Alright @RomanceNovelLi1, you were right.
This one is markedly better. Both because my hackles did not go up at the relationship between the two MCs and because the things that drew them to each other felt more real to me.

Also, I mean, historical autistic character who I really liked. Also I have some notes. I'll get to that in a minute.
This was one of those romances where the story gets equal billing with the romance and it's not always clear which is facilitating which, which I like. Overall it worked for me in a way that the previous book didn't.

2 comments:
1) Do people really spend that much time fantasizing about potential partners while they're still either strangers or just friends? Like - is this a romance novel trope used to convey interest that doesn't happen in real life or is this something that happens regularly and I'm just unaware of it? (Brought to you by the time I insisted that the conceit of reading people's emotions on their faces or people was a literary convenience and then I learned that. nope, I'm just autistic. Which was a wild experience.)

2) Ewan has a certain amount of convenient autism, meaning that the degree to which he is disabled by being (coded as) autistic depends on how much the plot needs him to be rather than being extremely consistent. Also Cole does this thing (that even autistic authors do and it drives me bonkers) where love somehow breaks through flat affect to have him show emotions and that's how you know it's love and, like, that's not how flat affect works. 
I can think of one author who does it well figures out how to bring the reader into the autistic experience of feeling rather than portray autistic characters as being less autistic in moments of high drama. And this isn't to say that autistic people don't have feelings (NOPE) or show feelings (also nope). But once you write a character who has a certain amount of flat affect, you ought to honor that.

I have two very specific critiques of this book that was otherwise very sweet and entertained my knittery self.

1) Jackson tries to lampshade the "romance isn't therapy" except that all of her characters—including, as far as I can tell, the romance in the previous book—deal with their stuff by committing to another person with whom they are in love. So either this is the therapy = talking about your things and just having the conversation helps (lol, nope) or the relationship deals with the very real trauma that these characters have experienced.
This is the inevitable problem of romance where there is an inverse relationship between the size of the stakes and the ability to resolve everything within 350 pages. So what do you do? I'm always impressed by authors who walk the line of ending it with "and they're working on it and it's not perfect but we're going to keep trying because we think we're worth it" and this book doesn't quite manage that for me.

2) Everyone spends WAY too much time inside their own heads and I realize that, coming from me, that's a wild critique because I absolutely spend way too much time inside my own head and the best I can say is...it doesn't sound like that. There's a lot of meditative exposition of people thinking about their choices and what got them to where they are now in a way that is very convenient for catching the reader up on everyone's life and, I just, it didn't feel like thinking to me. It felt like this book really needed a 19th century narrator to talk about their experiences for them, but alas, we don't do that anymore so characters need to do all that work for themselves and it comes out weird.

The little yarn shop in Harlem did absolutely delight me thought.

This was one of those books that I failed to read as a child but everyone else apparently did. So now I'm trying to catch up and it's fascinating to read the story about kids going into a fantasy world that defined so many of the books that the authors my age read and are responding to.
It's also good. It's good in the way that it responds to Narnia and good in the way that it thinks about story and fascinating to think about what's going to happen.
It's odd seeing how this book would have grabbed me if I'd read it 20 years ago and enjoying it now without being grabbed.
It reminds me, for perhaps obvious reasons, of Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry in how they are stories about coming into another world and discovering the seriousness of it. But it's also very different. I suppose that means I need to track down the rest of them now.

 This was so ridiculously beautiful. Leaving aside that Yong is an incredibly gifted writer who has a deep sense of how to make everything interesting and this stuff is already interesting!
The way he tells this story and his focus on the umwelten of animals rather than on what they can do for us makes it an amazing book to get lost in.
I realize this is a weird sentence, but it was the perfect book to finish on Rosh Chodesh to appreciate .ברכי נפשי 

It's been a while since a 1 star, but I kept myself entertained during the last half of this book by imagining the things I would complain about in the review. (Yes, I have heard of DNF. One day I might even try it...)

Thorne says in the letter to Mary Shelley at the end that she played with the main characters like dolls and she's right. Paper thin cutouts with no personality who just say things in the moment because it's convenient but would never be mistaken for real. There was no sense of them as people, just as things doing something in this moment and then doing something else in the next moment. But I will focus on four complaints because they are fairly representative.

