we’re not getting assigned much more negative ones). Are autistic characters only marketable when it’s not explicit? Are authors/publishers afraid of doing autistic representation wrong, so they want plausible deniability? Autistic people can tell when you’re writing one of us, so just say that’s what you’re doing! I, for one, am more likely to pick up a book when I know I’ll probably relate to the protagonist, and I get annoyed when I have to figure out if a book is hinting at autistic rep based on vague jacket copy about people who are picky, special, different, orderly, etc.

There is little that I love more than queer manga, and I'm always on the lookout for more, so when I heard about this series on Book Riot and saw that my library system owns it, I had to check it out. This first volume felt like the perfect start to a series, raising questions about the characters, their identities, and their relationships that made me want to immediately continue onto the next volume... which I absolutely did.

A quick and bittersweet novella about a budding romance between an asexual AI repair tech and the robot who has spent nearly 300 years running a tea shop and grieving her former owner. This was not exactly the cozy reading experience that I was expecting; one of the protagonists deals not only with loss but also with hate crimes committed against her because she is a robot, and there are some heavy implications regarding the legal status and treatment of AIs. (This topic has been on my mind because I recently re-watched all of the Matrix films as well as The Animatrix in preparation for The Matrix Resurrections, so maybe it stuck out more to me than it would to other readers.) That said, I loved the tender moments between Sal and Clara and the way Katz writes non-human characters. I would have happily spent more time in this world.

I recently binged the anime and was thrilled to discover that my library system has the manga so that I can binge it, too. I really appreciate how the series portrays Komi, who struggles with situational muteness, and her adventures as she expands her social circle, especially the way that her friends work with her methods of communicating. While the series doesn’t say that she’s autistic, she definitely seems autistic to me, so of course I find her endearing and relatable. Looking forward to reading more, and to the second season of the anime.

I’m a casual but heartfelt Hayao Miyazaki fan—I haven’t seen all of his films, but the ones that I have seen have really stuck with me over the years. So I was interested in reading How Do You Live? because of the Miyazaki connection.

It’s a book with real heart and solid values that are as relevant now as they have ever been. I agree with my friend Garrett that it would make an excellent graduation gift. Yoshino’s awareness of the connections between people would be a good antidote to the individualist, “go out there and show ‘em how it’s done” messaging that a lot of grads hear (or at least, my fellow Millennials and I did).

As the series progresses and introduces more characters, the quality starts to vary from volume to volume. The ones that I love, I really love--mostly the ones focusing more closely on Komi and Tadano--but some of the others are just so-so. This was one of the so-sos for me.