This book was excellent, thank you whoever on OLUF recommended it. The world needs more books like this, especially for queer kids to see themselves and find themselves in literature. It's a good book doing a good thing.

The best part about Murderbot is the narrative voice; it's just so much fun to read and the way it leaves little asides in and also the way that you can hear its emotional responses from the way it is aware of its body and reactions. Wells is just really good at thinking about how not-humans (in all the definitions) would relate to being embodied. And, of course, the adventures are fun.

Ellis has been using the “dead dove do not eat” gif a lot for her work and, you know, it works.
Which is to say, this book is exactly what I expected it to be, and the sub genre is one I don’t particularly care for. So it’s very much a reflection of the author, and her interests, and she does a really good job with it, and the whole first contact story has never particularly appealed to me.

I really liked this book - it's particularly polished for a debut novel and Johnson has an excellent sense of how story and society relate to one another. The story is not about injustice per se, but it is about the people who experience injustice and what happens to them and what their world looks like. And it's also just a cool story about parallel universes and what-ifs and it was extremely well done.

I’m trying to think of a review for this that isn’t just damning it with faint praise. It was fine, It did some stuff that was incredibly interesting as fantasy does. But mostly it fumbles the question of redemption, so one appreciates the irony of me reading it on Yom Kippur. How do you make a bad character good is a compelling question and one this book...entirely fails to answer. Cool world building, major character issues. And so here we are.

I really enjoy retellings and this particular version of the Mahabharata IN!! SPACE!!!! is no exception. There's something extremely cool and interesting about knowing that the story is based in a specific narrative tradition, but not knowing the actual story (which is a shameful absence in my education, but we'll leave that for now) and wondering which elements come from the author and which from the myth. The not-knowing adds an element to character choices as well - the sense of fatedness that these people are both choosing AND cannot act differently than they've chosen.
But Mandanna does a really good job with this mashup and now I just get to sit and wait for the finale.

This was a really sweet follow-up to the original story and resolved things very nicely.

Oh, Gen. And everyone else.
This series was fantastic and I'm so sad it ended and also delighted by the story-arc that it sketches.
I feel like I don't have that much to say about it other than that it was all I wanted it to be.

I loved this story - from the bizarre and atmospheric beginning to the unfolding of the mystery where the reader is understandably one step ahead of the narrator and yet not in any aggravating way. It's weird and gorgeous and I liked it so very much.