Me: Whether I like a book is about style, how it handles the characters, the larger experience; anything can  be done well.
Also me: I don't like books where people live in tall towers and the ground is different.

I...apparently it's a thing of mine. Anyway, it took me a while to get into this book, what with the setting being extremely gonzo and also a thing I don't like.
It got better when it got weirder...not that it didn't start out weird.

Also, Odd Thebes as narrator would NOT have been my first choice. I get it and also I resented him for a significant amount of the book because, well he's that kind of person. Honestly, given how many things in this book are tropes I don't like, it has to have been pretty good to get a 3.

I'm impressed at the number of "it's complicated" this book managed to produce.
 have to trust that this is where I left off reading the Earthsea books, which makes sense because I first read them as a child (on the bus to school, if we're going to be extremely specific) and this one wasn't out yet.
And it's not a book written for a child, it's a book for the children who grew up on Earthsea and it's made up of people trying to have a conversation about the performance of gender (and other roles) in a world without Judith Butler, which is super interesting in its own right, but the way in which Le Guin allows her own characters to deconstruct the world they live in - who am I am if I am not this thing I have been doing day in and day out? - makes it shine.
And it works as a story, which is the oddest part yet.
And also this book has a lot to say about disability and, while it's complicated because it's the story of disability that grows out of abuse rather than birth or illness—meaning something was DONE to a person rather than HAPPENED and that's also an experiential split in the Disability community—and so Le Guin is focused on trauma and recovery rather than the social model of disability and yet, it felt like there was obvious space for a conversation about ableism in the book's terms and that lacuna remains. That is - both Ged and Therru exist are models of having had something taken from them and both are stories of how they move not back but on (transcend) and also the gorgeous conversation of the world that shaped them and judges them that would match the gorgeous conversation this book has with and about gender is missing.
And there's another book so we'll see.

Oof, I have SO many feelings about this book.
So, first of all, this book was a humiliation party and that is not my thing at. all. and also, what exactly did I expect from a story is based on Emma!? Still, this upped the level of shudder.
It somehow felt like Naina got all the upsetting parts of Emma and Knightley without the privileges of either. And, like, the gender swapped thing is cool and also "let's turn this character into a woman and also take away all his personal stability" was definitely a choice.
I wanted Naina to be more okay than she was. I wanted this to be about men actually needing to account for their behavior and it...wasn't.

Which brings me to the thing that I keep coming back to - romance novels are an amazing place to work through and talk about serious issues and also it can be tonally complicated because the romance pushes happy endings and both trauma and systemic problems don't lean towards that.
Like,

you will not fix San Francisco's homelessness problem with A FUCKING APP! Helping those who are unhoused is amazing and also, AN APP!? The techno-utopianism is frustrating in the extreme. Not to mention the "have you considered crowdfunding to replace your billionaire asshole?" I just...it's such an EMMA thing to assume and it should FAIL for that reason because

solving systemic problems getting coopted to build to a HEA for narrative convenience was incredibly frustrating and disappointing.

Not to be all "blah blah Austen" and yet “A little bit of ivory, two inches wide, on which I work with a brush so fine as to produce little effect after much labour” is not just about modesty, it's about scope. Austen is DEEPLY invested in the individual and the rise or fall of her characters has little impact on the rest of the world. It's their story.
The Rajes, on the other hand, are writing across continents and have the wealth and privilege to alter lives. And on the one hand, it makes them real and situates them in the world. It makes what they do matter and means they aren't totally out of touch. On the other hand...the number of lives riding on whether these people can bang and have feelings at the same time is disconcerting. And the ways in which these books are hopeful conservative is fascinating and also bothers me. So much of these books take the stance that "all our current problems are a few bad actors and if we can just get the right person into power, all of this will go away. All we need is the right governor, the right app, the right crowdfunding initiative. Everything is FINE the way it is if we just act smarter."
And yes, romance is fantasy, but this is not a fantasy I feel comfortable buying into.

If I can't rate Ross, how could I possible rate Greenberg?

