Sometimes I wonder if it's the book or me - maybe I shouldn't be reading anything when it's the first week of school for half the people in this house (but none of the ones able to stay home by themselves). Maybe expecting anything from anything other than an old favorite is unfair.
Or maybe this book just took a while to actually catch my attention. Sometimes the "these people are murderers, please start caring about them" is a higher bar than I'm necessarily ready to clear.
Once the non-assassin parts of the plot got going, I was more into it, but I had a hard time getting into the mindset of the book's morality.
Audiobook was excellent, though.

Academic main characters I have, in fact, met.
This was a classic Stephanie Burgis and exactly what it says on the tea tin. And, honestly, I will read basically any arranged marriage to "aww, they love each other" (at least unless it's too popular and then I refuse on principle, but that is a personal failing, I know, I'm sorry.)

I really like Acevedo's work in YA and this feels like it's on the same wavelength, just expanding the scope of what can be talked about and who is in the story.
This one braids together the thread of resilience that comes from the care that others take for you, the impossibility of a specific future with the certainty of a future, and the very real presence of what it's like to live among a community of women.
Which I think is so much of what Acevedo wants to capture, writing in the strong literary tradition of quiet magics.

I’m kind of a sucker for celebrity memoirs that I can at all relate to so the whole crafting for mental health thing is entirely up my alley. 
Come for the art, stay for the complex conversation about parents with mental illness. 
And, as usual, this is one of those that you should absolutely listen to because why not have Sutton Foster read her own story to you?

I wanted to like this book so much more than I did and it comes down to...3 things, I think.
1) The worldbuilding was way more interesting than the characters holding it. Teh whole corporate belief structure thing was fascinating and felt like there was so much there to dig into, but it's mostly just background to set up the plot and that annoys me.
2) I just had very little invested in the main characters. (The Incomparable review that touches on their nature as beings that prey on humans made a point, but I'm not sure that's it.) They also kind of felt like plot vehicles, maybe?
3) Right on the heels of of my "contemporary romance trope of seeing love as the reward for finding yourself, not the method by which one does" comment, this book

plays straight into the trope of romance as the thing that saves and, like, Talabi does kind of lampshade it, but it's still jarring.

. Shigidi and Nneoma's relationship frustrated me, and reminded me of a conversation about a completely different author that the men fall fast because the women have so much more to lose. And Nneoma's resistance is written more as a trauma response rather than something that feels like a real and reasonable evaluation of her situation.

I don't know, this one took forever and I ended up switching to audiobook because I kept looking for excuses to read other things. But I appreciated so much of what was in there; it's just that everything I liked was kind of in the background. Can we talk about the belief and mythology thing?

The thing about Casey McQuiston is that they can write basically any trope and even if I don't usually love it, I will absolutely buy it.
I'm not a huge second-chance romance person except apparently when I am. This was incredibly well done, in part because McQuiston let the characters grow on their own before bringing them back together and in part because the setting is one of those "of course anything can happen" settings. There's also this very "contemporary trends in romance" aspect to it, where love is not the things that offers you fulfillment, but love is—in some ways—the reward for finding yourself.

By being able to live without it, you earn it

and I'm totally on board with that and also fascinated by it in my larger "romance novels are extremely nuanced guides to a culture's values" theory.

Also I strongly recommend reading this book in the summer when there are foods that taste good available because the only part of this book when I wasn't salivating over the food and drinks was when I had a mild case of food poisoning.

Having read When We Cease to Understand the World, this book was less of an overwhelmingly weird experience, but it was still very strange and preoccupied with similar questions about the moment when math (and so arguably science) stopped being being beautiful and became (only) terrifying.

It's interesting to meet characters I knew only through their research as people and it's another perspective on WWII and the holocaust because this is also, somehow, a Holocaust book. (I mean, it's the 20th century, there are Jews, they're in Europe, there's only so much it can be avoided.) But the premise of the book, the argument it does not so much advance as play with: at a certain point, an encounter with technology from a person who begins to grasp what is going on behind it will break.

Also, this book does answer the question of where autistic people were. In European science departments, apparently.

I liked this book a lot and also I wanted to love it and mostly just...liked it.
What Link does so well in her short stories is make fairy tale logic operate in the real world in a way that keeps the latter under the auspices of the former. What frustrates me about this book is that I'm not sure that fairy tales were meant to be 600+ pages long. Some of that might be that Link exceeded the amount of time I was willing to be confused before the plot kicked in and some of it might just be that she's an exquisite short story writer and a good novelist.
And yet it's weird and so much of it is wonderful and the structure fascinates me and yet I still didn't adore it the way I wanted to.

This book. I see why it took her so long to become the book that it is. 
Kingfisher, following in many ways in the footsteps of Diana Wynne Jones, has an exquisite sense of the rules of fantasy AND knows that the most absolutely terrifying things in the world are rarely the magic, but the ordinary cruelties that we do to each other. 
Which is why ordinary kindness is what matters so much. 
Also, as someone who loves the Goose Girl tale and definitely thinks it is under-told,

I cannot fucking believe you made Falada evil. I nearly screamed. It was so smart and worked so obviously well and I could not even deal. Horses and roses, Ursula. I cannot. Also, I have no idea why I expected this book to have a low body count of named characters. No idea.<\spoiler>
I loved the geese, I loved the butler, I hated by which I mean loved the evil parenting - Kingfisher is just so good at expanding fairy tales to make them able to say so much more. 
This also felt like something of a callback to Ella Enchanted, with the framework of “obedience”. 

I’m not…entirely sold on the consistency of character for Elezar between this series and Lord of the White Hell, but I’ll forgive a lot for some seriously entertaining fantasy. 
It’s fascinating to me that these books feel like they get marketed as romance, when they’re much more in the genre of “epic fantasy always ends in either tragedy or a love match”. Hale was always a worldbuilder first and a romance novelist second.