I have no idea what Shinn set out to write, but the series she wrote ended up being an extended meditation on how there is no such thing as protective violence outside of self defense. So many of the stories circling around the main characters in these books are how you can't hurt others to keep those you love safe. Even if the others are hurting them.
This one is probably the most explicit on the "bad magneto, no supremacy" front, but what fascinates me is that Shinn certainly has a fair amount of violence that is necessary, but it's fundamentally a story that says that violence is never care, even if it's necessary.
Which, given how often DV appears in her work, suggests there's something really interesting here.
Anyone have a paper they want to write?
Also more shape shifters and romance and puppies, but like, that's table stakes for Shinn.
At least no one needed to invent the car in this series.

I completely forgot to record and review this when I read it so here I am now, trying to remember what I thought of it.
Beyond liking it and finding the entire premise to be utterly brilliant.
We can leave it at that.

If, one day, I find myself able to write 1/10 as well as Abdurraqib, I think I will be satisfied with my prowess.
He's so good that I, well, I deliberately sought out and listened to a book about basketball which, if you know me, tells you all you need to know.
And it's not that the book is about so much more than basketball - which it is - or that Abdurraqib has a gorgeous sense of rhythm in his prose - which he does. It's that even the basketball sections were beautiful and compelling when he told them.

If the previous book was about "what can we fix by caring?" this book is about all the things we can't fix simply by caring about them. And, instead, how to keep caring anyway and live with that grief.
A diptych in how to hold on and how to let go.

I made a throwaway comment in one of my earlier reviews of a Shinn book that I was noting how often frank representation of domestic violence and those who experience and survive it appear in her books.
And that's not what this book is about. This book is about living despite, but a significant part of the narrative is a secondary character's experience of domestic violence and Shinn has a very clear-eyed view of why people stay and also how people can help. These books in particular are small stories - no one is saving the world, just each other here. But it feels like one of the things that Shinn's stories are quietly working through is "how do we make the world better by caring?"
Also they are romances, which is kind of another way of asking that question.

A delightful book; I have basically nothing to say about it as a story because the important part is in the telling and the characters so let’s just let the story sit.
2 notes:
There’s a thing that happens in stories that use magic as both a thing and a metaphor for marginalization where magic and its power ALSO becomes the mechanism by which marginalized groups fight back and there’s always so much to unpack there when the power is made real and threatening and also the path to liberation.
IDK, there’s a lot to unpack here. Also how we fight back when we can’t just

restore the monarchy, thanks Tolkien for giving everyone very high standards</spoilers>.
Also that acknowledgement note. He’s right but DAMN.

Leckie is SO GOOD. I love how much so many of her stories are about what it means to be...whatever it is that you are. Each of them is so weird and interesting and rich.
I want to go back to her God stories. In particular, the transactional nature of her deities are such a wildly useful narrative for thinking about HOW we relate to God and what exactly does it mean.
There's definitely something there with חותמו של הקב״ה אמת...
My brain delights in her stories.

I cannot express how much this book felt like it was written precisely for me. Ballads, Faerie, grammar puns and Gramarye, a Tam Lin reference, a story about stories and naming and speaking aloud and UGH. It was so good.
And then the audiobook goes and makes it even better by including performances of the music by the author and her sister. This book has reduced me to incoherent screaming, but in a good way.

The "Thank God Sharon Shinn has a back catalogue" experience continues apace. This is another one of her "How do people become themselves?" stories and it's interesting because, if it wasn't Shinn, I would have expected there to be a lot more gender in this story than there actually was. It feels like there's a lot under the surface of this story, but that's not the story Shinn is telling.

Still keeping track of how often domestic violence appears in Shinn's stories. She always takes it seriously, but I think it's been in all three books in this series. Probably because lies, truths, and dreams are all about the situations people can't escape. It's specifically the domesticity that makes it so interesting

I...should have seen the end coming and I appreciated it, but also....yeah, a surprising lack of gender.

How dare she be so good? How dare she also write such weird and interesting and complicated and everywhere stories in the process.
Why is it so much easier to talk about why bad books are bad than to talk about why good books are good and stories about stories are the hardest of all.
I loved this and I loved that it used narrative to talk about hard things specifically because polemic is too shallow to have meaningful conversations about creativity and story and disability and family and culture and race. So instead Okorafor gives us a story layered within a story layered within a...it's stories all the way down.