I'm not sure this cover could scream "For fans of the Last Binding series" more loudly if it tried. Truth in advertising, though.
Also I couldn't tell if this book was trying to be Dickensian and just not actually succeeding or if the throwaway references to Dickens characters were one-offs. There's definitely something in the names that feels our old friend Charles, but not so much in the rest of the style. In the above ground plot themes, well, obviously.
This book takes more from Rosetti's "Goblin Market" (thank goodness) and is, overall, true to the story Rosetti tells of bargains made and narrowly avoided and the place of love and care in/against the power of the bargain.
What it doesn't do, that "Goblin Market" does, is transcend that world of give and take. I'm not sure it's trying to, but it may have been a book with much more to say if it had.
Not that I mind a book that is exactly what it says on the tin - what if we beat the villains at their own game?

 The fundamental problem with grabbing books off your TBR is that sometimes the mood you were in when you put the book on your virtual shelf is not the mood you were in when you pulled it off. This is probably not the book I would have chosen to get out of a week-long reading slump, but here we are.
I am always down for a good history of science book and this did not disappoint even if it is not for the faint of stomach. I am bothered by very few things, but even I had a couple of "I am peacefully knitting and reading about some SERIOUSLY weird stuff right now" moments.
Schillace is a careful narrator and tells this story with the kind of love that bespeaks special interest and a willingness to carefully opine without being judgemental. You don't get the sense that there's a torrent of opinion just waiting to break forth, but instead a carefully considered telling of a story that is, in fact, as complicated as it looks.
I had also forgotten how much of the history of transplant was about turning it into something acceptable and I'm almost tempted to dig back into the great brain death debate in Judaism. Almost. 

Lev Rosen's books are always delightful examples of their genres. I'll even forgive this one for having slight hard-boiled vibes because it turns out that everyone is actually soft inside here. Yolks on you!

My main critique is that I called whodunnit not based on the plot or clues, but based on the prejudice of the characters involved. Which I would not have been able to do had a few more people been assholes. Basically I could have used a little more messiness even though I understand the ambiguous utopia that Rosen was trying to construct. I get it, I just don't like it is, after all, the prerogative of the reader.

This book was wonderful even though it hurt. Or, to say it differently, this book could not have been wonderful if it had not hurt.
If you know something of how the US - both government and citizens - have treated the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, very little in this book will shock you even if it will appall you all over again. But it's Clarren's gift for weaving this story in with her own families story and making it a story of interconnection--not two things that happened simultaneously but two things that happened as a braided loaf--that make the book stand out.
And specifically the idea that all cultures have ideas of atonement and we ought to be looking to our own cultures for how to right these wrongs.
While it is true that indigenous ways of farming will likely be critical to our future survival, Clarren's story is just as much about being Jewish and hos the community of the future is not about becoming someone else, but about rising to meet the expectations that the best of our identity asks of us. It's not surprising that she holds the tension in this story between Israel as the Jewish promised land and the state as a national body that commits crimes against its inhabitants. Because it is, after all, the speaking of truth on the path towards repentance and a better future that animates every part of this story.
Also the idea of toveling in a frozen stream that had a hole chopped into it sounds AWFUL and I recognize that I am saying this as someone who gets cranky when she has to use a mikvah that has not been remodeled in the last 20 years.

Le Guin is so good that she didn't even write this book and it was still amazing.
Short stories are always the bane of my reading existence because I never slow down for them and so I end up with just flashes of ideas that won't leave my head - Ib and Nib, the lizard women, the past lives, the tension that winds through nearly all the stories that maybe what is is not all that could be and how do we, small and imperfect creatures that we are, get from here to there.
Which Le Guin never stopped asking either.

I should probably have known that I would be meh on this because hardboiled detectives are not my favorite, but also I wanted it to be interesting about theology in a way that it was...not.

Part of the reason I disliked it is that I find "this woman does terrible things because MEN ARE EVIL" to be a fundamentally uninteresting story. It's basically the women in refrigerators story, but in reverse and, like, why? Also I COMPLETELY missed why the killing spree happened. Like, what was the point? How was it supposed to help? The only read I could find on it were religious people are crazy and what a boring take?

