aOkay so I feel like I have to skirt a very fine line here. The reason this book is successful is that it is very serious about its nature as a remix. It takes a lot of elements and jettisons a number more and then plays around with it to make a story with...what if I had a Darcy of my own vibes and it's so much better than if it tried to be a faithful adaptation. (I tend to be harsher on faithful adaptations.) I struggled a little with the aging down of the characters (Lizzy was 20 and Oliver is 17, Austen!Darcy was 28 and Ardent!Darcy is...18 or 19? Somewhere in that range.) Just because of the part of my brain yelling "everyone here is TWO!" which just kicks in some times. The burden of having gone from reading P&P first when I was not yet 1 and 20 (I was 12) to having my child be closer to Lizzy's age than I am.

Two things it got absolutely right and upon which I judge all of my P&P adaptations:
1) Darcy is not cruel. He is socially awkward, bad at people, used to being used, and judgmental of others but he never sets out to be unkind. The arc of his relationship in the original is him seeing his behavior through her eyes and her seeing his behavior through his and both going "ohhhh, okay." Novoa absolutely got that here and his use of Oliver as himself and Oliver pretending to capture that part of Darcy's personality was incredibly well done.
2) The Lydia problem. Novoa more or less ignores the three younger Bennets entirely, which works out great. Basically, the Lydia problem is that Wickham can't end up with Lydia is he's *the worst* so either he needs to be less bad or they need to not end up together. Novoa takes the most liberties with the story around Wickham, so that all works out and no one is punished for being 16 and naive by being married to an awful human. 

The thing I find super interesting is that Oliver is no longer the prejudiced one, but the victim of prejudice. Which is what immediately makes Wickham stand out to him as evil; Oliver has a very fine-tuned sense of who would cause him pain and that makes it much harder to make him Wickham's dupe (and also I don't think that's the story Novoa wants to tell). So the story transmutes to move Wickham away from the younger Bennets and to make Oliver much more a victim of circumstances who must choose agency rather than an agent who chooses wrongly and must learn. It's also the hardest part of P&P - to make both Lizzy and Darcy sympathetic - and it's the part that Novoa, understandably, is least interested in.

 

I have one ongoing, main complaint with this book and it's that Austen's language is so elegant and delightful and whenever people rewrite her prose, my brain goes "but it doesn't *sound* like that". No one does sound like her, not really. And I don't think Novoa is trying; he's very deliberately remixing by taking elements of the story and playing with them to create something new and exactly right.

I loved coming back to this world and seeing it instead from the perspective of someone who has a very different place in it.  Johnson's ability to take those two perspectives and make both Cara and Scales seem like they have perfectly self-evident worldviews is fascinating, especially as they come into conflict.
This book was messy and heart-achy and lovely in complicated ways and comes the closest to actually answering the question of "how do you make the bad world better"? "How do you fight systemic, ongoing injustice?"
And what I appreciate most about the answer is that the book is willing to wince, but never to flinch. 

This book was adorable and fun and a win for interfering old women everywhere and I appreciate that. I also like how it did not entirely go where I expected, but completely worked and made me very hungry.
I'm also fascinated by the way that generational differences play out when it comes to what I can only think of as home upkeep and domestic tasks. (Also the relationship between comfort with doing something and finding it easy. But I digress.)
Also shoutout to excellent parenting of a neurodivergent kid on Vera's part.
It was exactly as advertised and I was very pleased with it.

This book was absolutely fascinating to me to read, as someone who has almost the opposite experience of divinity than her, hearing the way she understands her own mystical experiences and the role of both experience and the divine (and the pathologization of both) was, okay, interesting.
But it's completely her critique of monotheism and, specifically, the inherited hierarchy of western civilization that thinks that good/wise people believe in either 0 or 1 gods and any more than that is a moral failing.
And I don't think she deserves anything as shallow or facile as "an answer," but I do think that a) at some point we as a society should probably grapple with the fact that we use pagan/idolator the way Christians use rabbis/pharisees as rhetorical objects; b) the way that some of us monotheists have remade God in a way that lets us respond to her critiques of God by saying "God's not like that"; and c) the way that we treat the world as a thing whose awe-some-ness it is out obligation to demystify, explain, and locate primarily in the synaptic firings of our own neurons.
Also I would pay money to listen to the narrative perspective of this book duke it out with that of Halakhic Man.

About 3/4 of the way through this book, I flipped from finding the relationship between Fiore and Enzo adorable to oppressive. I’m not even sure I can point to it - beyond a certain amount of recreating sickroom drama every time Fiore was doing fine - but I found that Fiore grew and changed while Enzo just…was. And kept being. And in some ways gets worse about making choices for Fiore and that just frustrated me. I do wonder if I just wanted a more tightly edited book or a different one than I got. 

Takács is such an extraordinary writer and ey bring eir Judaism into the stories in a way that makes me not actually get hung up on weird questions and actually just embrace the realness because ey include but don’t infodump. It’s just part of the background fabric of the incredibly strange and moving and complicated stories. 

This series is very cute and I have two very specific issues with it. The first is Aladdin movification where characters seem to work through problems in the previous installments only to...not have done so as fully as it seemed like they had the first time around. Which is fine, psychological healing is complicated, but I would prefer we showed that not by jumping immediately to "expressed my feelings, feeling better!" in the previous book only to rework it now, but to acknowledge the incompleteness from the getgo.
And, like, I do like empowerment in stories and I'm also annoying about it because the fantasy that just understanding your *cough* stuff is enough to vanquish it is particularly pernicious even if convenient. (Fantasies aimed at men are muscle-power fantasies while those aimed at women are will-power fantasy and the latter need a certain amount of critique.)
There is, of course, the irony of critiquing a book that both depicts unrealistic female empowerment AND depicts the kind of dickwaffle who tears those fantasies down for...depicting the unrealistic wish fulfillment. Granted I'm entirely on board with the unrealistic wish fulfillment of kicking ass and taking names. It's just solving years of psychological trauma by thinking hard about it for about forty-eight hours that I find...frustrating.
Also, on the subject of wish-fulfillment fantasies, I would love a dude who did not become a jerk when feeling protective. Like if I can have any unrealistic fantasy at all, why not one of those!?

And this is still a very fun superhero pop psych series of novels that I will probably continue to read because, well, thems the books.

I enjoyed this one, same as the last one, but I also really struggled to get into it and I don't know why. I'm not sure whether it's just my own absolute exhaustion (not a surprise there) or if it never really cohered into the story I expected it to be.

This was a delightfully hard punching story that was slightly hamstrung by the back cover that seemed to hint it was a delightful romp with darkness underneath. It's not - it's a delightful romp through darkness that is entirely present and telegraphed from the beginning. So my expectations were mis-set.

This book was so wonderfully adorable I cannot even stand it. it was exactly what I needed and wanted from a mix of romance and fantasy. A+ use of tropes to tell a delightful story.