I don't know if Kingfisher would have been my favorite fairy tale reteller as a teenager, but her warmth and sense combine to make her someone who speaks to me now on a very deep level. The world needs more people like her heroines.

I have no idea what I expected this book to be, mostly because I saw that Charlie Jane Anders of io9 had written it and she has excellent taste as a reviewer, so the content didn't really matter.
Which is good; I read the book and I'm still not sure how to describe it. Technofuturism meets magical realism, maybe? A triumphant story that takes place amid catastrophe? The young adult novel of two people who grow up, grow apart, grow together?
All of the above, I suppose. It was extremely enjoyable and Anders has an amazing talent for keeping her narrative matter-of-fact. The language of the narrative had the same cadence as verisimilitudinous fiction, but the plot was straight out of genre. And she combined them flawlessly.

This isn't exactly a fairy tale, although the mutated bones of one are clear in the narrative gaps. It's a fantastical and fantastic young adult novel that quietly and calmly thinks about young love and the curses of being a woman - one who looks beautiful, one who does not, one who wishes she was. The story is brutal, in its own way, but also shiningly kind in the possibilities that it offers beyond the question of who is fairest and what that does.

So Liu Cixin's trilogy is still brilliant science fiction. It feels like a juggling act that is impressive despite occasionally dropping a ball or two simply because of the amount in the air in the first place. It's a masterful display, even when it, like so many other works of science fiction, sometimes loses sight of its characters in the face of the thought experiments that categorize the genre: what if X happened?
Liu's trilogy is detailed, thought provoking and both dark and heartening at once. I very much look forward to the third book.

Man, I am behind on this series. Still amazing, still worth reading, still an excellent example of a character in a children's book who is Jewish and whose Jewishness informs her very existence, but whose story is not about being Jewish. We need more of these stories and the rich diversity they bring.

This book was, arguably, just as good as it's predecessor, but since I expected it to be really good and deal with complicated issues of theology, relationships, aliens, life, etc., I was not as blown away when it did so. Because I expected it to be really good and it was.
A worthy successor to a fantastic first book.

I was torn when it came to actually reading this book since I wasn't impressed with Priest's steampunk americana (arguably because I'm weirdly picky about that genre), but the story sounded so good. And Priest did not disappoint, this book was excellent and had everything I wanted out of a fast-paced, but richly layered YA novel.

City of Blades is the perfect sequel - it draws on what happened in the former, continues the overall arc and concerns of the series, but it never retreads the ground broken in the first book, preferring instead to do new and interesting things.
I think this series, along with Gladstone's Craft Sequence, showcase just how versatile epic fantasy can be. Both series take epic fantasy into almost contemporary settings and then play out the battles on those stages and it works so well.

Kowal shines as a short story author, I really enjoyed these and they rarely if ever fell...short the way her novels sometimes do. Her novels are decidedly enjoyable and I will keep reading them, but it seems clear that, at least as far as my tastes are concerned, she's at the top of her game here.

Glad I finally stumbled over the last book in this series - the library lost my hold and then I had a kid and so it goes - an enjoyable read that, thank God, had nothing whatsoever to do with Wuthering Heights.
And Connolly managed to do the thing where one characters keeps a piece of knowledge from another character even though it's a really bad idea to do so without making me want to punch them or making it feel like a plot contrivance rather than the kind of decision a normal person would make under the circumstances.
Also, baby wyverns are called woglets. Awww!