his book reminded me a lot of Casey McQuiston's more recent stuff, which is a good thing, and I just really appreciated both how absurdly adorable Dre et. al. were and how Jackson made his characters feel real and embody their identities while still telling a story that is about them as people and not as IDENTITIES. Being a fully realized character without being a in a very special episode.

Anyway, I'm a sucker for good time travel and happy endings and this book delivers.

The moral of this story is that I should keep getting my book recommendations from Twitter.

Am I supposed to RATE this book?
Such hubris, much no.
It has, as I remarked to a friend, the density of a neutron star and I also I kind of loved it.
I can't wait to teach it.

And the moral of this story is "don't take book recommendations from TikTok".
It was fine; I'll read anything that calls itself a beauty and the beast retelling and, this time, I got burned for it.
Mostly I just get annoyed at main characters who read to me like someone painted a bunch of conflicting emotions onto a cardboard cutout. Jak, in particular, felt like he was programmed to react in certain ways at certain times due to the exigencies of the plot without really accounting for what kind of person he would need to be or life he would need to have lived in order to do the things he does. And romances need a compelling lead.
At least it was short ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The fascinating thing about this book is that Kingfisher doesn't want you to be surprised. The horror is in the inexorable nature of the story, not in the suspense.
Which totally makes sense as a choice and also it threw me a bit.
Noting, incidentally, that there is at least one world weary and somewhat tolerant mammal in every horror novel she writes and I love it.

Segnbora was not my favorite character from the previous book, which made this one feel rather like a slog. Which, you know, fine. As is true in many novels, people improve upon the application of a dragon. And the pursuit of the plot continues to be interesting.
I forgot how 80s the 80s was. I have now been THOROUGHLY reminded.
There's a lot to unpack here and I almost don't want to because

it's not exactly that Duane handles either sexual assault or the process of healing BADLY. It's more the very 80s ideology that—in a world where wars are fought and the devil walks the earth, the worst fucking thing that can ever happen to a person is rape and that's a woman's story arc. Men are driven by fridged women and women are driven by rape. And, like, UGH. It's not bad for it's time. It's just...out of character, maybe? And, of course, the narrative is about tzelem elokim and ALSO about Christian love and forgiveness and they are very strange bedfellows here

.
It was, as they say, fine, but I can understand why getting through it felt like a slog.

A+ title. Book itself was also super interesting. I remember complaining about my previous non-fiction book that it was too pop and not enough science. 
This book did not have that problem. 
Did I get confused and lost sometime around quantum mechanics, as usual? Of course. Was it fun anyway? Absolutely. 
Is this at all useful for understanding the halakhic concept of safek? I’m not sure, although it seems clear that safek is from the Bayesian rather than the frequentist school. 
Also the deeply British mix of enthusiasm and dry observations definitely added to the appeal. I have no idea how enjoyable this would be to someone familiar with statistics and the science of uncertainty, but I certainly enjoyed it. 

Oh, look, a character with the maiden name Loew. Wonder where this is going...
I mean, okay, the acknowledgements that mention Throwing Sheyd were a delight and Podos does a pretty good job of not making this a "I have heard of one Jewish thing and it's a golem" story. There's a ton of stuff in here; the golem is just one among many and that makes it more reasonable from my perspective.
Ditto regarding the Holocaust. And, I mean, it's a Jewish fantasy story so where would we be without golems and the scars of intergenerational trauma?
I did like it, though! Like, none of my complaints are about the book itself which, as it stands alone, tells its story well and has delightful characters and skillfully melds plot and story and culture and what it means to be human.
And also sometimes it feels like every story is about the outsider (it is, after all, so much easier to explain the intricacies of Jewish ritual when your main character doesn't know it either) and the overprotective parents and just...I loved what this book did in a new way and some of the familiar choices were a bit too familiar.
(Also fascinating to see the other fantasies that emerge within the text—here's the disabled female rabbi and no one is making even the slightest deal about it; here are a bunch of reasonably observant Jews being totally accepting of their queer family members. May it be soon and in our day. For all the demons, there's also a lot of writing the tikkun olam into being for all the people who don't have it yet.)
I really want to see more Jewish mythology in stories and also I want to see it with Jews who are themselves also already embedded in Jewish culture

So, like, there are different kinds of 3s. There's the aimed for adequacy and hit it squarely 3s and then there are the aimed really high and didn't hit it 3s and it always feels weird to me that they both land with the same "yeah, I liked it".
This book was beautiful and frustrating and I wish I liked it more than I did and also it took me a relatively long time to listen my way through because I kept wondering whether I should listen to something else instead, like an interesting podcast.
The beginning and end were good. The middle could have been about 4-6 hours shorter.
There's an interesting problem that happens when you're trying to show a character's conversion but the audience is already believers. There's the God element here, but its mostly the "large European-esque empires conquering other cultures and stamping out their religion is bad" is a position I already held. Touraine had to learn it and the process of watching her learn (and mess up, lather rinse repeat) wasn't written in a way that held my attention. Insofar as people evolved in this story, they either didn't or had moments of, like, punctuated equilibrium. Suddenly I'm different.
I wanted to like this book, but between feeling like the character development needed development and my own general distaste for "all the main characters are selfish and get people killed" as a larger narrative arc, I just couldn't get into it.
Also, and this is a very weird digression, but I immediately read the debate between the two schools of how to "civilize" the conquered as a great example of how old mean ABA and new nice ABA are both still attempts to squish and cut and mold a child into something they were never meant to be. Which may not have been in the intent, but definitely resonated.

I pretty consistently protest that I don't like horror (I don't! I don't like being scared!) which is obviously why I read it and, in fairness, this book isn't the kind of horror that's trying to get you to not look under teh bed. It's the kind of horror to get you to think about entitlement and masculinity, and choices and responsibility and also how ABSOLUTELY GIANT elk are.
In that sense, it's my kind of thing in the way that genre fiction by marginalized authors that uses the structures of the genre to explore interesting ideas seems to always be my thing. Although Graham Jones is very clearly writing a horror story first and letting it evolve out of his anger rather than writing a story about it per se.

I described this book as "Involuntary Doctor Who" and I stand by that.
All the fun of the Doctor running from place to place, new world, stuff going on, wacky companion hijinks, an enemy in the mode of The Job Title, monster of the chapter, and mix in a lack of control over the multiverse and travel happening whenever he falls asleep and you get this book.
It's not trying to have all that much there, it's just a good premise that plays out with all the adventure and adrenaline you would expect.
With the caveat that this time the Doctor character is, actually, the least interesting person in the multiverse and that's why it's fun.