And I’ve reached the end of this series...for now.
Arrrgh, I want more, as the little mermaid lamented.
I want to know what happens. I want the characters to learn what I think I know! I want to know if I’m right!
Also, literally everyone should read this series because it is one of those quiet series that doesn’t get enough attention and yet is brilliant and, reading it now, was obviously the inspiration or merely the parent for so much interesting work that people are doing now with the intersection of science fiction and fantasy.
Dear Rosemary Kirstein,
I hope so many people buy your books that you are able to stop whatever it is you don’t want to be doing right now and finish the next book to great acclaim and many more sales. Very soon.
Thanks :D

It’s not that writers of literary fiction CAN’T write good speculative fiction or even good literary fiction with speculative elements...
It’s just that they can’t do so without having read the genre!
Heng just happened to be the writer around which some of this crystallized, but she is far from either the worst offender or the loudest (looking at you, Ian McEwan).
There’s a tendency to think that an idea about how the world works (or will work, or might work, or is terrifyingly zooming towards working) and a character drama is enough to carry a novel when all the author has done was, basically, given a name and fur color to schrodinger’s cat. You cannot tell me the story of the scientist deciding whether to open the box without telling me why the cat is in the box, how it got there, who approved the funding for this research anyway.
You cannot run a book on a gedankenexperiment even one as interesting as our culture’s obsession with fitness (the act of being fit) and life. Like, the point is good, but what happened to get us from where we are now to there? Where are people with less capital? Why is the world so empty? And, let’s be real, who the hell is producing all the nutripaks?
I don’t care if it’s stated in the story, but I don’t get the sense that Heng knows the answer to that question either and there’s the rub.
But to return for a second, Heng’s novel falls into the other obvious failure of the modernist novel - the sufferings of wealthy “interesting” people who are bored with life calls into question being while the existential drive to survive of those who are underprivileged is erased. All the characters fighting for the right to live are erased by the struggles of those fighting to die (and are pointedly only accessories to their fight).
Genre mashups are tricky because they ask the writer to be equally competent in both genres, or else the gaping chasm between how well one is executed compared to the other throws off the whole book. Heng’s characters, her disallusioned and not likable in the way we want female characters to be protagonist and her driven foil are clearly from a good literary novel. But they’re not living in a fully realized world because the act of calling to the reader’s mind a world unlike the one that is or was is a skill and it’s one Heng could cultivate but she hasn’t.
And it shows.

But when is the next one coming out!?
(She whines woefully.)
I suddenly appreciate why I waited so long to listen to "Before Mars" given the prospect of finding out what happens next looms so far away right now.
I loved this book. I particularly appreciated how much of it was narrating the characters playing a video game without it ever getting boring, which was a particular triumph.
And, ugh, the ending! Even when I started to see it coming, it was still such a punch. I love how Newman balanced the ethical questions in this - not the facile versions, but the very real issues raised by utilitarianism...and its value in the face of utter horror.
I also particularly liked the chilling Americans - both from the "oh, this is how our messed-up country looks to Europeans" and also, as a Jewish reader, a sense not so much of being seen, but of someone looking through eyes similar to mine.

I truly adore this book. It's one of my all-time favorites, one of those books I'll go back to when I've had a bad week or need to curl up with an old friend. It reminds me of everything I love in well-written Young Adult literature.

And Harry Crewe is one of the best heroines out there. Really, I find it very difficult not to love Robin McKinley's work and rereading makes me wish I had daughters to give it to.

So there was the bit where I was reading the chapter on teaching in one paragraph increments while watching my child in the backyard and then there was the bit where I was sitting in my chair reading the chapter on Other while my child was sitting in her chair "reading" and I know literature is supposed to be performative, but this is a bit excessive, don't you think?

I mean, I could wax rhapsodic about what Benjamin says, and I wouldn't be wrong, and her ways of thinking about a specifically embodied experience of theology, but the test of theory is the degree to which it can function as a tool-kit afterwards. Not "what do I think about this" but "how do I think with this". And Benjamin's book has given me a lot to think with.

