I can't tell if it was genuinely slow or took me over a week to read and therefore I experienced it as slow.
Today in "tea and heists, why didn't I like it?" books - 
I think some of it was the secret-keeping for plot purposes and I don't love when I notice that the third person close narration is inside a character's head but deliberately obscures information from the reader. If the reveal can't stand up to the narration, don't make it a reveal.
And some of it was trying to read in November 2024 so, like, who am I to adequately assess anything anyway ever?
Poor book; maybe if things had been different.

This book is…imagine if Gideon the Ninth had queer men as the central relationship instead of queer women and was also somehow less completely bonkers. This is both a good thing, in terms of readibility, and a little bit of a loss because it can’t quite hit the highs that The Locked Tomb reaches at its absolute best. 
I don’t think it’s trying, though. I think it’s aiming squarely at writing an unconventional hero and letting him shine. And it does that really well and with a great cast that I am willing to forgive it both some handwaving on the part of the plot and a map/terrain that feels like it has all the geographic integrity of a Catan board. 

Amazing how much reading you can get through on Yom tov when your kid refuses to go to shul for hakafot. 

Laini Taylor is definitely a good comp for this book - especially her own earlier work. Summers does a nice job with playing out the magical world and the movement through it, although sometimes this book feels a bit short on logistics and long on the wanting. 
It was good and also the most forgettable of all the books I read this weekend. Which is totally fine, not every book needs to live with you forever and I absolutely enjoyed my time with this one. But it definitely ended when it ended. 

This was an adorably delightful school romance set in—what might be the first ever—a magical school where, if relevant, I could imagine sending my children. The worst things these kids do is engage in underage drinking and break curfew. 
It was really interesting to have magic be a part of the texture of the world without it being a story about chosen ones or saving the world. It’s a boarding school romance at a magical school and the way magic informed the story and made it possible without really being the plot was actually great. 
Also they did the thing with the “take care of an egg for high school credit” except it was magicked to kvetch and that was just the most obvious of the ways that Valley was having fun with the whole premise. 

I loved this book precisely for what it did not do - provide detailed instructions for what to do. As someone who - like the author - both has something of a calculus and something of my own emotional reactions, I loved how carefully she looked at the question of emotions and love and the desire to be JUSTIFIED in the choices we make. She’s so good at peeling back the core of the conversation and asking what role love and dislike and pretense and the need to be right play in this conversation. 
Her read also points out all the ways that love and its poisoned alter ego hate are such an integral part of the conversation. And how often the breakdown comes between those who love still and those who no longer can. 
And how those of us who never loved that particular thing find the prospect of engaging with it incomprehensible. 
The fact that it was also a memoir about how we think about monstrosity and who we are when we are the judged and not the judge was just…exactly right. 
Also, Dederer writes parentheticals the way I do (before I edit them out out of fear that maybe I used too many) and I will forever love her for they. 

I cannot emphasize enough how delightfully adorable this book is or how much I needed it right now. 

Sometimes, you CAN judge a book by this cover. If the cover makes you think “ehh, not my jam,” you probably are not interested in this book. But if you look at the cover and think, as I did, “give it to me now”, you will not be disappointed. It absolutely lives up to the cover. There is tension, buckles are swashed, much pining is pined, and angsting is angsted. Also skulduggery and wool. 
Genuinely, this was exactly what it said on the tin and exactly what I wanted. 

I wonder what it’s like to read de Bodard if you actually imagine things and picture them in your head. Her work always feels incredibly abstract to me, but I’m not sure how much is me and how much is her. But she’s also such a fascinating storyteller. I keep trying to figure out how her books link together because they are very much “set in the same universe” but I always feel like I both get them and experience them as dreams that slip away. 
Good dreams, though. And, you know me, gotta love an autistic main character even if I don’t…adore the “everybody leaves me” story. 

Shoutout to whoever decided, in the description, to call this book penetrating. A+. 
I read this because it felt like a useful part of teaching hilkhot niddah and it was, albeit not entirely as I expected. It was a book that left me occasionally incandescently angry at the relative paucity of research on female genitalia and that left me wildly enamored of just how weird animals are and how many ways there are to create new beings. The…non-obviousness of the way we do things and the degree to which phallic power is fundamentally culturally constructed - given how wide a range the biology entails - is super interesting. 
Genuinely appreciated the sense of humor as well. Especially around the names. It was very well done and gives me also a sense of where the world is right now. 

I really like Steven Rowley, it turns out, and this was surprisingly good Yom Kippur reading. (I might argue that anything is good Yom Kippur reading if you interpret it properly—perhaps instead of a dissertation, literature students should be asked to find 39 ways to make meaning.)
Which is, in the end, doing this book a disservice. The story of how people come to terms with their lives and losses is sweetly done and Rowley handles it with a lightness that I think can be mistaken for shallowness, but that I think is actually just his commitment to the characters and the fact that they are not angsty people. Just interesting ones.