The thing I really appreciated about this book is how...easily pushed around it showed me to be. When Misery was fighting in one direction, I was desperately rooting for them to believe. And once they did, I was desperately rooting for them not to believe. 
The story itself is complicated and I thoroughly enjoyed that the book wasn't necessarily interested in revelations as they occurred to the characters, but understood that the reader's attentions and the characters are just radically different because it's a story about how to craft the story of the hero.
And it's also very much a story about the mechanisms of faith—not faith itself exactly, but how faith works within the human mind. What makes people come to believe and what is it that distinguishes real faith from false beliefs. What is compelling, what is simplistic, and why do things look the way they do through different lenses?
And what Yang does with the Larex Forge and the mythology here is create a theological gedanken experiment where, given the nature of the book's reality, divinity might be real or might be madness and you can infer only from what the book tells you. Which is particularly fascinating to me because of what it reveals about when and what I want to believe.
Also, like, giant space mechs shaped like horrifying angels.

Awww, this was cute!
Appreciated the total lack of nobility and the Dickensian series of coincidences that make the world go round in a way that felt, at least to me, inevitable rather than contrived.
I don't have a lot to say about it, beyond once again finding the ways that contemporary authors use historical settings to have conversations about morality and what a person *ought* to do in a way that is so obviously about now rather than then.
(There's probably something also to be said here about romance novels and novellae in the sense of shu"t as different approaches to narrating the concept of ought but since I have no idea how to do it justice, I have no intention of doing it at all. Yet.)

I appreciate that this series just has no sense of scale. Like - everything that happens is the major event in another book and, in this book (and the previous one), it's like a chapter.
It's very much in the tradition of Delaney's idea of philosophical scifi but also with Tchaikovsky's own fondness for interesting cultural situations and resolutions.
The entire question is always "can we communicate across impossibly wide chasms of difference" and the book is always trying to write a realistic "yes!" as an answer.
Well, for a given definition of realistic. The premise can be as bonkers as one wishes so long as it allows for the bridge to be built. And I kind of love that.

Breaking my “academia doesn’t get reviews” rule because this book is so obviously a five. 
(Full disclosure- Sarit gave me a copy of the book but I was halfway through my library copy when she did)
The text sits right at the Venn diagram of meticulously researched history, nuanced close readings of texts, and really good analysis. And it was also fun to read!
I taught the chapter on men and women’s time, but I think my favorite was on human and Godly time. 

 So, I mean, first of all, thank you to Dr. Yitz Landes for putting this volume together and publishing it with footnotes and giving me access, by proxy, to all of these incredible people--the Roshei Yeshiva of Gush and your father. 
It was such a fascinating and moving read to learn more about two people I looked up to from afar and, specifically, getting a sense of their theology and how they see both God's will and our obligation
----
And there's a part of me that's furious that this kind of Torah wasn't really accessible to me because of my gender AND because no one told me that this kind of thinking and relationship existed. I had good teachers and the paucity of what I was exposed to because of my gender never ceases to anger me.
And the way R. Lichtenstein talks about the intellectual work of learning Torah as THE work of a Jew in the world, something that is attributed to his mother as well as to his teachers, just makes me wonder what he does with the non-obligation that women have in learning Torah. How do you square that? And you can see the 20th century work to nuance that p'tor/prohibition and yet AND YET.
I have a lot of feelings and this book, like so many, is the catalyst rather than the cause. 

Apparently it was time for the semi-regular reminder that 18th century novels pre-Austen annoy me. Which is a testament to the author's evocation of the era and also made it much more difficult for me to actually appreciate the book.

I had somehow not realized that this was a Jewish story even though *obviously* it is. And also it says something about the state of Jewish fiction that I was excited for a book that talked about a different tragedy than the Holocaust for a change

—instead we get the Russian pogroms!

We take our wins where we get them.
And it did end up being a very Jewish story about loss and mourning and memory while also being an American road trip novel and I'm not entirely sure the mashup worked, but I very much appreciated the story that it was.

And I also feel slightly bad that one of my takeaways was "I wish xenophobia and prejudice was that easy to exorcise." I think this book overall handles the problem of making natural evil supernatural pretty well—mostly by letting it exist in the fairy tale metaphor space—but that thought did occur to me.

Also, and I have to complain, there is one moment where a character says God's holy and hidden name, but what the character says in quotes is "Shem Hamephorash" and, like, that should not have quotes around it. Otherwise the Jewish content was great.

I will, it is known, read ANYTHING that calls itself a Beauty and the Beast story. This one was super sweet even if it felt slow at the beginning and was one of those books where, try as I might, I kept missing things in the audiobook because my mind wandered until the plot threads really started to pull together.
I appreciated the fairy tale parts and I also wanted a little more...something with the conversation about what happens when the world makes you the monster and you acquiesce because I couldn't tell if Cochrane was just skating lightly over it or was saying what needed to be said precisely by not engaging with it. צ״ע

Pandian's absolute commitment to the bit is what makes these books so much fun. Are they realistic? No. Do they hit the sweet spot between homage and pastiche to traditional mysteries with the knowing wink that invites the familiar reader in? Absolutely.
Are the recipes once again leaving me salivating? Oh completely. It may be cardamom scone time.

I have spent so much of my life trying to be critical (in both senses of the term) of Jane Eyre and, more specifically, Edward Fairfax Rochester and it remains intriguing to me that he's still such a compelling character in the text. That you can take them apart outside of the book(s) and then come back and see both of them in the book and it's just BAM.

Anyway, this book is wildly successful at doing what it sets out to do--taking the structure and experience of Jane Eyre rather than the specific plot beats--and transforming it into a modern narrative.

There were two things that stood out for me in how Edwards handled them.

The first is that she understands that Rochester has to screw up badly enough that you understand why Jane leaves and not so badly that you think she's wasting her time going back. So many people try to walk this line and what Edwards gets deeply is that's not *just* about Rochester; it's about what Jane can accept. Making Jane a foster kid gives Edwards the space to unpack Jane's reaction as reasonable given her background and the right thing to do for her without making Rosen evil. It was a really good call.
The second thing was her pitch perfect evocation of St. John Rivers as a career minded early academic trying to convince Jane to think his way and play his game because they're convenient for each other. 
This was one of the few books where I reacted to both the Rochester and the Rivers characters the way I did in Bronte's original and the absolute obnoxious condescension from Rivers that highlights how Rochester sees Jane as a person was brought into this version brilliantly.

This is not the retelling that hews closest to the original, but it's the one that captures the feel of the original for me.