I always finish Oyeyemi's book with this sense of "what did I just READ" but in a good way, and this book is no different.
Well. I'm less sure than usual what she was trying to do with it and more intrigued than usual with what she did with the story it's based on and also just confused and I liked and I don't know where it went and I'm not entirely sure I went with it.
And also so much of it was fascinating and delightful and compelling and I don't even know what to do with it.

WHY IS SHE SO GOOD???

I mean, I suppose I could also review it and talk about how ridiculously well she jumps genres and how her depiction of New Yorkers is just *chef's kiss* and how raw (but not in a bad way) it was to read the bits with the alt-right and just...
You know, I stand by the all caps at the beginning.

There's this one moment where the story is offering a convenient in-narrative reason why (nearly) all the characters come from Victorian fiction and I'm obviously sitting here yelling "It's Mickey Mouse's fault" because I am well acquainted with the role that copyright plays in the life of the English scholar.
A few comments:
1) When there is a significant time-lag between when *I* put all the information together and when the characters do, I get annoyed. This book had that and I spent a lot of time yelling "come ON!" at Rob. I appreciated what Parry was doing, but there are definite debut novel plot kinks, mostly pacing. Ehh, it's a first novel thing.
2) There was George Eliot erasure here and as someone who HATED David Copperfield and thinks that roughly two thirds of everything Dickens has written is overrated, I MAY have had some feelings about the focus of the book.
3) The term I'm grasping for here is the narcissism of small differences. Because I read Victorian literature, because I think about it slightly differently than Parry, there's a lot of this book that felt like "yes, but!" for me.
4) This was fine, but Jasper Fforde did it better? Is that mean? That's kind of mean, but I feel like I spent a lot of this book reading it and remembering my first encounter with The Eyre Affair.

So there was this moment, about a third of the way through the book, when I was just utterly delighted and charmed by Achilles and Patroclus and suddenly remembered that I know how this story ends and it does not. go. well.
Which made it hard to read even when I wanted to know how she was going to get there.
The book as a meditation on, to quote Hamilton, "Who lives, who dies, who tells your story" is gorgeous, though, and I loved how Miller handled questions of fame, honor, legacy, and fame.
Odysseus is still my favorite POS though.

I’m torn about these books - I love what Suri is doing with world building and mythology and once the story gets going, it really has momentum and is enjoyable.
And there’s a particular style of writing internal experiences that she uses for both Mehr and Arwa that I think distances me from them. I think it may be a description thing - that I often feel like she’s telling us how they’re feeling or having them tell us how they’re feeling. (As someone who can spend hours thinking she’s angry and nope, turns out I forgot to eat breakfast, that level of self awareness is unbelievable in a way that the daiva are not.) So it takes me ages to get into the story because I’m at a distance from the main character I’m supposed to be feeling with.
But the stakes and the narrative (and the dreams of empires, ugh, that part is so gorgeously done!) make me want to read more.

This is, admittedly, a kind of niche genre, but one that I find myself drawn to and think is kind of amazing: Austen retellings by South Asian writers (or writers of South Asian descent).
The way that Austen's world speaks to and also allows them to talk about their own experiences and cultures is awesome, they consistently land SO much better than modern retellings (LBD excepted, of course), and they also take on social issues in a way that's familiar to Austen's readers.
And also, reading the specific religious elements through the lens of Orthodox Judaism adds a certain power to it; one that comes from the mix of familiarity and distance.
Jalaluddin has written one of my favorites so far. She understands that P&P is in the story, not the plot, and allows the narrative to progress in a way that deviates from the original and is truer to the story SHE is telling. I also love that she recognizes that Ayesha (Lizzy) actually makes some mistakes and it's not just Darcy/Khalid's judgmental nature. The way that religion stands for - and takes the place of - propriety is excellent and the way she explores what makes people stick to stricter religious interpretations is also fascinating.

I have so many feelings about Khalid's makeover because I keep reading my own cultural context onto it and the relationship between law and practice in Islam and Judaism are actually still quite different and it's complicated, but also recognizing that what is happening is not him moving away from religion, but engaging seriously with it on its own terms and his own terms rather than letting devotion be a shield from the world and that is incredibly well done.

Now...can Jalaluddin do the other Austens?

Look, you call it a beauty and the beast retelling and I'm there. Often to complain about it, but definitely not in this case.
I love how this was both a queer retelling of the original fairy tale and an excuse to ask some REALLY good questions, such as: what as WRONG with the dad? Why romantic love? Why all the secrecy?
And Gray's retelling either accounts for or straight-up ditches those elements and still manages to tell the beauty and the beast story. It was so fun.
Also, I <3 Daisy forever.

Is this romance or historical romance or historical fantasy with romance?
Charles's books - like so many of my favorite stories do - straddle the line between stories about people in relationships and stories about saving the world through meeting one another. Drawing that line is...productive, I suppose, but the line itself feels squashy and like it depends more on what sort of emotions the relationships are designed to elicit in the reader. More to think about there, but let's be real, the best novels of any kind are when the protagonists come together to save humankind. Especially romance.

Today on "I didn't remember anything about the series", Bennett draws the reader back into things skillfully and reminds us of how things work pretty subtly.
Enough that I didn't feel a sense of "who are these humans and why do I care?"
I knew and I cared and the world building is still brilliant and the people amazing and Bennett still pulls no punches and ow...
The perils of book two 0f...I think three.

I hate when I can’t remember who recommended a novel. Like, someone I follow on Twitter definitely liked this and now I just have no idea who.
Not that it matters, I just care about the oddest things.
And I feel like this book was not what I expected it to be, first from aforementioned twitter comments and then from the publishing “we trade in HEAs!” cover copy. It straddles the line between complex fantasy and romance without precisely the world building that is fantasy’s strong suit or the focus on the relationship developing that is romance’s forte.
These are actually two genres that go great together and, insofar as this novel succeeds imperfectly at both, the missteps feel like they come from a debut writer biting off more than they can chew and also still honing their craft.
And there’s a lot of potential here for a much more seamless melding of genres and I hope she gets there in her next book.