This book is complicated for me, first because it's about 50 years old and vacillates wildly between the prophetic and the prosaic. Sometimes I want to yell her points from the rooftops. Sometimes they make me want to howl.

What is, I think, most interesting to me is how the deepest questions that animate Ross are just...uninteresting to Greenberg. Of course Judaism isn't supposed to be misogynist, now go fix the divorce system. Gett over it.

Greenberg is at her best when she's grappling with her own journey and recognizing that her writing is an attempt to cultivate the produce of meaning. Like a tomato. She's most frustrating when she writes like she has already found it. (Like Denethor eating a tomato. Okay, not that bad. Nothing is that bad. But you get the idea.)

I liked this book, but I didn't love it the way I expected to. I mean, let's be clear, murder and medicine and feminism is a fantastic combination and I'm not entirely sure why picking this book up felt like a thing I ought to do to finish it rather than a thing I was excited to do.
It's always hard when it's like "did this book have the misfortune to be read when I was super tired?" "Did this book not pay off all the things it set up?"
A bit of both. It felt like there were a lot of threads that Schwartz braided together and then just dropped a bunch, not in terms of remembering, but in terms of resolution and also I think I wasn't entirely bought in to the book and didn't pick it up because it was the thing I most wanted to read next, but the thing that was just there.

So I've been super interested in religious figures in fantasy (and scifi, I suppose) who actually...practice their faith, I suppose. And for whom there is an element of *FAITH* to their belief, rather than serving a manifestly evident God who they treat like a miracle dispenser.
Also I've read Degan's writing under her pseudonym (which is less Anglo-Catholic, more Classical Greek) and enjoyed so here we are, reading about the process by which belief comes (back) into a person's life.
Also, like, a weird and wild story that is basically...okay imagine if Dorothy Sayers decide to write C.S. Lewis. It's kind of that. (Apparently he wrote a eulogy for her, a fact that I love.)
But what interests me is people talking about why they believe and I'm particularly fascinated by the role that aesthetics plays in both conversion stories we get. That it's not just belief and it's not that faith has trappings, but that the aesthetics that build up faith practices (what I'd call both minhag and hiddur mitzvah if I had to translate it into Jewish terms) are an integral part of what brings people to faith. And we lose and ignore it at our peril. The theological argument that this book is making, between the romance and the mystery of the disappearing fiance, is that matter matters in every sense.
Which makes it, of course, a deeply (Anglo-)Catholic book and also a fine addition to my "fantasticly faithful" collection.

There are some authors who pick their microgenre and never leave it and others who write in literally everything. The interesting thing about Vo is that she's chosen two genres and just writes extremely well in both.
Like her Gatsby rewrite, this one is set in our(ish) world and takes on a very particular period of history even as it plays entirely with both the mythos of Hollywood and the myths of humanity.
It was gorgeous and intriguing.

Hugo reading 2022 - also known as trying to get through the rest of the novellas in under a week.

The theme of this book is tea and religious callings and also if Judaism had tea rebbes, I would be THERE.

I think I've had this on my TBR list since Liz Bourke started talking about it because it is ENTIRELY my wheelhouse.
1) A couple—one of whom is extremely intelligent and also traumatized, the other who is good natured and exceptional in his own right—thrown together by circumstances.
2) We must date/marry because reasons and now I'm falling for you.
3) Was there only one bed? Reader, there was.
4) Realistic understanding of the difference between "healed by the power of love" and "when you give your partner space and support, they can begin to heal" with this book in the latter.
5) Fantasy romance that believe firmly in both genres.

Did I love it? Of course I did. Did I stay up until 3am to finish it? No, I managed to finish by 2:45 because I read quickly. Worth it.

So the first book felt like it was very clearly setting the world up for this and subsequent books. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening—and while it would have been nice to have remembered more of the characters without having to play the "wait, who is that guy" game, that's on me.
What Roanhorse is doing with her gods and politics is really fun and I'm looking forward to more (and maybe even remembering things next time? maybe?)