Okay, I’m halfway through the series and I’m STILL not sure I understand what Butler is doing.
In part, it’s because Butler isn’t the kind of author who DOES things. Her work is rarely reducible to an allegory or moral. It’s always, more than anything else, what does it mean to be a human under these circumstances? In some ways, all of her books are thought experiments: given humans, what would they do?
So what comes next. I suppose that’s what reading the next book will tell me.

Me: I vaguely remember reading the first book. It had elephants and weird plot twists.
10 minutes later: How did I forget that the elephants were Jewish? Also, my brain SEVERELY underremembered the weirdness.
Still incredibly strange. Still fun.

So, you know, honesty compels me to admit that I did enjoy this rendition of post-apocalyptic Persuasion because compartmentalizing is a thing.
The premise was interesting, the whole Luddite=Ruling class is a very clever play on Austen’s era, and the book speeds along pretty fast.
I have three major issues
1) Austen’s genius in Persuasion is the way that she takes the petty, the venial, the self-interested, and the shallow and she shows how it’s villainous to those with less power. The Baronet isn’t EVIL. He doesn’t need to be. That’s the point. Evil isn’t cackling and vengeful and pointedly vindictive. It’s just caring more about your social life than your daughter. Peterfreund entirely lacks this sense of nuance and casts her characters much more starkly. Which is not a bad thing in and of itself, but given that this is a retelling of Persuasion, I sort of expect deviations from the narrative to justify themselves for some reason and this one doesn’t. Which leads me to assume that the justification is that such characters require nuance that Austen has and Peterfreund lacks.
On that note, I really hate when authors rewriting Austen use her language in their text because all it does is emphasize just how incredibly talented she is. And you don’t have to be a gorgeous writer to rewrite Austen, but just don’t remind the reader in the middle of what Austen writes like because you will rarely benefit from the comparison. Aside from the fact that, if your characters don’t usually sound that like, it’s a bit jarring.
2) Err, are we just going to gloss over the slavery? Okay, yes, obviously the book thinks that mistreating your slaves is bad (my GOD, do we set the bar low here), but it’s really hard to forget that our heroine is good because she’s one of the good slave owners. Peterfreund just doesn’t talk at all about the economy of her dystopia. Are the Reduced paid? Are the Posts? Can they freely leave? Do they have any resources? Like, this is the vital distinction between remuneration for services rendered and slavery and the book just doesn’t care? How does that happen?
Peterfreund is a breezy writer and it’s easy to equate Elliott’s position with that of the Posts—no authority, utterly under the thumb of her father, no place to go, etc. But she has extraordinary power over them that she refuses to use and, when she has that power explicitly, all the posts just...flock back to slavery because good masters are better than freedom!?
🤮
Seriously, how do you MISS this?
3) Notice how I mostly focused on the Posts above? Yeah, that’s because the Reduced are an even larger kettle of awful. I get why an author would choose to engage with the treatment of the developmentally disabled and critique it. I DON’T get how an author could engage with it on the level of “mistreatment is bad, but paternalistic protection without recognizing autonomy, agency, or humanity is fine”. And Peterfreund sets the reader up to think it’s going in this direction: Ro’s flowers and Elliott’s wheat, but never actually GOES anywhere with it. Oh, isn’t it cute, they’re alike and she’ll protect her, but the incredible injustice of the treatment of the Reduced is barely even touched on. Of course they were used as cannon fodder, of course they ought to work on estates and contribute as their masters decide, of course that’s just the way things are.
This is a book about one...okay, three individuals’ triumph against a deeply oppressive and abusive system, but their triumph not only ignores, but actively rests on the perpetuation of the system...but at least good people are in charge right now so everything is fine, right?
Ugggh.
At this point, I’m not sure I even want to touch the deeply annoying girl versus girl and “this is the good girl because she doesn’t care about fashion” stuff which, yes, this book inherits from Austen, but also ...Austen is subtle and nuanced, people!
And I gave it three stars because I did enjoy it. But Peterfreund’s failure to interrogate her premises is upsetting and I just...Do. Better.
She could have written nearly this exact story, but with an Elliott that recognized her position and the injustices she was struggling against and who worked not merely to be a good owner of people, but to free them. You don’t need to throw out the premise, just don’t ask me to root for someone who protects the status quo because they themselves won’t misuse it.
Like I said, Uggggh.

