Why do I enjoy Peter Pan retellings so much given how much I feel like I have grown out of the original...
Well that's a question that answers itself.
There is something nice about the attempts to logic the nonsense that is Neverland, which this book mostly does not do, but allows it to be what it is. And also just, it's a very smart twist to the original to make it about trans masculinity and the dream of being a boy forever hits differently when its dreamed by the eldest Darling child.
Also the dedication was perfect, no notes. And set the tone for exactly what to expect from the rest of the book. I really did appreciate, though, how the story also deconstructed childish notions of masculinity versus more mature ones through the dreams of the characters. Which is also why the romance worked.
Anyway, it's a very full book for its length and I really enjoyed it.

Weird how a book written 11 years ago about events that happened 13 years ago is absolutely history.
Low lights definitely include getting rid of abortion rights as an example of a thing that Republicans might pander to their base about but never do and talking about the riots of 1968 at Columbia as "remember when people were actually horrified by universities setting violent police on their own students?"
I'm not entirely where Graeber is ideologically, although I continue to find his way of seeing the world completely fascinating. (Perhaps what I lack is the courage of my convictions. And Graeber is also a cautionary tale of how easily institutions can banish someone without lifting a finger. So there's that.)
I was a student on the other side of the country when the Occupy movement really took off in NY (speaking of things that are history now).
This book is both a cautionary tale in writing for the future in the present and also a prescient vision of the choices coming up and how bad it can get if we keep going the way we are. 
This book makes me want to imagine an anarchist classroom.

This is one of those books where the acknowledgements is an integral part of the story. And I loved (and also lowkey screamed) at how this book begins in a way that seems like it is making one point as a continuation of the previous book (victories for justice don't last forever) and turns out to be going in a much different and more complicated direction. It's not precisely a book for loving, but it is so clearly a book for appreciating and one that will absolutely stick with me. It's a book that hurts, but only through its realness.

It's so hard to rate or talk about a book that you read because it is formative and everyone tells you to read it because of how it shaped them. Those are the kinds of books you need to just trip over and find yourself in rather than set out to read to find out what all the fuss is about.
I liked it and it was so careful and interesting and doing so many things in such a short space of time and ALSO I strongly suspect that if I had not been waiting for it to be careful and interesting and do things I would have loved it.
Still - the story itself and the way Halla slips in and out of dream-time and myth-time and history and plays all of those things together to weave a story about what it means to be human on the outside is so fascinating.
Also it has an A Wrinkle in Time feel to it in the way it approaches the girl's bildungsroman AND in the way that it's not Christian but it's not...not Christian.

I've been looking forward to this one since Schillace started talking about it on social media (which was at least one social media platform ago...) and I really enjoyed it even if a couple of moments were straight of out my autistic nightmares of failing to perform the correct feelings appropriately for the person whio is strongly judging me for it.
It was a very fun and enjoyable example of British mystery.

The author LIVES. Sorry, Barthes.
Tolkien criticism is so interesting because it so obviously resists an approach that lets the author be dead and that is both to its credit and occasionally its detriment.
Neither of which matters because Fimi tells us precisely what her stance is here. Like biblical criticism, she's untangling the layers of Tolkien's life and how that leads to complexities and contradictions and just the interesting evolutions that happens to Arda as it grows.
My favorite part, by far, was her refusal to take Tolkien at his word on things like his disdain for fairies, his order of operation between the literary and the linguistic.
But it general it was a super interesting portrait of both a man and his texts and how knowing the context for the former can enrich the latter.

So I'm just not going to talk about the Space Jews because I've already listened to the always thoughtful and trenchant critiques emerging from WizLes (the Wizards versus Lesbians podcast, for those of you who don't read all my reviews,) and I'd basically just end up repeating what they have already said.
The thing that bothered me the most was actually not the #SpaceJews part of the religion, but the frustrating experience of encountering a complex and carefully constructed mythology and the people who are beholden to it WITHOUT ANY SENSE OF IT AS A LIVING THEOLOGY. Where did it come from? What is the Godfire and how did it manifest? Why do people believe these things? What DOES Chono believe that is her strong faith that gives her strength? How did this become everyone's religion? Why does the sectarian natur eonly matter in some case? I've gotten spoiled by authors that either make their gods manifest or are just extremely thoughtful about what belief looks like and this book has so much god adjacent content, but the absence of like any meaningful engagement with it as religion frustrated me so much.
Unfortunately the story of an absolute monster destroying herself was super compelling and I enjoyed a lot of the rest of it. But not quite enough to mask my ongoing irrituation.

I received a review copy of this book from a publication so my actual review will be linked here once it goes live.

I've been having a little bit of a medieval history moment in the past year or so and this is obviously another book in that wall. Ramírez tells a number of fascinating histories of the women whose lives in the middle ages were so much richer and more complicated than they are often portrayed as being. She's not trying to be comprehensive, which I appreciate, but to complicate the simplistic narratives that we have been told. She's relatively good at not sugar-coating her main characters, although one would not entirely be faulted if one came away from the book with the impression that things were objectively better for women in the Middle Ages than they were in the centuries between the 17th and 19th, which I think is also a overstatement of the case. (The 19th century remains the bugbear of our understanding of every century that came before it.)
It's also very Christian-centric and I would love the Jewish version of this book, if we knew enough women from before the 16th century to write it. But I still so appreciated both the stories and the way that Ramírez does her best to balance what we can know, what we can only speculate about, and what we owe historical figures when it comes to imaging how they might have experienced their own world rather than purely seeing them through our own eyes.

Every so often I find myself in "did I not really get what this book or doing or did I get it just fine and not entirely like it"? The entwined narratives of this novel caught me that way; I kept wondering what exactly was behind the meta-commentary choice. It definitely added to the experience of the novel and the way it called attention to specific things - and it rewards reflection, which I guess is a net positive. But it feels like meta-text on the text rather than entirely integral. I wanted it to be doing more.
The internal story was twisty in all the right ways and I very much appreciated how it worked itself out, coincidences aside. It's not a mystery novel without coincidences.