This is Ekaterin’s “Mountains of Mourning” story and, though it parallels Miles’ in many ways, it’s one that plays to her strength and awareness rather than his. It’s not about investigation, it’s about perseverance. That’s what Ekaterin does and, although she’s very good at weaponizing her persistence even in Komarr and has her chance to be Lady Vorkosigan gettin things done in Diplomatic Immunity, this is her story of actually becoming Lady Vorkosigan who is the future Countess and caretaker. It’s a fun and fast read.
Also, radioactive butter bugs.

Walton begins by warning the reader that she can’t really write short stories.
She’s...not wrong. Which is not that say the book isn’t interesting or that Walton’s “narrative as intellectual exercise” doesn’t work, because it works extremely well, even when the story is just a joke (see Jane Austen’s Letters to Cassandra for the absolute best of these).
This book is a cabinet of curiosities, curated to provide one fascinating snippet after another, but leaving the question of whether it exceeded the aim of its parts or diminishes them through decontextualization wide open.

I could not have asked for a better book to sit around reading yesterday when I couldn’t sleep. It went from being sweet and silly to suddenly poignant and painful in a moment and I loved all of it. Yoon’s short chapters and non-viewpoint character interjections build tension and immersion so perfectly, I honestly could not put it down.

I knew I had read the first book in this series and remembered absolutely NOTHING about it except that there was earth magic and a main character. So, you know, I wasn't actually wrong about anything.
It's still a really cute series. The main characters don't annoy me and the romance is handled very well.

I forgot that I knew that this was a trilogy so this book took me a while to get into because I expected it to resolve itself by the end of book one and so the pace was unexpected.
There's a thing that happens when one re/tells fairy tales in a contemporary framework where suddenly the whole descent into "everything is terrible" that marks the beginning of nearly every fairy tale about women becomes much more visceral. Loss of parent, loss of status, loss of autonomy no longer plays out in the distant language of myth, but the verisimilitude of the novel. Which is sometimes hard to read, especially if you are 2/3s of the way through the book and things continue to get worse.

Does God exist in this book? I always wonder why it is understood that the old gods and ways are real...but Jesus isn't? I mean, obviously he isn't, I'm Jewish, but the question stands for me in a funny way that, when we make fairy stories real, do we inherently turn away from monotheistic religion?

On to the next book! Especially if this is the set-up, I want to know what happens next.

I always find Valente interesting to read: she's an author whose diversity of genres leaves the reader wondering how her voice is going to come through so distinctly despite the ping-ponging of topics.
And of course it always does.
This can make her a bit niche; her writing is always powerful in its fullness rather than its spareness and you have to like that (i.e. not buy into the idea that the fact that most people use adverbs badly doesn't make them inherently bad). Valente knows description and her descriptions here are the whole story. Since we know what is going to happen in every story and, depending on our familiarity with the comics in question, can map every beat of the story, the narrative lands or falls based on the descriptions.
I think it lands every time, although I am probably like the worst reader. I know just enough about comics that I spend the whole time trying to figure out who Valente is referring to without knowing enough to appreciate every parallel.
Except Pauline's story. Oof.
The problem with a story of descriptions and a story about the stories we tell is that it just...sits there. The purpose of speaking is the speech-act itself and the resolution of the story is knowing that the story is told. The Refrigerator Monologues doesn't GO anywhere because, in its writing, it already went there. This does rather mess with one's sense of arc and resolution.

I really should learn to trust twitter. When so many people I follow describe a book as unputdownable, I should just plan for it.
Generation ships are one of the things in my wheelhouse and this one, with its mix of history and futurity, was excellent.
The politics are painfully real, the racial dynamics are incredibly well developed, and Solomon is unflinching in their portrayal of what was. And yet the science fictional elements, the promise of what might be, feel like both a redemption and a despair.
Ugh, it’s just really good.

Book, what the h*ck?
Don't get me wrong, in the best possible way, but what was this book? I almost need to fling it at other people and make them read it so I can process it.
Cashore does something fascinating here with genre and questions of what makes a story reasonable and creates verisimilitude and readerly expectations. But she also tells a story made out of disparate parts that only makes to the reader from the readerly view, which totally messes with one's sense of denouement when it's clear that the characters can't access the resolution.
But she also just tells a story--she isn't a late 20th century experimental author, so this isn't couched in Pynchonesque language nor does she explain what she is trying to do in the book with the book. She just does it.
I have this odd sensation that we respect books more when they tell us they're being weird and provocative--and so excuse themselves from telling a compelling story--than when books give equal priority to the narrative and so don't explain the conceit in order to protect the reader experience.
I understand why people don't like this book, but I kinda loved it.

I'm still waiting to see what this series becomes. The pacing works both for and against Brennan here--keeping us matched with Ree is a very clever storytelling device, but also I still have no idea what's going on...a state of mind not helped by my complete inability to remember things from one book to another.

This is another book whose fascinating conceit and extremely trenchant social commentary is embedded with the fairly strict framework of the YA novel. (Which I feel like I need to talk about as a genre, because YA is encroaching on mystery/19th century novel in terms of how it structures its beats and necessary stations of the plot. Note to self, do that somewhere else.)
This is probably a good thing; it's more than time for us as a culture to require thoughtful idea to only be expressed in certain genres. And I realize I say this as someone who grows increasingly grumpy at first person YA novels set in the present tense, and Goodreads really should have a two-tiered systems for "this is a great book for someone in the mood to read it and I'm not, but also I think the author is doing something brilliant and don't want to miss out because my brain-space isn't right for it."
There were a few moments where it felt Camille had been required by plot to make the wrong choices because plot, which annoyed me, and there was the inevitable "books come in from the hold shelf when they come in from the hold shelf and not when you are in the mood for the genre" and my brain really wants non-YA fantasy that won't take forever to read...which is a bit of a problem, because my shelves are basically sci-fi and ya at the moment.
Anyway, good book both in its ability to provide precisely what its genre promised and in the thinky stuff underneath.