This is a hard one to rate - the gap between what she sets out to do and what shows up on the page is sometimes wide and yet the ambition and the skill with which she writes especially the experience of mental illness is itself an accomplishment.
I think some of my disconnect is that the first book was the first 90% of the beauty and the beast story and this book is the final 10% and the amount of story that needs to get embellished to make that happen doesn’t always feel like the same narrative as the one in Wintersong. And also Josef as a character - I’m not sure if it’s a development issue or something else, but there are ways in which he can’t stand up to the role the narrative is asking of him.
But what she’s trying to do here is so interesting; I think this one just runs into “book 2” issues.

How did I not realize this was a tiny Tor.com novella?
And also it was sweet, and a nice distraction, and utterly full of mythology and now I want to go outside and just hang around some trees.

Watching this book unfold was an absolutely beautiful experience and the way the story developed out of both objects and conversations to turn into a patchwork whole was just so good.
And the story itself, as it became the story, was so viciously exquisite. And impossible not to love.

I’m like 90% on board with this book and like 10% “did the twist have to happen”?
It’s not really about how well it was telegraphed, more that it’s a relationship dynamic I really didn’t want to see here. (They are so cute! Just let them be happy together and then make them have to go against the world. Meh.)
But the story and the rebellion and the STUFF in the book is just really good and thoughtful.

And on three, we say “awww” because this was absolutely adorable meta/fiction and a very quick read, but no less sweet for all that.

Hugo/Nebula reading 2020.
Alas, I seem to have forgotten to add a shelf for "well it was speculative when it was WRITTEN" for categorizing purposes.
I really meant to read this when it came out. I'm a bit sad I didn't since it reads so differently during a global pandemic rather than afterwards. And, of course, the idea that the least realistic part of the book is the bit where people actually do what they're told to try to stop infections...
Although the actual world that Pinsker created, with its predatory capitalism and art as movement and the way that fear becomes normalized in parenting is, honestly, a gut punch of the highest and best order.

My biggest complaint is that it uses one of my least favorite tropes, which is the part where the sympathetic character--wittingly or unwittingly--cruelly betrays someone else because, oh, so many reasons. And Rosemary learns from that, but it's a story that is hard for me to read and hard, in some ways, because I see it so often. My fault, perhaps, for reading too many romance novels. And yet, Pinsker's clarity of vision overall means that the degree to which her characters fail to appreciate the consequences of their actions is painful in a way that I don't really enjoy reading. She moves past it quickly enough, but it's there and I don't like it.

Alright, two books down and at least 5 to go.

I love Zen Cho so much; her work is always light-hearted and also deeply felt and powerful and the way that she thinks about and looks for stories to tell is just so good.
Obviously I devoured this in like 30 seconds and it just made me very happy.

I'm not sure this is actually YA or just a "we shelve it here because protagonist apparent age", but I really appreciated the way this book felt like a specific genre of old school fantasy in the vein of Wrede's Lyra books or Diana Wynne Jones (plot is less twisty) or Robin McKinley. (Wait, when did they get old?)
It's a very specific itch, but Neumeier definitely scratches it.

Hugo reading.
I always wonder if I'm stricter with Hugo books than others in terms of rating. Or does the fact that I'm only choosing to read them insofar as I'm choosing to read all the nominees mean that I'm less inclined towards them from the get-go?
I mean, this book is definitely within the genre of things that are my thing. (Ugh, English.) It reminds me of Cat Valente, except Valente has an exuberance and ornateness where even (especially?) when she's being overwrought, she's wonderful. Harrow doesn't precisely walk the line between too much and not enough so much as wobble back and forth across it. I like what she does here and I also wanted more from this book than I got.
There are also aspects of this book that feel like Harrow engaged with superficially and that could have used...something. Like, yes, people in our world are racist, I'm pleased she doesn't gloss over that. And at the same time, in the naming of it, Harrow does skate lightly over it because she's rather too invested in her villains being villainous to have other people show the level of evil.

All the evil seems to come from outside our own world and, while the evil inside it gets name-checked, it doesn't land with the same power. This appears also in Harrow's use of "sane girl in a madhouse" as a trope, which I admit is one I find DEEPLY troubling because authors so rarely make the obvious jump that this isn't wrong because we're treating those without mental illness like they have a mental illness or even, as Harrow does, that the madhouse can drive one mad, but that institutionalization is fundamentally abuse even when a person is "mad", suffering from mental illness, utterly unable to communicate with the world, or a danger to themselves and others. And it's still something that happens and seeing it used as a historical nightmare...and specifically that it's bad because "sane women" were silenced through it bothers me.

It was a definitely a good debut, for all that I have some bones - large and small - to pick with it. And I appreciate what Harrow is doing with both the idea of story and the portal fantasy. It's interesting that we're at a point where this feels like it's part of an extremely large conversation BOTH about the nature of portal fantasy and about the nature of narrative.

Hugo reading. It continues apace.
This was awesome! I'd been meaning to read it for a while (and really appreciated Clark's other works, which I read for last year's Hugo), but this one was just such a good mix of genres with the grumpy civil servant and his bright-eyed new recruit solving the mystery but in a gorgeously realized fantasy world. It's not necessarily easy to take the familiar and elevate it, but Clark did so elegantly here and I really enjoyed this one.