1) So much of this book was gratuitous. In this case, I'm thinking of the completely unnecessary love triangle. Why did we need that? Oh my god why are they obsessed with her.

2) Historical inaccuracies that served no reason. Why are all these Anglicans pretending to be Catholic? Why do they think clergy can't marry? What's up with the whole exercise and appreciation of musculature nonsense? Why are the Frankensteins British?

3) This book handled belief and theology really poorly. Victor's atheism—inspired by Percy's, yes—is shallow, but at least it's real and, like, as a religious person, the bits where prayer was invoked felt deeply cringey (I'm willing to concede that this may be my visceral dislike for Christian ideas of prayer, but still). Some of it was "why" but most of it was "ugh". Everyone felt like a caricature, which means that both the atheism and the reach for divinity suffered.

4) And if you think this book handles theology poorly, that's nothing on how it handles morality. The book tries to have this arc where Angelika becomes more aware of injustice and poverty, but it's all in the William Wordsworth "the poor exist for me to be kind to them" thing where poverty and suffering is for Angelika to grow and so it doesn't matter whether she's effective or actually helpful, just that she has feelings. None of which persists in the face of actual challenges; she reverts straight back to selfishness but I don't think we're supposed to notice. But she wants to be better. Also Thorne has a tendnecy to equate poverty and dirt with moral value and, like, that's not how people experiencing poverty usually behave. Thorne writes like she wants to care about important questions like the morality of DIY spousing, but she doesn't follow through. Ever.

Anyway, so, not my jam, not my donut. 

It is wild to have your Shabbat table arguments recapitulated in book form.
Sedgman basically makes the argument for a strong ethical stance and a movement away from reasonable (as determined by whom) as the standard for behavior. Reasonable only works when the world is fair.
It's really good and the narrative voice is absolutely delightful. Especially the way her children are an integral part of the story in a way that women writing not-about-motherhood don't often get to do. But she does and does it well. It did help that it resonated.
I'm not sure that this is a book that will change people's minds; part of what this book analyzes is when rhetoric fails and why. But I found it really valuable to see how she lays out her case and the research behind it. 

It was extremely unfair for this book to come out right before the last days of passover and then have one Friday before it's Shabbat again. Did I try to finish it before Shabbat anyway? Yes of course, it's called hubris.

I have absolutely no idea how to describe what this book is doing. Hall is always at his most "trenchant observations about the nature of humanity" when he's at his most absurd and this book is no exception. Everyone is ridiculous and that's why it works because people are ridiculous and Hall loves that about us.

Now that I'm aware of the existence of "wizards versus lesbians" (both the podcast and the microgenre), it's very difficult to miss.

I wish I remembered more of books one and two.

I keep putting Bennett and Wexler in conversation in my mind, mostly because of the queer protagonists and because I read them for the first time around the same time, and it's interesting because the prime relationships that turn the engine of both plot and story in Wexler's world is siblings, while, in Bennett's, it's parent/child. And you see that here as well.
It's a very weird series that is somehow simultaneously about empathy, the impossibility of grief, and "what if we lived in a simulation and then hacked the mainframe".
One day I'll reread it back to back and see what it's like that way.

(Also, I'm looking forward to some literature or DH student's dissertation on the acknowledgements section of books written in the first two years of the pandemic. There's so much there.)

As a side note, I've discovered that the counterpart of gay princes in speculative fiction is lesbian detectives. (No, I will not be unpacking that further at this time, but do let me know if that sentence makes sense) The mlm/wlw solidarity we need.

Anyway, this book was an absolute delight. I appreciated Older's earlier work, but this pushed all the right buttons and reminded me that I actually do really like second chance romance when it's not the focus of the story, but just part of it. Also everything about this book was perfectly crafted and the world was such an interesting backdrop that just made the entire thing so much more fun. I would like more of this please.

I have this problem and it's called "bildungsroman take forever for me to read" and it eventually dawned on me that the reason it was taking me months to get through this book was that it was a bildungsroman and so my reading slowed to an absolute crawl.
This makes no sense because this story was a delightful mix of all the things I appreciate in a story and especially once it hit the fifty percent mark and started to spiral as a story, it was really good. It just takes me forever to get through the larval stages of main character development when the story is so episodic so I finish part and then put it down.