Everything about the previous book remained delightful in this one. Playing "oh, hey, it's that guy!" but with 19th century speculative fiction is one of my favorite games and Goss is getting quite good at writing the flavor of the times without getting too much into a Dickensian style or slipping up. And the conceit of characters interjecting into the narrative has grown on me since the last book.
Definitely my kind of book.

I adore this genre. Less CS Lewis, more L Frank Baum and Norton Juster, this is one of my favorite kinds of portal fantasies. It was clever and delightful and pointed and the puns were silly and I want adult books like this!

Still reading InCryptid, still entertained by the stories, still incredibly grateful to McGuire for writing the kind of book that you can curl up with after a stressful day and just fall into.

I love this series. It's everything I want my space opera to be...although I can't decide if the lower stakes make it more like opera or less.
Anyway, Chambers vision of the future is interesting, but she also understands that characters just being people in strange spaces is more than enough to drive a story and that SF needs its people of the future just...peopling.

So I didn't REALLY like this book, although I also didn't dislike it. (Dear Goodreads - "It was ok" should be three stars) The writing style and choices for the sisters was interesting, but the actual story was...okay, a long train journey should go somewhere and also can we talk about the animal soul stealing thing for a minute?
I'm not sure what I wanted from the book, I'm quite sure I didn't get it, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up reading the second book to find out if I can get it.

I really enjoyed Chokshi's work so of course I read her when she writes middle grade.
This was delightful and hilarious and I very much enjoyed reading it.

This was the first KJ Charles book I had heard of and it took me a while to finally read it, but Charles delivers as always.
She has an excellent sense of the balance between romance plot and adventure plot. All of her books are delightful in that respect.

There were Jews in this one!
Also plot and adventures and romance, but I was expecting that.

I can tell, somewhat, that this is earlier in Charles' oeuvre, although not in terms of quality. More in terms of the way she seems to buck the "and here's when X happens" rules of the romance novel in her later works.
But the themes of men negotiating relationships, obligations, and care remain a key part of the story. Along with all the other stuff, of course.

This book was fascinating and I really enjoy what Drayden is doing with genre-mashup and overall weirdness. It took me longer to get into than her previous novel, which may have thrown off my enjoyment a bit and meant that I liked it more on the intellectual level. The last quarter or so of the book, when it went from being interesting concept and build-up to straight up bonkers was by far my favorite bit and, while I appreciate the work needed to get to that point, it still felt like I was reading to find out what would happen eventually rather than turning pages to find out what happens next.