I did like this book better than its predecessor, but I'm still not a huge fan of the American frontier.
I did appreciate how hard Carson worked both to accurate present the atrocities of how native peoples and Chinese immigrants were treated and to prevent the white characters from becoming savior figures. I'm still not as invested in this story as her previous trilogy.

Really interesting bunch of stories (except the second which was...less interesting). Chiang has this amazing ability to take an almost gimmicky conceit and work through it to turn it into a fully fledged story. Story of Your Life was a standout, but I also really liked "Liking What You See: A Documentary" and it's prescient in its ability to understand how the early 21st century understands the world.

So I didn't mind the "why is everything roman" as much this time - maybe because I had read fewer evil romans recently. I am now firmly in "why is there romance in this?" territory.
It feels contrived and, with one exception, feels like it only exists as character motivation for characters who would be equally motivated by friendship. Maybe if the romantic interest felt less hollow, maybe if it wasn't the guiding force behind everyone's behavior.
And it dragged at moments, and jumped weirdly forward at others.
Which is not to say I didn't enjoy it. I will probably still seek out the third one when it comes out and just pretend the romance isn't happening because the rest of the story is interesting and doing cool things with mythologies.

I was so so wrong for thinking this author wasn't for me. This book was brilliant, even better than the first, and I loved it.
Time to seek out her other trilogy and, if anyone else is (not so) patiently waiting for Scott Lynch's Thorn of Emberlain, I highly recommend this series to tide you over.

I enjoyed this book as a continuation of the elemental blessings series, but it didn't really stand out to me the way the previous ones did.
Partially, I found that Shinn seems to have less of a grasp on what constitutes Torz (or what makes Torz interesting) than she does for the other elements. So there wasn't that same sense of a character playing out her identity in the same fashion.
Partially, I thought Leah had it WAY too easy becoming a mother again. There's fantasy and then there's fantasy. Celia was a reasonably believable child. But Mally...it played into this fantasy of children as fulfilling for parents. Which, don't get me wrong, they absolutely are, but they are also people. Mally makes Leah feel better, never worse. She shows no resentment for her mother's absence, which is mind boggling. And I'm absolutely on board with Leah's behavior; she did everything right. But right actions still have consequences and I feel like we got none of those.
And then there's Chandran. Who I liked less and less as the book went on.

First there was the wife murder thing. And, like, I get it. She was evil. But in the larger context of literature, I feel like I read many more men whose murder of their wives is justified than women whose murder of their husbands for threatening them with violence is justified. Most women murdered by their husbands were just killed by evil men. And they get no vengeance. So fiction's constant reliance on the trope of justifying men murdering women, especially without the counter-narrative of women who are absolved and praised for rising up and killing their husbands, bothers me.
And secondly, Chandran has this annoying tendency to tell Leah what's good for her. And I understand his need to make his own choices, but that almost always shades into attempting to manage her emotions about it. Not cool, dude. So my investment in the narrative's extremely neat and tidy ending was rapidly dwindling.
If there's another book in this series, I'll probably track it down, but I won't be as excited for it as I was for this one.

It's an Anne Bishop novel with no sex. If you don't know what you're getting into with one of those, this is not the right place to start.
I have started every review of the books in this series this way and everything I've said up until now still holds true. But I want to turn from Bishop's handling of gender politics for a moment.
I'm four books into this series and I STILL can't tell whether it's a brilliant examination of imperialism or racist.
I think it might be accidentally both.
Here's the thing - the terra indigene are very clearly modeled on indigenous peoples, right down to the name. They also draw on the animal and shape shifter legends of indigenous people. They are under attack by the inhabitants of Europe Cel-Romano and the introduction that accompanies every book in the damn series recapitulates the first contact.
BUT, and it's a big one, the terra indigene are a fantasy of power. The shifters, the Elders, the ACTUAL OCEAN are the terra indigene. Humans are always here on sufferance. Unlike the Imperialist fantasy of dominance, this is the fantasy where the only humans allowed to stay are those who can learn to live in harmony, who can cooperate with those unlike themselves, who can submit to the strictures of living with the land and its stronger inhabitants. The narrative still turns on the fulcrum of power and dominance, but this time it's Nature's order, rather than human imposed might-makes-right, and while nature can be both altruistic and cruel, it is not duplicitous and that makes it better than humans.
The Others is basically the story of what would have happened had humans been forced to reckon with power in their attempts to conquer and subdue the world. The group Humans First and Last consistently gets what is coming to it and the moral is that those who put in-group survival above helping others and cooperation deserve all of what nature red in tooth and claw can do.
Here's the second but. The terra indigene don't stand for indigenous people. They replace them. So, first of all, the pristine Americas is itself an imperialist white fantasy and is problematic in pretending indigenous people never lived here. And second, if you read the terra indigene as stand-ins for the indigenous inhabitants rather than the mark of their erasure, then Bishop is playing into their dehumanization by, quite literally, making them animals (some of the time). Also a problematic imperialist trope.
At the end of the day, our sordid history is things that Europeans did to other humans. And while this series, told predominantly from the point of view of non-humans, manages to defamiliarize the human experience by making our priorities and attitudes look weird, it also relies on native erasure and dehumanization to do so.
Bishop also combines "city-folk are evil" and "anyone intolerant deserves to die" into the same story and I have to love her for it.

So sometimes I end up checking my to-read list for books to read and totally forget what it was about the review/cover copy/whatever that made it interesting in the first place. But I trust my former self not to misjudge my taste.
Anyway, once I got about 1/5 of the way into this book and realized it was shaping up to be a Cupid and Psyche/East of the Sun, West of the Moon style fairy tale, I was thrilled. Next to beauty and the beast, those are my favorites to see reworked and this book does a great job with the larger tropes while crafting a wholly Indian fairy tale. I wonder if south Asian folklore has its own version of AT-425 & 428.

About 20 pages in, this book went from "I have no idea what's going on" to "I still have no idea what's going on, but I need to find out right now, why can't I read faster?"
I picked this one up because it was recommended to someone else as a mix of Guy Gavriel Kay and Robin McKinley so how could I not? Neumeier shares Kay's sense of carefully constructing countries in conflict and McKinley's precision in deploying romance that is both subsidiary to the plot and enmeshed in it. But this is very much its own book as well - Neumeier's interest in articulating the magic behind her world and playing out its consequences through the text makes this book at times twisty and confusing, but always compelling and, by the end, completely un-put-down-able.

The third book was nothing at all like what I expected, which I should have expected after the second book was nothing like the first book. Liu continues to play out his ideas to conclusions that are simultaneously logically inevitable and completely incomprehensible.
This book worked better than the previous one - I'm not sure why - perhaps it was that the shift was less startling once it had happened once or maybe the way that Liu focused the narrative through the eyes of the characters worked better for me. (I will also consider that I prefer Ken Liu to Joel Martinsen, but I'm not sure there's any way for me to tell).
Anyway, I'm glad I finished the series and I think it will stick in my mind for a long time. It definitely scratches the "thoughtful sf" itch.

Welcome to the 11th hour Tor.com novella read, as one does at the end of the year. This was fascinating and had the spareness of a short story even though it lasted as long as a novella. There is something about the word count that does lend one to a story based more on conceit than character. It worked and I enjoyed it even though I rarely love stories like that though they intrigue me.