I suppose I understand how someone named Ursula could end up having so much sympathy with the villains in a story.
Calling this a clever retelling does not really do it justice. A wise retelling, perhaps? It's not complicated, but it is a very Kingfisher-esque meditation on what it means to be small and stubborn and face down evil with everything you have.

Okay, so reading this book less than a week after Katherine May's Enchantment was AN EXPERIENCE.
Because May is talking about finding ways to do what many of these secular religions offer, albeit often in a terrifying fashion.
And., despite being a rabbi, apparently I ALSO have a knee-jerk response that describing something as a religion is a way of saying it's adherents are unreasonable and its tenets aren't true. Anyway, some cheshbon hanefesh (soul searching) to be done there, clearly.

But I also think that Burton is doing something extremely interesting in the way she framed her book and how she brought us into it through history and her own experiences. She's convincing that religion as such is at least necessary if not good.
And simmering in the background of the entire book is the commodification of religions that become practiced through individual purchases and aesthetics. Especially wellness (tm), which is part of nearly every secular religion she mentions, as the religion of buying you way into eternal life...if you'd indulge me. In some ways, that's my biggest problem with taking the goodness of her secular religions seriously (even the ones that inform my own behavior) because of the impossibility of any lasting meaning coming from a religion where I am supplicant, priest, temple, and God and the road to heaven is paved with dollars spend on self care. *checks yarn collection guiltily* What does it mean to take a social justice community and turn everything into demands for "free labor"? (There's arakhin stuff going on here too, but that's getting way too far afield.) Even granting that the alternative is worse, the idea that justice is a commodity rather than what we are obligated to give to the world upsets me. But also I am used to balancing obligation and the limits of the self so IDK. Solving yet another problem with UBI.

What is also fascinating about this book is that, when you line up her secular religions next to each other, it becomes much easier to discuss the measure of a religion in terms of how much good or evil it does. The atavistic alt-right and similar ideologies is the only religion with a death toll. If we're evaluating new religions not (just) on their truth claims, but on the good they do in their rituals, communities, and eschatological future, it's pretty clear which one is the actual worst. (Not leaving aside the truth claims, it's also the one with the least amount of actual evidence behind it's beliefs, but I digress). That does not make dealing with it easier, but it does change the conversation about the value of each individual idea when only one of them creates murderers. (What this says about theistic religions is an exercise I leave to the reader.)

The question I keep getting stuck on, though, is that Burton talks about the deployment of bodies and lived experience in the social justice movement and notes that it's a very this-world approach with no concept of the soul. And I keep trying to figure out whether that's true.

Also, this book was written pre-COVID and it feels like it's ALSO describing things that no longer exist and it's weird to feel that a 3 year book is out of date.

I think this book spends a little too much time inside Rath’s head and it means we love him and get a little judgy at other people. 
And it’s quintessential Megan Derr—good people doing the best they can come out okay in the end and fall in love. What’s not to like?

I have two very specific complaints about this book. The first is the Elizabeth Bennetification of Jane Austen heroines. And while Jalaluddin is generally better than other writers at sticking to the feel of the book rather than the plot beats, I felt like this book could have used a little more Anne Elliott in its main character.
Which brings me to thing two - second chance romances tend to annoy me because you have to tread the fine line between "no sensible person would have broken up for this reason" and "why would you get back together with someone who DID that?" It's like trying to get Darcy to be the right level of socially awkward where he's definitely offensive, but not a dick. And the part where it fell apart actually made total sense to me. It was everything up until the...fourth time they reconnected that I kept wondering what these two were doing together. 
Also, and this is just silly, I can't tell if *I* don't know as much as I thought I did about app development or the author doesn't, but either way, aspects of the development stuff just felt odd.

And, this is absolutely a culturally specific phenomenon, but the fact that they were married FOR YEARS made me immediately want to scream. Absolutely not, no ma'am, sets off all my women in chained marriages bells. And that also made it difficult

Having said that, I continue to delight in the community that Jalaluddin sets us in and the sense of camaraderie I feel with the romances she situates within a religious community navigating its own practices and devotion and relationship to the wider world. Especially when I get to play "can I guess the translation of that Arabic word based on my knowledge of Hebrew?"