The other thing that bothered me is, and I'm not entirely sure how to describe this, the shallowness of the faith. And I don't know if that's because my own faith tradition feels deeper because I'm in it and I don't see the depths here or whether the author's take on faith itself is also shallow and could have more behind it.
That was the part I found so disappointing. I wanted a story about faith and murder and I got a story about murder in a religious environment. They are not the same.

This book makes me want to write and a little makes me want to throw away the idea that writing is even possible.
It isn't.
We do it anyway.
I loved getting to know Solnit as more than the voice behind "Men Explain Things to Me" and all the stories and the care that she takes in telling them. She's so careful with the shards of her life and with so many lives; recognizing their sharpness and finding ways to make them into a mosaic anyway.
I love the way she uses language and I love the way her words are luminous.

To paraphrase Jane Austen - if I felt less, I could probably talk about it more.
This book is such a gift and the way that Piepzna-Samarasinha talks about community and the neverending beautiful hard and so often unrewarded and undermined work of building it is amazing.
They don't shy away from the complexity and they refuse to be childish in their estimation of what it takes to bring about a better world.
I loved being invited into their stories. I appreciated the challenges and the kinds of conversations that can only happen in and within communities rather than as performances for outsiders.
How can we move towards horizontal leadership, how can we think about community and systemic and individuals all at once, how can we make sure there is always space for the realities of disabled life?
It's hard to read this book now, four years into a global pandemic that began two years after the book was published, and wonder where we go now. But Piepzna-Samarasinha offers not a map, but a compass, with the hope and the promise that we all can find our ways.

I wonder if I would have liked this book better had I not read it in about 48 hours. It does go very quickly and the conceit is cute. Granted, I'm more arranged than accidental marriage, but YMMV.
Basically I had three issues with this book and two of them were from the latter half. (If I'd been annoyed at the beginning, I probably would have stopped).

1) I don't love how the neurodivergent MC was portrayed, although I feel differently about it knowing that this book is nearly a decade old. (Time flies, as they say.) I probably would have been less grumpy about it - both the "I'm not autistic, I'm on the spectrum" stuff and the fact that Partick seemed to actually have generalized asshole disorder that was less about what constitutes an appropriate remark and more about what would read as hurtful. I did appreciate, though, the extremely nuanced handling of "this is why I didn't want to tell you because you'd stop treating me like me", which was excellent.
2) The older I get, the less I find "the mob guy is alright, actually" to be an interesting story. I do think it is possible and important to hold the tension that people who do systemic evil can be incredibly kind to their families and communities, but I don't think this story succeeded in holding that tension or in reckoning with the evil that came in from a plot device. Which like, fine, romance novel serial. But also I can have my own standards if I want them! It is my right as a reader.
3) This problem could have easily been solved by two people having a conversation. The more I read, the higher my bar for this plot device. This does not clear it. 
I do wonder if this is also a decade thing - is it possible that finally, 5784 years since the start of the Hebrew calendar, we have outgrown this trope and this book is just from a previous era? I hope so.

This one is my fault - a story written as a serial has very repetitive sex scenes and, by the end, I was really just skimming them thinking "ehh, okay, this orifice again."

 

It was cute, I obviously finished it and extremely quickly so like, there's that. I just wish I enjoyed all of it instead of enjoying part and enduring the other part.

For some reason, I was expecting this book to be weirder. I do think the jacket copy set me up a little bit there.
Anyway, this was a fascinating view into some other profession's neuroses and I found the meditation on "who has a right to my story?" versus "don't I have a right to truth rather than seeming?" to be, ultimately, the part of the book that kept me coming back for more.
This book is a great entry into the "unlikeable but such a compelling train wreck" protagonist collection, which was also part of what worked. I enjoyed the story much more once I decided that whether or not Weir wanted me to like her, I was going to enjoy not doing so.