This was exactly as adorable as I expected it to be and this just felt like a great, iconic Cat Sebastian romance.
And the thing I find so interesting is that she's writing a recovered/invented history of queerness before AIDS - invented because we lost so much of it and the last 40 years of queer history has so fundamentally altered the way societies think about queerness.
Sebastian finds a way to tell the story about accepting parents and family members willing to be welcoming and finding a space for yourself despite everything. And it's just really nice to read.

Easton is such a good character and Kingfisher’s narrative voice permeates the entire story and keeps everything balanced on that perfect edge between horror and funny and then when you get the actual moments of pathos

the widow’s perfect and horrible prayers are exactly right but the real moment is Easton’s “Blessed Virgin, why must you keep sending me innocent monsters?” which

is perfect and stunning and lands with such force because of the tightrope the book walked up until that point. 
Also this is definitely a covid book even if it’s not officially a covid book. 

Update to my review for the first book: it did not get better. 
So, first of all, the two main characters keep doing the thing of “you kept SECRETS from me?” As if they are not themselves hiding truly astonishing amounts of information and it was annoying the first time and progressively more annoying with each subsequent occurrence. There was a lot of interpersonal conflict that seemed to exist because the book had a conflict quota and was working to exceed it. 
Also, this is a book written after 2020, so OBVIOUSLY I’m going to judge it for its portrayal of an epidemic and, in particular, the way our main characters seem to constantly do the thing that should-by the rules of the world-get them sick but don’t. The explanations offered are insufficient for making me feel like it’s more than a hand wave plot device and, I mean, come on. 
Also, wow, is this a book about bad dads. Just like EVERYONE. Dead moms and bad dads. Which also made it FASCINATING to see who got forgiven by the narrative. One evil mom would have been a lovely change of pace. 
And while I’m kvetching, the book definitely set up the main romance to be far kinkier than it actually delivered on. Which, like, fine. Given the publishers, it makes sense. But why write it that way to start then?
This could have been so much less meh. 

The main problem with this book is that, by virtue of the fact that it IS a book, the inevitable conclusion of the book is very obvious but there's no reason for the characters to know that they are, in fact, in a book and that disparate plot elements must come together a certain way.
Which kind of got in the way of enjoying the progression because I kept thinking "did they notice the thing that the narrator is careful to point out to me?"
But the world and characters were definitely worth spending time with and on and I was glad for having read it even if the plot is definitely the weakest part of the story.

There's a point where one person recommends a book and I want to read it but if like more than three people have mentioned it, I get weird about it and very "ugh, fine, I'll read the book everyone else likes" and of course it is, in fact, as deeply entertaining as everyone says it is and I'm kind of ridiculous and I know that about myself.
(There is actually a number of people talking about a book past which I will refuse to read it regardless of how much I will probably enjoy it and that says more about me than anyone else.)
It's a little odd getting to know someone through their books when the book is written with the presumption that you picked it up because you know them. But Irby's incredibly self-deprecating sense of humor and deep commitment to writing about normal things as if they are funny and awful things as if they are normal really works.
And my rule that you should always listen to memoirs when they are read by the author continues to serve me well.

Both of the above stars are for Diana Wynne Jones' essay on "The Shape of the Narrative in the Lord of the Rings".
There are two other clever things that this book does. The first is the final essay on sex and desire, which is an irritating but--at least when it's textually grounded--reasonable read of both gender and desire in Lord of the Rings.
The other clever thing the book does is attempt to undercut critique of its premises by painting those who object to their criticism as themselves implicated in the problematic morals of the text.
Everything else was teethgrinding.

There are reasons for this. One is the state of critical fields interested in being part of this anthology in 1984. Barthes had killed the author, but that approach had apparently not made its way to the critics writing this work and it's returning me to my era of reading bad undergraduate essays where I'm trying to painstakingly point out that the purpose of reading the politics of the text is to talk about the politics of the text, not make arguments for the morality of the author. (Robert Browning is great for this.) And because it's not careful about the argument, it ends up doing the modernist "this is what the text means" (because 1984) thing. It's jarring to see both how different this is from how I was taught to reflect on my own interpretive lens and, equally, how different the fields I read from this era are from these essays. The ones that looked at Tolkien and the zeitgeist were interesting. The ones that complained about the kinds of people who would like this stuff were...less so.
(This is also the era before academia got interested in popular anything - not that it is doing that much better these days.)

