This is SO my jam. Diverse identities in a London that is historically flavored and inflected, but that is suffused with modern speech and sense of plot development.
Just, you know, really really fun. Perfect summer reading. Also, thank heavens for Kindles otherwise I would have to figure out what to do with the five paperbacks I'd suddenly accumulated.

This was really fun. Charles obviously knows both her romance novels and her gothics very well and her blending of the two was excellent.
Off to read another one!

This book is basically what happens if you took Holmes and Watson, made them gay (not, you know, that they aren't already) and turned them into Ghostbusters.
The great thing about that description is you now know whether you want to be clamoring to read this ASAP or not. It is exactly what it says on the tin and what it says on the tin is a ton of fun, ridiculously well-researched while also being super campy, and I really want this on TV in the style of Miss Fisher.

Oh, good. We’ve hit the regency. The regency hits back.
I love fops. Probably from spending too much time with Sir Percy Blakenely at a formative age. “Someone has to strike a pose and bear the weight of well tailored clothes...and that is why the Lord created men.”

This book is the best of the three...maybe it’s a middle book thing or maybe I just like watching them fight.
But oh man, the politics and the social commentary and the plot. I read a romance novel for the plot, you guys!
And for the Blake references because there’s a character who finds Blake’s engraving technique as interesting as I do and how do you not love that level of research!?

Speaking of reading for the plot...
This was my least favorite of the series from a romance perspective, but I loved watching all the narrative threads come together and also Richard was an idiot and needed to be told it.
So these books aren’t ACTUALLY designed as meditations on different forms of power disparity. They just happen to be.
The first book is about mentorship, the second is about both BDSM and the authority of class, the last is about employee/employer and also what constitutes respectable work.
The question is not whether such relationships can work—my god, man, it’s a romance novel, of COURSE they’ll work—but asking about the kinds of negotiations that go into making such things work. Can the members of a relationship create and thus grant equality, especially when the world thinks otherwise?

This was definitely a “what did I just read?” book.
It’s one of those books that is all depth with little surface. Spare, strange, uninterested in resolution; amatka rewards intricate study but, if you’re not in the mood for that, does rather leave you wondering whether it’s the book or your own brain producing all the interesting bits.

This book is packed full and overflowing with precisely the sort of pithy observations about the world that make one want to read it aloud to everyone in the vicinity.
I’d like to apologize to my tolerant spouse creature for putting up with that.
Time to go back and copy out all the passages I flagged.

So Novik is excellent and the novelette this evolved out of was delightful, which meant this was basically a slam-dunk.
But seriously, it was so good.
Novik has a gift for writing within the fairy tale framework and by fairy tale rules without necessarily adapting her narrative to the beat of the fairy tale plot. The denouements are not precisely where you expect them to be, what would ordinarily be the end of the story, the beginning of the happily ever after, is just the beginning. It makes for a fun ride that keeps the reader on her toes.
Also, there was this scene where two Jewish women are waiting on line to get into the city and get to talking and discover they are going to the same wedding because they know they bride and groom respectively and their non-jewish servant is nonplussed and I hav rarely felt more seen and known by a book than in that moment.
And Miryem Mandelstam is the best. I want to hang a portrait of her in our yeshiva.

This series was so much fun and this ending was incredible!
Also, someone please write me the fanfic where Aral Vorkosigan and Shuos Jedao meet on the field of battle.