Hugo reading.
I feel slightly bad rating this above Middlegame because that was the more technically excellent book, but by the end, I was into this one more and annoyed I couldn’t stay awake to finish it and had to get through the last chapter or two first thing in the morning.
This book has two flaws. The first is pacing. Which is a time-honored debut author problem, but (as others have noted) the first quarter to third of the book just drags and it’s not fun to push forward. I also think Muir is doing something with language and speech patterns that doesn’t precisely land for me in the sense that it feels disjointed rather than a reflection of personalities, but so it goes.
The other thing, and this is probably specifically a Hugos issue, is that it’s a book about necromancy with nothing interesting to say about death - either how the characters relate to it differently or re/framing death for the reader in a way that does what literature can do. The necromancy is an aesthetic, which is fine, I had a secret desire to create a wardrobe out of hot topic too, but also why? Why does it MATTER?

Hugos Reading.
It's interesting to me how much of Lee's writing is consistent between the impossibly intricate math of the Hexarchate and the mythological space corps of Dragon Pearl.
(I don't know what I was expecting, as they say.)
I quite liked what he did here and I enjoyed this book and probably would have liked it more if I wasn't trying to crunch through it to finish it for Hugo season. But also it's so unpredictable whether my brain wants to deal with middle grade and YA in any given week. This was already ahead because it was more the former than the latter and also I think, because it's Lee and because how familiar the writing felt, I missed Jedao.

So this was utterly adorable. Obviously, two women falling in love would try to show it by insistently making things for each other and then insistently complimenting each other.
My main quibble with this story is that it almost entirely avoids my least favorite trope - the drama that could be avoided if people actually used their words - only to fall into it near the end. But it was only for a chapter or two, so I'll forgive it.
I do wonder whether I should start shelving these as Fantasy - welcome to the world where change is possible, where if you just do the work then you will EVENTUALLY get the recognition and the world will shift. Obviously, stories need a denoument, but sometimes I think I read them for the ease with which the villains (misogyny, racism, poverty) are vanquished.

This series has been incredibly fun so far and the main characters are extremely sweet. My favorite part, however, is that Therin understands that it's more than possible to have a sequel where our intrepid heroes struggle without needing to rehash the issues from the previous book or create problems because people don't talk about the things it would make sense to talk about. The struggles are mostly from the outside and put stress on Arthur and Rory and they have to figure out how to balance and it's just really nicely done.

I'm a huge fan of Ursula's work and read most of these on her blog. I bought it to own the stories and because there was a new one in it!
I love how she handles fairy takes and how they're a mix of fae rules and sensible behavior. And they are all beautiful.

I never know what to DO with Valente’s writing. It always somehow entirely exceeds...everything. In terms of lushness, in terms of scope, in terms of what it demands of the reader. She’s never easy to read, but always rewarding to read.
And there’s something simultaneously fascinating and defamiliarizing to read stories playing with a set of mythologies with which I’m unfamiliar. The balance between the arc of stories, which spans cultures, and the particular shape of these stories is thrown into sharp relief. Now I want to know more.

I am such trash for Alexis Hall’s romances. And this one is no exception.
Partially it’s in how he walks the line between the absurdity of the characters and their very real flaws and personalities. Like half the cast is utterly ridiculous, but in a perfectly believable fashion. And it’s also in how he deals with the (admittedly often similar) emotional state of his main characters. He’s actually quite good at writing romance as the catalyst that allows for emotional growth rather than romance as the source of healing, which is part of what I appreciate. To say nothing of yelling at the main characters, which is the best part of any romance, as we all know.

I’ve definitely said phrases like “I don’t like horror” before, but I’m probably wrong because, like every other gothic novel about women and haunting and houses (thanks Dr. Auerbach!), I loved it.
There are books that are hard to put down in the sense that stuff keeps happening and so you have to keep reading. And then there are books that feel more inexorable. You put them down to do something else and then, five minutes later, you’re reading again and pulled back in. Mexican Gothic is like that. Moreno-Garcia knows her genre well and, in particular, knows how to leverage familiar tropes to tell a new story steeped in its own atmosphere and one that, in its extremely deliberate use of setting and character, takes the traditional horror of the foreigner and outsider that drives so much of the gothic, and puts it to spectacular good use.

So, um, fun fact, I’ve never actually read the rest of this series. Just the first one. (Why did I have a Tortall bias? Why did I avoid the Emelan books for so long? Why am I so odd? The world may never know.) Anyway, because COVID is a thing that makes libraries hard to access and money/shelf-space is a thing that makes just buying everything I remotely want to read a bad idea, I’ve been going through what I already own for some new stuff. And since my husband rereads Tamora Pierce and really likes the Emelan books, I decided it was time for a (re)read.
Anyway, there’s something extremely delightful about reading a book by an author you know well about characters you are already invested in. Easy reading isn’t precisely the right language, but it’s not far off either. Comfort brain food maybe?

There are some authors who, as they write and evolve, I find myself picking up their older work and thinking that really annoying thought that no creator likes to hear “I liked them better before.”
Readers, we’re really the worst.
This was a really nice chance to explore what it is I like so much about Walton, especially when she’s writing books in the vein of thought experiments. This book isn’t about the plot, it’s about a story of what people are like that uses fantasy and the excuse of a fascinating setting to think about how people are. I’m so glad it made it to ebook and I’m glad I tripped over it and was reminded of what precisely I appreciate about Walton as an author.