Another thing, and this made the book a brutal slog, is the number of essays in this book that offer editorial advice on a book that had been published for more than 20 years, advice that they think would have made the text better. Which, again, what? (My personal favorite was the person who thought that the problem was the lack of Campbellian hero with a moral struggle to hold the book together because that was what they imagined for themselves as a teenager and, my darling, my sweet summer child, my poor benighted writer who just needed a zine. Have you considered that maybe the problem is not the book?) Almost all of them boil down to "I don't see what the fuss is about and it would have been better if it had these things that are more to my tastes." Look, I too can excoriate popular books that I don't particularly enjoy because the things they do are not the things I care about. I can also go on a tear about why any number of widely acclaimed early 20th century writers suck because I don't appreciate their work (see everything Henry James wrote after Portrait of a Lady). But it's not interesting. These are texts that have almost nothing to say about Lord of the Rings, but invite--if the authors were not Dead in the critical sense--a fascinating investigation into the kind of person who writes it. Many of them reveal little about Lord of the Rings and much about how the narrative critical voice imagines meaning is made and literature works to morally improve. There is a thread of dulce et utile that underpins many of these texts - that by arguing against one or both of these features of LOTR, they can make it go away. Unfortunately for them, Peter Jackson exists.

Jackson is not the only reason LOTR survived and thrived; the entire rest of the field of fantasy is pretty relevant as well. This book came out a little less than 30 years after LOTR and it's been 40 since it was published so some of the fault I am finding in these essays is that of not being able to predict the future. Having said that, "how future-proof is this essay?" is a question more critics should be asking themselves. And, in this book in particular, "how much of my critique is based on a High Modernist presumption that any backwards longing is inherently suspect?" Whereas there is a prominent strain in our current discourse (especially among Gen X and under) that things ARE worse and that the destruction of Fangorn and the poisoning of the Isen and the mind of gears that drives Saruman are, in fact, the things that will kill us as a species. The scouring of the Shire and the rewilding of England are not entirely different. The very specific longing for restoration resonates with something that Lord of the Rings recognized but its contemporary critics did not.

I could handle the criticism better if it was better done. (Yes, really.) Tolkien's work is both wonderful and flawed and the capacity to name those flaws (yes, including the text's reactionary politics and racist characterizations and the ways that its American success may stem, in part, from an lack of familiarity with the specific class systems it implicitly espouses) is also necessary. That's neither reason to dismiss it or reason to exalt it despite. It's a "yes, and" and the fact that basically every essay is written as a review attempting to pass moral judgment rather than an analysis inviting critical awareness is just so irritating.

Because I am PROFOUNDLY interested in the question of why - given the purported politics of the book - progressive readers resonate with it. And presumably a work written in 1984 is not the correct place to seek answers to that question, but I wonder whether it points the way anyway. Some critics tend to assume that readers take uncritically from the text and if something does not explicitly match their politics, it implicitly speaks to something in them. But it's much more interesting to see what people DO resonate with - for LOTR, I think the compelling fantasy is "what if, in the face of overwhelming odds, good people could make a difference by not giving up?" Also "what if the people in charge were actually good?" To Tolkien's point about about escape and consolation, if pegasus ennobles horses then the fellowship ennobles our marches on power. (the essay with that title was also egregiously bad in how it misread "On Fairy Stories"  and why should I trust your ability to read fiction if you can't even read nonfiction and understand what it's saying.)

And, yes, fiction is always more complicated than its politics and one of the most interesting things to watch as fantasy and science fiction and romance and horror get taken seriously as genres is what we get when we reckon with the space between readerly desire to have and readerly desire to pretend to have. Arranged queer marriage plots are a great example (and also one of my self-confessed beloved tropes). The queer-normative world is the desire, the "what if you ended up with the perfect person for you" is the imagine because who wants the risk of the reality? LOTR also exists in that slippage between and I am boundlessly curious about the parts of the story that draw us out and the parts that slip by. What is the meat of the nut and what is the shell in our love? (Am I saying that we are Rabbi Meir and literature is Elisha ben Abuya? Um.)

