Middle books are hard, but made much easier when you read the trilogy like one giant book and don't really notice when one ends and the other begins.
This book basically tied up the loose ends from the previous book and created some new and interesting loose ends for the next book.
If you are at all invested in the world that Monette and Bear created, you will continue to very much enjoy this series. If you're not in it for the worldbuilding...okay, I guess, but I'm not entirely sure why you are here then.

I loved the first book in this series, enjoyed the first half of this one, and then basically fell off as soon as it became the story of a lost person trying to find themselves again.
I'm just not...interested in this story. Also

either the person who is single-minded about murder is wrong in their murder and so the redemption is about learning to kill, or they're RIGHT about this particular murder but we think it's somehow BAD for them to do the murdering and that's just...so uninteresting to me.

And that just really made it meh.

It's not that this isn't a romance novel because in so many ways it is. But the romance takes a backseat to the found family story and the "what does it mean to be human" story...
But also every story about non-humans is about what it means to be human. Or at least, all of TJ Klune's are. How do we become ourselves by finding the ways in which humanity is not about being homo sapiens? By caring for others and falling in love. Obviously.
Also, apparently, food.

This book is basically two things. The first is a strong desire to think about the setting/vibe of Beowulf. The second is a desire to critique and rework Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern, but with wolves. Specifically the bit about dragon mating.
It works extremely well.

I'm just bad at books that are supposed to be read slowly and sat with. I don't go slowly and sit with things so I feel like a lot of the stories in this book that would have benefited from having spent time with, I just sped through.
On the other hand, the wide span of experiences covered by the different essays is part of what makes it so compelling. There are so many different experiences: not one story, but many.

I desperately need to reread the original trilogy for this, but also this book was so interesting and weird and I love how Leckie writes an entire novel that begins in interlinked character studies and then becomes a story about growing up and finding yourself except in the most alien and weird way possible.
(Also since I just reread Ocean's Echo, we seem to be on a mind meld kick these days)

This book may hold the record for longest time between reading the beginning and the end. I'm pretty sure I started listening to it...before COVID. Definitely before I sped up my audiobooks.
The fact that I remembered enough about the story to pick it up says something.
Most of what it says is "what did I just read"? (For a given value of just)

This book is fascinating in the way it understands sectarianism and intelligence, especially when it comes to intellectual disability. It's particularly interesting because (like many marginalized sf writers, as opposed to white straight male writers), Kress is more interested in "What happens if" rather than polemics. Which makes, in particular, the portrayals of disability messy on any number of levels: whose life has value, how do we define value, a certain amount of magical healing...but because it's not polemical, Kress also lets it remain a problem rather than an argument. This book is uncomfortable, but precisely because it wants to think about the uncomfortable implications of genetic modification.

There is also, and this is my biggest critique of the text (aside from some of the freudian stuff), a complete absence of art as anything other than distraction (bad) or STEM support (good). Nothing about the human being's need for art or creativity. 90s. Whatever. That's probably the biggest frustration in the book. (The second biggest is that this was apparently a novella first that got expanded into a book AND IT SHOWS.)

When people are influenced by Tolkien, they write homage. When people are influenced by Lewis, they write critique.
There's an entire Harold Bloom Anxiety of Influence thing to be written about the need to rework one's relationship with Narnia as one grows up and needs to deal with complicated feelings about Narnia as a place.
I'm not in the mood to write it, but it definitely exists and it's attempting to negotiate the Christianity, the simplistic portrayal of women, the "problem of Susan" and what exactly this strange place that exists to gratify the whims of children is...
And, I mean, that most of what Tchaikovsky is doing here: exorcising Lewis. I'm not entirely convinced it works as a book, but Tchaikovsky has always been a writer of ideas through story rather than either character or narrative so that tracks.

I am so glad this book exists. It's thoughtful and funny and is not trying to tell you what to do, but taking seriously the idea that what and how we watch and relate to screens is itself worth looking at with curiosity and interest and not turning it into a moral panic.
I listen to enough You're Wrong About to find the history of a moral panic fascinating already, but Maciak talks about it without making it about the panic, but instead about the larger story of being human.
I really liked it.

This book feels like half a book that got out of hand and became a whole book.
I'm not sure if I liked the first book better or I got tired of the conceit.
I also feel like there was a SUPER interesting book about how to (re)build identity after it's stolen from you or you've never had it and I'm not sure the book this is gives it the space to be interesting and say interesting and complicated things.