Dear Goodreads,
Will you please implement a half star system? This was not a three star book because what it was trying to do pushes it easily into four stars, but it somehow doesn't quite seem to achieve what it sets out to do. (Bow before me, for I am the queen of the vague review).
In certain respects, Brennan's book is brilliant. She has the voice of the naturalist down pat and she does 19th century British woman on an adventure with all the style and sincerity of someone who gets the Victorians and understands how to put them on paper. Her narrator, Lady Isabella Trent, is the prime example of getting character and voice right.
The plot, oddly enough, is where I think my expectations were most disappointed. If this wants to be a Victorian novel, and I do think it does, it's missing that sense for how the plot has to lock together perfectly in order to make the events seem real and as though they work. And it's not that Brennan doesn't have all the pieces there, but the way she lays them out leaves me wondering why they don't fit together as well as they should. (Trying to articulate my objections in a concrete manner is weirdly frustrating. I'm usually better than this.) It's as if she has all the tools for writing this book at her disposal, but she doesn't always deploy them in a way that works for me. So the foreshadowing is there, but it doesn't...foreshadow right (for a Victorian novel).
I think that may be my biggest objection. When someone attempts to write a Victorian novel and epically fails, I just laugh. But Brennan is only off by a little bit and that sense of the world just a bit out of skew throws me because I want it to be right. I expect it to be right.
Oh, and the pseudo-Judaism thing, which encapsulates my objections rather perfectly. I love that she chose to give Judaism a prominent place as the model religion of her pseudo-Europe. That's awesome. I'm disappointed (in someone) that I picked up on no indications from the text that the Magisterial branch of the religion was also based in Judaism. I should have noticed that. (Brennan has said this in an interview and I will take her word for it and it makes sense because she doesn't describe the break as different religions in the text, but as different sects). So either I missed the indications of a more legalistic/rabbinic Judaism, which is possible if a trifle embarrassing, or the way that Brennan tries to convey it misses somehow. That for all the interesting world that she creates and the attention to very specific kinds of detail, we don't find out enough about that world to answer out own questions about how this world came to be as it is and why. Yes, that's the problem. The world and plot seem realer to her, as author, than they do to me as reader and something of the details and the intricacies get lost on the way from her brain to mine. And I can sense their absence and I miss them.
Tl:dr - we need a 3.5 star rating and, despite everything, I hope the next book in this series is better.

To the friend of mine who suggested that I read this book even though I was ambivalent about the first (I really liked it and was really annoyed by it at the same time) - thank you!
There are a number of reasons that this book worked better for me than the first one - I think I like Lady Trent a bit better this time around and, as silly as it sounds, the plot was just more fun. I'm glad I went back to this series.

Me: I have to finish this book before shabbat because it's an ebook and I won't be able to read it.
Also me: I just finished this book right before shabbat so how am I supposed to read the sequel!?

Baker's doing a LOT here and part of what is so interesting about that is the ways that she (in many ways like Seanan McGuire) makes it a part of the background.
I definitely enjoyed this book, but I have a feeling there are people who are not me with whom it resonates WAY more, which - I should note - is amazing and how literature should work. Still going to get the second one out for reading this week, especially because I want to see where Baker takes it and Millie's internal voice is just awesome.

So I picked this up because I loved Elizabeth Acevedo's performance in...something and now I have no idea what and I was looking for what else she did and I have this problem where I see the words "Pride and Prejudice" on a book and I feel compelled to read it.
This leads to disappointment less rarely than seeing "Jane Eyre" does, but it's not always a surefire hit.
Zoboi's story, though, is amazing. First, she gets that retellings build on the bones of the story and don't need to hit all the plot beats. She keeps the elements that tell her story and jettisons or replaces the elements that don't work. And she understands that the essential conflict between Lizzie and Darcy is not that he's a jerk, but that they are close enough to share the same world and distant enough that they see it through radically different eyes. Zoboi uses that to skillful effect. Her politics are louder than Austen's--a feature of the time, perhaps, as much as the politics in question--and the fact that she is so invested in using Pride and Prejudice to tell a story of gentrification and poc life in New York rather than using the latter as the backdrop for the former makes this a really good retelling.
And I'm particularly grateful for Acevedo's narration and the way she performed Zuri's poetry. This was definitely a book to listen to.

I admit, my main reaction was "oh, so that's what we've been building up to!"
Now I want to reread the series with the knowledge of where it's going. It's really clever and well done and now I want a BBC miniseries with Maggie Smith playing Lady Trent as the narrator.

Update: reread the series in two weeks. It’s one of those stories that’s even better on reread.