I am definitely not done with my random readings of Tolkien criticism that catch my interest and I still think that there is a lot more to be said about the way LOTR presents evil and power in a way that resonates and also, at the end of the day, I think JRRT is right about escape and recovery and consolation.

I'll take "books I've been looking forward to since they came out, but have not read because the laws governing what gets read off of my TBR are odd, intricate and, most importantly, known to no one. Not even me."
Anyway, it was exactly the beautiful ongoing hurt/comfort romance of the previous one and--since it's the same characters--a continuation of the romance between our highly strung genius and local golden retriever.
So of course it has fanfic vibes, by which I mean that the plot is taken seriously but is predominantly a vehicle for the character study and romance rather than the point of the book. And Meadows has a very keen sense of his characters and how trauma and pain curtail their choices while still making it, overall, a story about surviving and thriving rather than a story about trauma. Having said that, the number of times I did the thing where you put the book down, yell gently at the main characters because you absolutely cannot, and then immediately pick it back up again...was high.
In a good way.

"Are the flaws of the main character(s) a main focus of the book?" is the story of Emma.
Here's the problem and I have this problem every single time I read a retelling of Emma and the problem is that, while I love Emma, I LOATHE Emma.
So any character based on her...I will slowly seethe at the entire book and, if I don't, I will judge the author for failing to capture the book's nature. So, you know, there's that. Rosen does a very good job under the constraints of making Emmett and, in particular, Mr. Woodhouse, sympathetic even as the book hews quite closely to the arc of Emma. Emma is a book that soars because Austen's prose is so good and she's very deft even when she's not being subtle. Rosen is not that subtle and any time you shift from free indirect discourse to tight first person, the subtlety of the text inevitably shifts. 
Basically, I judge every Austen retelling by the standards of the original and then complain about it, which is very silly and this book, as its own thing, is very sweet and Emmett is an excellent heir to Cher Horowitz as a contemporary reflection of Emma Woodhouse.

Okay, it's not as though the Count of Monte Cristo is, you know, realistic as stories go so I don't think that's my main critique. I think I just wanted the main characters to be having a little more fun than they were actually having. 
If you're going to get absolute revenge, it should be FUN. And then you rethink and realize It's not as fulfilling as you thought it was going to be etc. I wanted more of "I thought this would feel better" and less outside manipulation into forcing our heroine's hands. I think, overall, it was the lack of agency that frustrated me so much, especially with the gender swap. Don't make Edmund Dantes a girl and then give her less power over her life. 
I still want to know what happens, though. This might be one of those books where, once the plot of the original starts to run out, the story gets more interesting (as opposed to Austen retellings which inevitably get less interesting if they go on past the books.)

(Inspired by this book, I am drinking a gimlet that was - I think - poured with a very heavy hand. Or I'm an ABSOLUTE lightweight. Also a possibility.)
There is A+ dog content in this book. And also I think that mystery is probably an excellent genre for MRK to be writing in because of how methodical and meticulous it can be, which plays to her strengths.
There was so much about this book that I liked - The Westie, of COURSE, but also the science fictional creativity and the serious consideration of disability and a disabled heroine counting her spoons and how the future changes that calculus but does not change the need for it.
It's fascinating to me how MRK shows so clearly the operation of privilege in the mystery novel, but this work is not in any sense a critique of it. Merely a noting of it.
And also

while I am not a person who attempts to guess mysteries, I found this one to be a little sparing with the clues. I don't usually try to guess, but I do hold the standard of could I guess or, more precisely, could my extremely astute sister have guessed and, if the answer is no, I judge the book for not providing enough information or details.

The other thing that I find complicated about MRK as an author is that she is technically precise, but I often struggle to believe that her characters have deep interiority. It's not, for example, that I don't think that her characters are real, but more that her descriptions - especially those of desire - feel surface deep in a way that I can't explain. I've had this problem since her first Glamourist books and her research is impeccable and, with that, so much of the rounded depth of her characters just doesn't come through.
Which is clearly a me-problem and it's unfair to read her work and keep hoping she'll do something different and yet, as they say, hope springs eternal. And she wrote a fascinating mystery, just not one I'm entirely convinced is populated by people.