The title lied. This was not, in fact, fun.
Some people enjoy reading the novelizations of another person's poorly thought out D&D  campaign. It turns out that I don't. (I blame Legends and Lattes, somewhat, for equating cozy fantasy with worlds pulled entirely from RPGs. 1 - I don't like RPGs, it is one of the defining distinctions between me and my spouse and 2 - I expect more coherence to worldbuilding in books than I do in games, which means that you cannot

invent goddamn message boards through tapestries and fucking STARBUCKS AND UBER but...not a CAR or a TRAIN? What is this nonsense? Why do these things exist without the infrastructure to support far more massive things? You can't have VEGAS and CONS without a vastly differently organized world. It just doesn't make sense.

Anyway, I'm mad that I like to know how things end because otherwise I would have DNF'ed this.

We're two books in to a Sharon Shinn series and no one has invented a car yet? What is even happening?

I'm enjoying the conceit of this world very much and I like that it's...sort of magic and sort of just people being people. I do like the idea of "person who you can tell all your secrets to" although I REALLY like "culturally sanctioned blunt person" as a job.

But also I like having Shinn books left to read in this absolute dumpster fire of a timeline.

It's always interesting to me how little Shinn shies away from, for lack of a better term, depictions of domestic violence and how, in her stories, they are both terrible and commonplace. They're BAD but they are things that happen and need dealing with.

Literally nothing happened in this book and yet I had such an enjoyable time reading it. It's a book two in a trilogy and it shows. Do you like romances that are mostly the story of people becoming who they are and setting up book three? Great, have a book!

Also I would listen to Jenny Sterlin read ANYTHING, which may explain my appreciation.

This woman needs a 12 part HBO series about her life. Obviously the thread tying it together would be the inquisition and her work to rescue other conversos, which lets her be the absolute hero she was, with all her flaws, but also - there's just so much FUN you could have, especially if you stunt cast some of the bit characters and make up the courtroom scenes and embellish a few narrow escapes. (And Brianda!)

This book was wonderful and Doña Gracia Nasi is one of the most amazing women of Jewish history.

The fundamental problem with the taming of the shrew as the source of your adaptation is, well, twofold. The first is the taming and the second is the shrew. 
(Also having 10 Things I Hate About You set the bar)
Sharma negotiates pretty well around the basic problems of the plot, which just means that it's when the original plot feels the need to raise its head that things get weird again. I think some of it was that I found the contrived need for the two main characters to get together to be...overly contrived in an attempt to balance original storyline and modernity.
It was a very fun mess, but it was a mess.

Maybe I'll just read Sharon Shinn's entire back catalog for the foreseeable future.
Shinn is apparently the queen of "what if we did the generic fantasy world, but then this one weird thing" and just running with it.
I enjoyed this one a lot even though I don't have a lot to say about it. I think I need fiction that I don't have a lot to talk about right now.

There's a particular level of niche nerdiness for which these books scratch an itch. Yes, I WOULD like to think about the how the suspension of habeus corpus affected the average Londoner (and their love life?)
This series is interesting precisely for how careful it is not to play into the lives of the gentry to tell romance set during the regency. It does mean that you end up with a lot of "I showed up for the romance but now I'm here for the history of women making choices" and the romance feels almost secondary, but that might also be what catches my attention.

I do love metafiction and this one - how and why are there so many murders in this sleepy little town - is extremely delightful and does the thing really well where it plays with the conventions of the genre while still adhering to them and, in doing so, making the critique more fun.
There's a quiet heart behind the story, while it's still extremely funny and just very well done.

Ah yes, the final book in "What if the elements determined your flavor of neurodivergence?" series. This time, it's autism I mean wood.
Not that I don't still remember my frustration with Odelia from last time, but like, the main message of this book was, well, the GEmara? A person should be supple like a reed and not break like a cedar?

It feels like Shinn really knew what she was doing with Coru and Sweela and didn't entirely know how to let the other characters grow into more of their elements rather than less of them. Also, while I do usually find Autism/ADHD to be a good pairing, Valentina and Sebastian never really worked for me as characters who were narratively assigned to be in love.

I like Shinn but this series is sometimes a cautionary tale in planning a fivefold book when you only really know what you want to do with some of them. (Good job, Bujold, on pivoting back to the Fifth God when she realized that was where her interest was.