So, the thing is, I’m reading George MacDonald because I feel like I missed a LOT of the 19th century fantasy that inspired the authors I love.
So it’s a mix of seeing their inspiration, but also seeing what they consciously jettisoned and also reflecting back on tastes that were shaped by what they chose to keep and leave out creates an interesting response to it.
2 thoughts.
1 - the Victorian child is a fascinating character and the way they are realized never ceases to intrigue me. (What are small humans even?)
2 - it’s not that the theology of this book isn’t explicit OR simplistic because it is both, but I want more books that think about how we ought to be. (It’s VERY different, but reminiscent nonetheless of Jemisin in the broken earth and “no voting on who gets to be people”. Literature is also a conversation about who they - meaning the characters - are so who we ought to be).

Some novellas stand very strongly alone and some feel like sketches atop the under painting of a world that you’re not precisely sure is filled in.
I liked this book for what it was and also I’m always invested in the combination of world building with characters and there just wasn’t enough of the former for me.

I love a good gothic novel and this one had all the important bits. Hauntings, innocent children, forbidden lovers, secrets, a good murder or few, well-places mythology to hang it all together and blur the lines between the “real” world and that of tales.
I did appreciate the shout-out to the heroines on the moors and the recognition that it’s not the landscape but the people running across it that makes the genre.

Victorian and fin de siecle children’s literature is really interesting.
Do we moralize less in contemporary children’s literature or just less explicitly?
Also, I see what people mean about finding Bilbo’s goblins in this story.

I somehow feel like I’ve read this story so many times of the sick king and the true servant and the conniving courtiers...but was MacDonald the version that inspired all of them?
You definitely see Theoden here, though. And also the slippage between fantasy that makes meaning in the real world and actual allegory.

I really like Cat Sebastian.
Also, this trend of using romance to think about how we write mental illness is frankly fascinating.
Because romance is the genre most closely linked with happy endings and a kind of aspirational understanding that obstacles can be overcome, there’s something (depressingly) radical in giving the person who is usually the villain or the tragic hero the chance to be the comic hero.
I also do wonder how much the queer content and the fact that these are gay romances allows for this kind of experimentation. But also I hate dealing with surprise!misogyny and it happens often enough in straight romances that I just avoid then when it’s not genre+romance.

Okay, look, I DEFINITELY read this book the second it calms out, probably more than once, so I have no idea why it isn’t marked as read here. If you like beauty and the beast at ALL, do yourself a favor and pick this book up.

Oh, I'll just get this one out of the library...oh, wait, Daveed Diggs is reading the audiobook? Welp, I guess it's mine now.
Totally worth it. The story itself is gorgeous and Rivers is so good at the quiet anguish of being apart. And the story itself is such a good evolution of the narrative so far.
And, okay, realistically, I am not going to rave about the end note, but that's a lie because I'm absolutely going to rave about how good the end note is it because it just ties everything up not neatly but beautifully.

A cosy mystery and historical gay romance? Oh, and it’s Christmas themed?
Yes please.
My vices are extremely wholesome, thank you for asking.
(Also, everything I said a while ago about trauma in romance novels is true here as well. I wonder how much Sebastian in particular is flossing over the very real stress and pain that mental illness of all kinds cause in relationships and also my god do we need narrative models that suggest that love is possible with mental illness. Not in spite of or because of. Just with.

I love Sandhya Menon. She's a brilliant YA romance writer and is clearly having a blast and that translates perfectly into her books.
The thing that she is so good at - and that is the reason this book is a five rather than a four - is that Menon GETS the difference between the arc of a romance and the tropes of a romance. Romance, as a narrative genre with a specific arc, is about getting (usually) two specific people who the reader has identified as belonging together to end up together by the end. (I know, duh.) When one deviates from the normal, straight, conventional stories, the arc of the romance draws along the characters and allows both the writer and the reader to imagine otherwise. I both feel very strongly that fiction ought not limit itself to what is appropriate in the real world and believe that we model what is possible in the world by what we see in fiction. So I'm all here for terrifying sulky men falling in love with their governesses--even though that's unlikely to be love in the real world--and note that if all the stories of arranged marriages are of people escaping them to find true love, it skews our perceptions of such things. Menon REALLY gets that and sets out to tell a story of arranged marriages that work out, of fat girls getting their hearts desires AND staying fat, a world that recognizes how romances shape the contours of our dreams and that this is no less ridiculous than the number of dukes who are also rakes in Regency England. (So many. Just...a gardening shed of dukes.)
The point, wherever it meandered off to, is that expansive tropes for the romance arc are amazing and I'm very much looking forward to reading more of them.