One of the highest compliments I can give a print book is that Shabbat ends and I keep reading it.
Also, this book has what I can only call big Raksura energy, which makes me very happy because while I love Murderbot, I also really Wells' entire back catalog. 
N.K. Jemisin provided one of the blurbs and she said: "Wells excels at brooding, powerful inhuman protagonists who just need a little kindness to be their badass best.”
And I have never read a more complete summary of her oeuvre in my life.

I adore Katherine May, and not just because she's also an autistic woman fascinated by the theological questions the world asks of us all.
In part it's that she writes with an openness I long for; cynicism and sarcasm were my sword and shield for decades and while I still need the brutal human that gets us through these days and these times, I also find myself longing for the ability to say "here is my still beating heart, handle with care" and trust the world to listen. May writes with that kind of trust.
The thing that stood out most starkly to me in this book is the idea of hierophany; May quotes Mircea Eliade on (and here I paraphrase from memory) that experience of perceiving a thing as sacred. In doing so, we turn it into a hierophany. And I keep thinking of Rav Soloveitchik in Halakhic Man talking about the perception of the sun setting that tells Halakhic man it's time to say ma'ariv. And I think, in order to understand both what Rav Soloveitchik is doing and what so many of his students and followers fail to grasp, is the idea of hierophany. The world is not a clock that keeps halakhic time, but that combines with halakha to create a hierophany. But it's not about elevating the mundane EITHER. It's about seeing and, in the seeing, perceiving the sacred that is already there. The sacred is not an imposition on the natural world, but a wellspring that bubbles out of it to meet the cloud of revelation halfway. (That's where we build the palace of torah, right?)
Reading May makes me think these thoughts. I feel like I need to reread her book now with little sticky flags to put everywhere. 

Apparently it's Nicole Chung time because I immediately finished her second memoir and went on to read her first.
It's so interesting reading them back to back because they focus so closely on specific parts of her life that one really does get that sense of bifurcated identity that she is exploring as a transracial adoptee. I don't think it's not-not intentional, but I do think it's an effect rather than a goal.
And they're both stories about finding/making meaning in ways that feel like they call not so much to the reader to respond, but on the reader to become a person who has heard and listened and has changed for having done so.
Especially as a pair, these are my favorite kinds of memoirs: invitations into other people's experiences and lives as a gift. Come with me. Let me tell you my story.

Another Wizards vs. Lesbians recommendation, this one very much to my taste. I do wonder how it would have landed if I hadn't already listened to the episode and knew I would like it.
But also, Simon is one of the most delightful Jewish characters I've run into in fiction in a long time. And seeing how his religion was a quiet but integral part of his magical identity was just so well done.
I agree - I would love to see this novella turn into either a series or the start of a a longer book.

I hate when I have nothing intelligent to say about a book. To be clear, I inhaled this one over the course of a single day...which may not be the best way to experience a story of grief and loss and seeing oneself.
Another round of former Toast editors breaking my heart with their longform writing in all the best ways. This is just one of those stories that stays because it's a good book to have read to one day be sad. And to read now and let the text offer a reckoning with loss.
Also one of the few books where I see a depiction of religion that resonates with me and the push/pull between inside/outside when it comes to comfort and being at home.

I'm not entirely sure if the secondhand embarrassment to adorable ratio was entirely correct in this book. Or, rather, that it IS but the deck is stacked towards the front and there were a number of moments where I just put the book down and was like "nope, not dealing with these nudniks".
Which, I mean, bug or feature is in the eye of the beholder and it's always difficult to pinpoint the line between "aww" and "ugh" because readers are fickle beasties.
And basically the book, as a reading experience, definitely got better after the first third. And one of the things this book does really well is "falling in love is no substitute for therapy" and I really appreciate that.
And there are moments when this book feels like the author read that post (Reddit or Tumblr, I can't remember) about the difference between ask culture and guess culture and thought "what if that but gay".