I appreciate this series’s absolute willingness to be bananas and lean in to being a gendankenexperiment with a plot. 
And it’s also a trilogy about what it means to be People (human or even Human manifestly not sufficient for current purposes). 
The first is about sentience in a radically different body shape, the second takes the first book and combines that with distributed consciousness and then this is the obvious third stage of “what is sentience anyway”. 

I didn’t originally love the AuDHD birds especially as it became clear that Tchaikovsky was doing it on purpose. And, by the end, once the corvids started on

we’re not sentient but neither are any of the rest of you,

I was suddenly much more sold on them and what Tchaikovsky was doing with it. 
These books are hard to describe because they’re ALL about the weird and the what if. Thinking on character level it’s hard to talk about these books but this is one of the few series where the author’s choice to go worldbuilding and ideology instead of (rather than through) character still works for me. 
Some of that is because he does have some touchstone characters to carry the story. But much of it is Hudson’s narration. 
My one observation is that, in a way I find startling, he’s one of the few authors in the sff field that have interesting things to say but nothing about gender. And it’s notable by now in its absence because so much other stuff about culture is integral to these books. 

I definitely read this too quickly and I definitely did not appreciate everything it was doing, but it does confirm many of my core beliefs:
1) People talking about information they are passionate about is amazing
2) All disciplines get more interesting the further you drill down into the knowledge mostly specialists know
3) Stuff is more complicated than you think

It also introduced me to many thinkers and civilizations that I just knew nothing about and it was the wide variety and the possibilities that were so interesting and compelling.

Also the authors' critique of inequality as a useful framework without more context AND their arguments about the nature of freedom (as grounded in the indigenous critique) is SUPER fascinating. (Also feels like it's in conversation with the way that religious thinkers have tried to come to terms with freedom and heteronomy in ways that shine a light on the weak points)

I am really racking up the "what did I just READ" books these days.
Most of this book was what I expected. Somehow I failed to expect the last like...quarter of it. I should have. I'm not mad. More appreciative of how everything played out.
Also WOW does Herc get interrupted when there is kissing happening. Like every time until the last.

Turns out that the book people think is good is, in fact, good.
Post-shabbos news at 11.
There is a certain amount of leadership (tm) speak that I may just be tired of from having heard it too much.
But the things she pushes her reader to think about—and care about—are useful. It's more complicated to ask what value they have in terms of producing better results, but when what you're attempting to create is an experience, asking what goes into it and focusing on the people is useful.
Also that one thing about replacing etiquette with explicit rules just made my heart sing.

The story itself was interesting and the question of what it takes to take down unfair systems of power (masters tools etc.) made for a fascinating sequel.
...and I remembered *nothing* whatsoever about the first book and I strongly suspect that my somewhat desultory response of "oh, okay, I guess these people are all kind of traumatized" would have been very different if I remembered their trauma.
Brains, man. Brains.

So my biggest issue with this book was that I had somehow filed it in my head as a romance recommendation and it is not a romance, although what it is is adorable. But by the time I realized that it wasn't the thing I thought it was, I was also 3/4s of the way through the book and just going to finish it.
That's not the book's fault at all, but it definitely impacted my experience. (Isn't it annoying how you can get entered into a contract with the reader without, you know, getting into a contract with the reader.)
My second biggest issue was that it was written in second person and I just can't. 
However, if you*—gentle reader—go in expecting an adorable found family story that is also a critique of how kindness gets lost when institutionalized and don't mind second person, you may find that this is the book for you.
——
*Yes, obviously, second person is fine in nonfiction. It's in fiction I hate it. I don't like when books tell me what I'm doing when I'm manifestly not.

I need a shelf called "this is definitely someone's special interest" for all the books I read that are told with love and care about a thing that matters deeply to the author.

I am NOT getting backyard chickens. I'm close enough to my limit of creatures I can keep alive as it is. But this was a fun read (thanks, Kevin & Productivity Alchemy!) except for all the parts that were not exactly fun because they're about industrial farming and...yikes on bikes. There wasn't anything I didn't know, just a lot about the ways in which we owe animals so much better than we give them.

I would, however, love if someone right near me felt like getting backyard chickens so I could live vicariously through them. 

Also, there is a therapy chicken in this book named "Attila the Hen". That is all and that is everything.

In retrospect, reading this back to back with All My Rage may not have been my GREATEST choice.
But they're also very different in many ways. I'm always weird on psychological thrillers—and it definitely helps when there's a scifi element—but Gailey is very good at what they do and what they often do is make you *extremely* uncomfortable in all the ways that fiction can. This book is no exception and the story she tells—how we come to see others as human and how we come to see them as ours to manipulate—uses the premise extraordinarily well. It was a gut punch of a book.

This was one of those books where I shouldn't have listened to it on a Friday because it was giving me a lot of feelings—mostly of the "everything hurts and what do I do because I can't make these peoples' lives better—and processing feelings while cooking for Shabbat is...less than helpful.
It was heart-hurting and heart-mending though. And thank goodness I finished it before candlelighting.
It was good and hard and there are two things I want to talk about.

1 - Salahudin as a character was so well drawn and also

I could have sworn he was autistic and the reveal for what actually happened was both awful but also complicated for me because of the way that a) autistic kids are so often traumatized and b) our baseline is his trauma. It's not that Tahir did anything wrong and it makes perfect sense and also there's a lot to unpack there.

2 - Imam Shafiq and Sister Khadija are some of the most accurately depicted clergy I have ever read. I realize there's a ton in this book about the American dream and outsiders and loss and how people deal with trauma and what it means to heal, but...Tahir's power couple that serves as spiritual guides to the small community and works ridiculously hard and shows up when they're needed without judgement and always with food - so accurate and I really appreciated it. 

Points to Alexis Hall for literally never once breaking character, including in the extra-diagetic material. Well done, spirit.

The thing (well, one of the many things) I love about Hall is that he is extremely good at interrogating tropes by *very strongly committing to them*.
This is not his first Ducal rodeo and, like all the other times he's written a historical romance novel about a Duke, the story is simultaneously about broody mcbroodicus falling in love and also asking "what it is that makes a person like this without making them fundamentally unbearable" and then writing a story that answers that question. He also doesn't pull punches in his descriptions, which makes for an interesting depiction of animal sacrifice that's just...there without any moralizing. But, again, committing to the bit.
And, finally, one of my favorite Hall tropes, that completely ridiculous and slightly over the top friend who you spend the entire time going "do...do they have any idea what's going on? Are they the ONLY one with any idea what's going on?"
Delightful.