This was a lot of fun. Ahdieh has a very specific style that permeates her books and while the romance was a bit silly and precipitous, the setting more than made up for it.

This book was delightful and, although I prefer Okorafor's writing for adults, I'm glad I read it to catch up for the Hugos.

Murderbot remains a really interesting series and, in the great tradition of Martha Wells, it's easy to forget that she's doing something really interesting in the genre because of how understated her writing is.
Her take on AI is the mark of a sea change in how we think about artificial intelligence and her ideas of sentience are fascinating...but easy to miss because it's also a plot-filled sf novella. It's a book that rewards both the quick read and the post-read thinking about it.

I think I like the idea of this book more than the actual book. To be clear, I quite liked the book, but I kept expecting it to do something...more.
It's not that kind of book.
Like Wells' Artificial Condition, actually, it's the kind of book that expects the reader to do the thinking with the material it provides. So the story is about transitions and the choices people make and the way we grow as humans--and the omniscience of the narrator distances the reader from the people making the choices and invites us to analyze them and sympathize with them rather than empathize. But the premise of the novel and the dissolution of borders is not so much unexplored as deliberately left blank. Genre fiction wants to talk about exactly how and why and what the global ramifications of such things are. But Hamid is astute in his focus and his understanding of how humans in the thick of situations respond.
This is a book that gets better the more you talk about it. The book inspires conversation and grows in the talking and, I think, is only 2/3s of a book if you just put it down when you are done.

:D
This book made me happy, which surprised me since I was expecting not to like Tess. Mostly because I have, historically, had a hard time with characters who make terrible life choices. Tess worked for me--I may finally be old enough to appreciate why 17 year olds make terrible life choices (rather than needing to justify my own) or Hartman was successful enough in painting the layers of misogyny and culture that ensnared Tess that I understood why her and my perspective were so divergent.
Anyway, this was delightful and it felt like a return to everything I liked about Seraphina.

Hugo voting closes imminently and I am not. done. yet.
Anyway, Okorafor's sequel works even better than the first book. It's very fun to see her move the beats of the school plot/portal fantasy to West Africa. I love the bildungsroman when girls get to build themselves and this did just that.

I feel like the word tour de force gets thrown around a lot when it comes to this book. Turns out its for good reason. Every story in this book was spectacular. Granted, I still hated the CSI because it was so not to my taste, but I could tell that Machado was still doing something brilliant even though I didn't like it.
The rest of them. The Husband Stitch was genius, Eight Small Bites made me want to cry, they all were just such good examples of...not horror, but the horrifying.

I am 2/3s here for this book and 1/3"why is Elias the POV again!?"
Laia and Helene are amazing and brilliant and doing really cool stuff and Elias is...chugging along until a plot appropriate point for him to get his act together.
Anyway, come for the epic women, grudgingly get through dude.

Calling Hardinge a YA novelist is something of a misnomer that, I think, is a result of her writing young women as her main characters and specializing in a genre that had its heyday about 230 years ago. Her books are certainly modern and feel as though they were written by a contemporary author, but she is a gothic novelist of the highest caliber. Her work is shadowed, gloomy, haunting and haunted, and centers on a young, vulnerable female protagonist trying to find her place in the world without the world destroying her first.
Because Hardinge is a 21st century, she often bucks the trend of the marriage plot and her heroines are often capable in a way that your average 18th century gothic heroine is not (with exception).
But Hardinge manages to give me the gothic shivers every time. I love it.
I'm not sure this book was as revelatory as "A Face Like Glass", which is the first book of hers I'd read, but her approach to possession and ghosts is genius and the way she tells the story is just perfect for the genre.