For the first book in a series, I feel like I have really insightful things to say about the world building and ideas and by the fourth I’m like
Characters still good? ☑️
Plot still zippy? ☑️
Dragons still dragoning? ☑️
Cogman’s still got it and this series is still great fun.

I actually started this book in audio form, and I really loved the narrator, but I have no patience for listening to romance novels because I want to inhale them as fast as possible and audiobooks are limited by my speed (and also I feel guilty listening above 1.25 because the voice actors put in all this work and its getting lost in the fast forwarding).
So I read it over Shabbat instead and it was so much fun.
Menon is swiftly going on my “pick up immediately” romance authors because I love her characters so much.

I thought I would feel more prepared to discuss this series after finishing the third of four books.
lol whoops.
I look forward to the fourth book and finding out what Butler is doing...or watching the whole thing tie together with awe but without enlightenment.

I can’t say I’m all that reassured that Butler won’t really envision a future where the US does not break down into a kind of rugged individualist anarchy. We haven’t yet, but still.

It took me a little while to get back into Taylor’s writing style. She’s excellent, but assumes that, like a normal human, I remembered ANYTHING AT ALL about the previous novel other than the name of one protagonist and the death of another.
Anyway, I caught up on the salient bits quickly enough and, once again, was wowed by the universe she created and the intricacies involved in it.
I would also like to express my gratitude for basically no annoying romantic tension for the sake of drama.
I really should reread this duology back to back...the next time I have time. (So like in five years.)

There was a quote, misattributed to Abraham Lincoln and meant to be derogatory, "people who like this sort of thing will find this is the sort of thing that they like."
Precisely, although without undertones of dismissal. If you enjoy reading critical academic treatments on topics you want to know more about, this book is a really good example of the genre. Harari is consistently coherent and makes it very clear when he is providing information and advancing an argument.
I thought the beginning, where he articulates and opines on the problem of defining magic, was particularly helpful and the last chapter was the most interesting to me, as a scholar and collector of rabbinic narratives.
Yeah, if this is your thing, this is a great thing.
Also, serious shout-out to Batya Stein for the translation. Translating academia is never easy and part of the reason I think this work was so readable was the effort she made to make sure that she wasn't writing just for people who expect to find sentences confusing.

This book is adorable. And it has serious Jewish representation in the first story (although I’m not sure how I feel about Shearith Israel congregants speaking Hebrew with an Ashkenazi accent...I’ll have to check with my friends who pray there). All the stories were great examples of the ways in which diversity adds depth to the narratives and gives the characters a real stake in their stories. Writing diversely leads to better and more interesting stories. These stories balance the reassuring predictability of romance with the very real stakes of history and while I think Milan is the best writer of the three, I found Lerner to be delightful as well and not just because I appreciated seeing observant Jews as main characters.

This was a significantly higher three than its predecessor, which only goes to show the lack of nuance in the goodreads rating system. I want a rubric.
Anyway, part of the reason is that the plot of this novel is eminently more suited to the book that inspired it than the first novel was to Persuasion. There’s a horrifying revolution, there’s a spy, everyone needs their heads knocked together...sounds like an excellent retelling of The Scarlet Pimpernel.
And Peterfreund mostly delivers. The gender swap was delightful, the completely different direction from her previous book was appreciated and yet there are two more significant issues that both books share.
The first is world building versus window dressing. Why are, historically, women not allowed to hold power on one island but not on the other?
Because plot! Why does the amazing technology turn inward instead out also out? Plot! Why is there an aristocracy? Plot!
Like, yes, there has to be to have 19th century retellings, but at least GESTURE in the story towards explaining the development. You gave history for the other developments, you explained why we’re on this deserted island. There are more examples, but this basically gets the point across. World building should’ve feel deep, not like it just exists to give color to the story.
The second problem...this book is better about slavery, but still has serious issues in the way it doesn’t think about disability. Like, yes, it clears the very low bar of “the people intentionally disabling others and turning them into slaves are bad”. But it assumes that mental/developmental disabilities are the worst thing that could ever happen to people and tends to treat those with disabilities as objects of pity, scorn, or utility rather than as subjects in their own right and it’s just very uncomfortable. Again, it’s a level of thought that implies window dressing and not real and thoughtful world building.