I love this series so much. And Cleric Chih is another entry on my "important clergy of speculative fiction" list. (Which I have to figure out what I want to do with...)
Just...loss and memory, and the stories we tell and who owns memory and also the mammoths as both metaphors for the things that we can't leave behind but also actual mammoths and just...I would like these books in a beautiful omnibus edition one day.

I knew I would fly through this, which of course is why I finished it the day it came out. I really like this particular KJ Charles series. It just makes me so happy and it really does showcase Charles at her best.
Also it has one of my favorite pairing tropes of slightly tormented genius and absolute golden retriever of a human.

I'm not sure if I wanted more from this book than it gave or if I just was in a weird headspace while reading it. I think I wanted more of the mystery in my mystery and it felt more like the mystery was an accessory to it.
Having said that, the conceit was very clever and I do very much like Mur Lafferty's books when they're on a space station.

I have finally had my necromance with this series and apparently all it took was Moira Quirk's audio to really sell me on the absolute weirdness of it. The voices she does are just AMAZING and I appreciate it so much. I also really appreciate Muir's commitment to jumping genre and setting and everything in literally every book.
Also I now have expectations that consist predominantly of expecting Muir to mess with us as readers and play around with silly internet memes and just generally have fun while also asking about the nature of love and loss and self-abnegation. You know, easy questions.

Either Moira Quirk absolutely slays as a narrator (correct) or this book is INFINITELY better on the reread (also correct).
I'm generally pro-spoilers, but I think perhaps this book needed to be spoiled for me in order for me to have the kind of correct expectations. Once I knew what Muir was doing, I could enjoy what she was doing. I'm so glad I reread this before taking on Nona.

This is the kind of Jewish book I want! It's thoughtful and it's interested in all sorts of Jews and it cares about details and Judaism as a religion and culture and people and then it goes and makes one joke about there not being a golem and then...there's no golem! (Sorry, I am so tired of golems.)

I adored it.

I have got to stop reading books that upset me on Shabbat, I'm beginning to suspect that it's assur.
This book is not so much intentionally upsetting, but inevitably upsetting because it talks about our failures to perceive truth, the need to perform truth in the way that best matches the other person's idea of what your truth ought to look like, the way we as a western society have turned the gotcha into an art form and what happens to people who are disbelieved.
It's a really hard book, for all that it's a very difficult book to stop reading. It's a book that leaves me simultaneously energized and depleted; I want to support those pushing for change and I want us to talk and think about what is invested in presenting the other as a con man trying to take what is ours rather than a fellow trying to convey their unknowable soul.
I feel like I'm spending a lot of time this Elul thinking about obligation and I wish I knew where it was going.

Also, shout out to Nayeri for the way she talks about autism and her own suspicions about her neurotype. It makes a lot of sense to me that it takes an autistic person to unpack the ways that natural behaviors...aren't and how our assumptions about the culture that taught us how to express emotions and convey stories can absolutely hinder us when the things we assume are "what humans do" turn out to be socially constructed.

Casey McQuiston has written three very different stories and all of them are amazing. This is no different and also I'm beginning to suspect that I like ya fiction better than YA fantasy.
 (Possible reasons include that I am far enough away from my own young adult years that simply the POV is enough defamiliarization to catch my interest or that I am pickier about fiction and only read authors I already know and trust whereas I am more adventurous when it comes to YA or that the plots are better. No idea.)

This book is so good and it is so careful with its characters to give them space not just to be, but to become and recognizes how much of adolescence is about becoming rather than figuring out what you actually need or want to be. Also the story itself was EXTREMELY satisfying in all the right ways.

This book is a lot in all the best ways. I found myself stopping constantly to think about all the questions Odell was asking about time and how we (are urged to) spend it. And evaluating my own relationship with work and time and the having of time and, just, all the things. 
Also, she's just such a good writer and the way she invites you equally into the research as into the travelogue means you are constantly being drawn along, almost outside of your own time, into these set pieces of moments that she builds for you. They cohere, but they don't specifically go places, which is the point.
I was also amused at how many of her references I've read - it's been over a decade since I had to read Bergson and Taylor. Heschel was a bit more recent.

I appreciated that this book took one of the mainstays of the romance genre—the man with the secret—and said "yes, but let's maybe make that the least interesting part of the story". The ongoing conversations about what it means to do something truly versus falsely and the degree of art that exists in all interactions...
It was also super interesting to hear the characters take apart and choreograph their interactions (NTs can DO that?) as a way to have the conversation about what lying is (and isn't) and also when and how it matters.
Also, Lerner is one of the few authors who write Jewish characters in romance I actually want to read. Which is, believe me, a hell of a high bar.