And the tor novellas continue to impress. I’m really appreciating their approach to A-US and just generally awesome characters.
Let the reading for Hugo nominations continue.

I have a ridiculous amount to say about this book, most of which can be summed up as “damn, I wish I was teaching it!”
Levy’s clearly just coming into her own as an author and the sharpness of her vision is not quite yet matched by her skill with the pen. But what she’s accomplished here is fascinating.
There are two things worth drawing attention to:
She talks the way we do. The in-group conversation and awareness of self as other has not changed in 140 years. The way we see ourselves as modern, as outside, as complicated, as deeply committed to advancement...yeah. “I’m in this picture and I don’t like it” as they say.
The second thing I think is really interesting is talking about this book as a defamiliarizarion of 21st century modern orthodoxy’s materialism. What do we think of them and how do they reflect us...
Hmm, when can I get a book club?

This was very fun to read. And I’m honestly quite proud of how many of the aggadot I was familiar with.
Also, shoutout to my favorite footnote that translates R Akita saying “blast your bones” to Turnus Rufus as “in our idiom, go to hell”.

So I've been holding off on substantive reviews for this series until I finish the final book, which I have...
asdhjskdfashdbf jks
It makes a bit more sense to know that this is the first book written and that the other books are written to tell the story of how this particular future came to be. But still.
The thing about Butler is that she makes everyone else look shallow and comprehensible. It's not that she isn't making a point in her stories; she obviously is and there is so much to say and think about when it comes to slavery and humans and the possibilities of what we become and, more than anything else, the drive to survive.
And its also very clearly part of the story and unignorable, yet Butler doesn't offer answers or explanations. Her work is so often a hypothesis - if we are X, the future is Y. If I posit this human, these humans will come next. And you end up reading her experiment and trying to decide how you feel about her humans. And whether they are the humans we want to be.
Ugh, this series makes my brain hurt, but in the best way.

This series keeps getting better with every book. Newman is a great author and I love her voice work on all her books, but this one was particularly excellent. It was hard to put down and that's WAY more annoying in an audiobook.
A few thoughts:
I really appreciate the way that Newman writes characters with mental illness. Every protagonist in this series has been struggling with mental illness of some kind and, while it's always part of the plot, it's not convenient and it's not merely to make the story go. It shows them as real people. And Newman is unsparing in her depiction of how people are mistreated, shamed, and shunned for mental illness. This is either incredibly painful to read and be reminded of or incredibly gratifying to read and feel seen. The way she handles postpartum depression in this book is excellent.
I also appreciate how terrifyingly real the world she presents is. The govcorps, the lack of privacy, the runaway economics...she's doing a scarily good job of extrapolating the future and also reflecting on the ways in which the people living within that future just, you know, shrug at the atrocities.
It's also a really good psychological thriller.
I'm so glad I've finished it and now I can actually read more about the next book, which I've been avoiding looking at anything having to do with it lest it spoil this one.

The problem with this being my least favorite of the wayward children books is that it’s being held to an unfairly high standard. Those books have been consistently epic so the fact that this one is good, but not as good as expected, bumps it down from where it would have been had this been the first book I read.
It was still devastating and cut-glass gorgeous, but not as...stained glass glorious as the other ones.

Oh, man, this book!
It’s weird in all the best ways of Ann Leckie and just brilliant and my reaction were basically:
Wait a minute, is this hamlet?
This IS hamlet!
That ophelia!?
Ahhh, crap, I just remembered how hamlet ends.

But also a meditation on the power of speech and gods and propitiation and what prayer and ויאמר/ויהי is and UGH. So good you guys.

This book was ridiculously good. Some observations follow:
MaNishtana’s execution of narrative voice is just pitch perfect. It is exactly what this story needs because it also performs the tightrope walk between identities that the main character does. How does it sound to balance blackness, Jewishness, adulthood in Brooklyn in 2016? Exactly like this.
This book is also a balance of identification and recognition of difference. Reading about rabbis unwanted for their identity, it’s hard not to have it resonate because, well, Maharat. But women in Orthodox Judaism and black Jews in Jewish spaces have radically different experiences. They might rhyme, but that doesn’t mean one isn’t a sonnet and the other isn’t epic verse. Although identifying with the English major, major geek, socially awkward, now rabbi at the heart of this book isn’t, you know, a STRETCH for me.
Rosenstern and Guildencrantz, OMG. I love this book already. Reading this book in New York DEFINITELY made me appreciate some of the “this really happened” elements.

I really want to put this book in conversation with Amy Levy’s Reuben Sachs, not just because I read them basically back to back, but because they’re both books by insiders writing about this Jewish community in a way that is willing to call out its hypocrisy, its obsessions with its golden calves, its failures in the way it speaks to one another.
But they’re also very different books written at very different times in the history of the novel (although, arguably, less different than they might be) and with very different arcs. And one is a comedy and one is a tragedy. And who the outsiders are and are not also shifts. But I’d love to do this nonetheless.
Anyway, it’s been a heck of a weekend for good books.

Is What The FForde a rating?
It should be.
Everything I wanted from the incomparable Jasper Fforde. No one else writes remotely like him.

This book is one of those that makes me wonder whether the definition of YA is first person narrator under the age of 21.
Which really is as it should be. It’s about scope and experience, not content and Wexler does a really good job of writing his protagonist. And the world building is excellent and the combat is miles more thought out than anything and, ugh, when is the next book coming out again?