The last chapter was, obviously, my favorite, but I appreciated both Secunda's overall argument and the sources he makes available for inviting both learners and academics to think more seriously about the context of the Gemara.
(And the framework is far more helpful for the laylearner because there's no point in the future where I envision learned Pahlavi, but to be able to grasp/wrangle other people's scholarship in my own attempts to negotiate with the text is valuable.)

In so many ways, this book is more interesting for what Halivni thinks he is doing and the meta-conversation about how religious academics grapple with the conclusions of academia than his argument itself which, while it gets the job done and gets us from there to here, is more about what he needs from revelation.
Which, yes, is how this whole thing works. And Halivni has more of a knack than other people for identifying lacunae and reconstructing them in a manner not merely defensible, but later corroborated. And also, this book is fundamentally a theological argument for how to believe in Torah MiSinai after biblical criticism couched in academic language.
And that theological work and the drive he feels is far more interesting than the results.

This book is, in many ways, a hard book to read. It's not a story designed to suck you in, but it keeps you at a distance. It is, early on, a cerebral story where the reader is asked to spend a lot of time thinking about the characters rather than feeling with them. It feels almost like a documentary and it has that almost videographic eye in what it sees.
It is, in many ways, a book that is better without talking about it and although it can survive knowing what happens at the end, it's better when one doesn't. But like the rest of it, the twists are cerebral and it is only near the end that the reader has seen enough to feel.
And there's more than enough feeling in the ending.

So I will always read a beauty and the beast retelling, but this was particularly cool because I recognized the author from a fan forum we were on together lo these many eons ago. I’m so glad to see her take on the story now and I love how understated the magic in the story is. And how much thought she put into the curse itself.
It was a really good historical romance novel with the fairy twist and I’m so glad it’s out there in the world.