I'd say this is a hard book to read during war time, although it's not as though there have been extended periods of peace during my adult years. Just wars that touched me more closely and wars that happened...there.
Alefret is an extraordinary character and the fact that he is not unbelievable just adds to the experience of appreciating him and his commitments and the story of violence and non-violence Mohamed is telling.
It's just thoughtful and complex and everything about it feels deeply true. And I so appreciated her portrayal of disability and othering in this story, especially in how it shapes the people who live it.

But I kept trying to use this story to think about Gaza. Not as 1:1 mapping, but as a larger conversation about safety and desperation and what it means to win and the things that cultures commit to and cannot let go of. And yet I think the ending was unsatisfying and I worry that's because I can't imagine a real ending to these wars that never end.

Obviously I need to know what happens next. And it's always fun switching up perspectives in the land of romance novels. 
I feel like I somehow don't have a lot to say about this book. Hale continues to be very good at pulling no punches and the story is interesting and definitely does a better job ending the arc than the previous book one. But mostly it's just entertaining fantasy that could probably stand to be a bit tighter.

Any opportunity for a new Penric is fun, even if it is very obvious that Bujold is continuing her "what is the worst thing that I can do to this character" approach to stories.
Also "how bad of a situation can I put the sorcerer who can't kill into and still get him out?"
Could you imagine if Aish had Penric's skill with kiruv, though?

This series really does remain one of my "Holmes is extremely neurodivergent, duh" stories and I continue to enjoy it even if I keep wondering if the story will ever actually go anywhere.
In fairness, this is ALSO the problem with the original Sherlock Holmes stories so, you know, true to form.
And also true to Holmesian form, the goal of this book is not to figure it out yourself. It's to be entertained while Charlotte tells you how the somewhat unrealistic deductions work. That is the joy of a Conan Doyle story and it works perfectly here as well.

Still enjoying this series, still fascinated by the very early 2010s aesthetic in fantasy religion, which I think would be handled differently if written these days.
Did not actually like the audiobook version, but it was what the library had and I am impatient and can handle just about any narrator at 2x speed. But yeah, I prefer these books in written form.
Did really enjoy it though and, while it never surprised me in terms of plot, I was entertained along the ride the entire time.

I have been sleeping on Ginn Hale for reasons I still don't know. Also I should probably just cave and create a romantasy tag.
My main complaint about this book is that it does not end, it stops and then just picks right up in book two and, like, why even bother? (Probably print binding, but I digress.)
There's something very fun about reading a book written 14 years ago and noticing how the genre has changed - both the romance and the fantasy side - and which arcs are just absolutely essential.

Take as given my usual "short stories are hard to review" kvetch. All of these were strange and compelling in their own weird ways, although some of them stood out more than others.
What felt like it ran through all of them as a theme was the unicorn not as purity, but as the loss of something.
No paradise except the paradise lost.

I was so intrigued by Leduc's assertion that this isn't actually a work of academic fairy tale scholarship, although I may just have a rather different view of what is and ought to constitute scholarship these days.
She does the thing that I love where she analyses something beloved in a way that sees both why it is valued and loved and still clearly notices the flaws. She's also very good at giving the attempts to subvert both the credit and critique they are due. For that, I'll even forgive

her defense of the final season of GoT.

The thing that sticks with me, beyond the way she interleaves her own story and tells it as a kind of post-fairy-tale fairy tale, is the way she makes my favorite argument, which is that it's rarely the explicit values of a text that shape how we think, but the implicit and the normal/ized that are most integral to how we think. There's this big and messy and complicated conversation that looms over books when it comes to the obligation of portrayal - both in terms of whether it lands on the individual or the collective and also in terms of what exactly we take from texts. This book feels like an important piece of that conversation, even if it does not do so by taking a stand.

I love Cleric Chih and I so appreciate how clever Vo is in telling new stories and telling complicated stories. The way that Vo always plays with the story that the characters think is being told and the story that is actually told is always so good and fun and clever and I always put these novellas down impressed and delighted.