Speculative fiction being speculative is SO weird. Also, this is the first book I've seen in a while has a sense of what catastrophe looks like at scale. Most current books either leave our catastrophes in the past or focus on one part of them. This book has everything.
While meditating on the nature of change and reality and "making things better" and, like so much of Le Guin's shorter work, just sits on top of you. 
And I wonder how this book would read if you didn't see the author behind it, her fury, her drive to find a future that must be better than the worst of our selves, her commitment to the humanity of others.
That last shines through in this book and her books are always grappling with the ways in which we do ourselves and our planet a disservice when we stop seeing others and begin to see only our dreams and potentials and what we might build. Le Guin always asks a lot. And then looks at what happens when we don't give it.

The gentle parenting panopticon meets Stepford Wives. I swear, this book was tailor-made to terrify me in the way of good horrific dystopias. It’s not horror in the conventional sense of “intrusion fantasy” where the goal is to return the world to status quo, merely horrifying in the story it tells about the world we could be living in that is like two technological steps away from world we live in now. 
“You’d best start believing in punk-free dystopias. You’re in one.”
Chan absolutely skewers the aspect of parenting wisdom that imagines parents as entirely responsible for their children’s reactions to everything, recognizes the ways in which we set parents without resources up to fail and then judge them for failing, and set the bar so much lower for men than for women.
It’s brutal. It’s brilliant. It’s incredibly depressing. It’s a book I could not put down until I had finished and could reach at least some catharsis. 

Watching people try to describe this book in attempting to pitch it is a bit wild to me because it isn’t like the things people keep describing it as, but the things it is like are things that are not as widely known. 
What makes it so compelling is that Chan weaves fate, desire, nothingness, and self-abnegation into a story that makes meaningful the struggle for power in a way that just people fighting over a throne wouldn’t be. And, naturally, the gender stuff is a delight in the way that it complicates the story of rising to power. 

There was too much pop in this pop science.
Which I grant is extremely rich coming from me, who hates reading anything with the data attached. And yet I wanted more and definitely more than the extremely vapid conclusions about how we spend our time that the book leaves us with.
The anecdotes were good, but the actual sense of it as a history of science was...well, exactly like someone stretched a longform journalism article into a book. Just not a good way.
Also, based on the amount of time this book spent on justifying the slow food movement as more than a bunch of weirdo hippies relative to the amount of time it spent acknowledging and grappling with British imperialism and colonialism, I got the impression I was not the imagined audience for this book.

Me: I'm really appreciating how much care and thought Addison puts into what recovery from depression and trauma looks like and how it slowly builds around a character.
Also me: JUST KISS ALREADY

I'm quietly fascinated by Addison's choice to use the model of the mystery to keep exploring this world and it feels like it's working really well. And I also just love Thara "I have no friends" Celehar surrounded by all the people who are like "how dare you, what am I?"
It's just so good.

Addison is also Tolkinesque in her interest in how words shape society and the philology at the heart of the story, You know, for the rest of us nerds.

Books are so weirdly personal. Every time I read YA I end up in this cycle of "is the trope acceptable this time" and, like, in this book the answer happens to be yes.
And it is deeply tropetastic, but Forna uses those familiar tropes to have a beautifully angry response to the patriarchy. And, more importantly, she understood that everything had to be justified WITHIN the story and not merely because it's a story. Why is there a ceremony? Why is this one special? Why does this work? Forna has thought through the answers to that carefully and stuck the landing on a chosen one narrative, which usually ends up with me rolling my eyes. So kudos on that.

I expected to love this book for the autism connection between me and the author, but honestly his clever use of song lyrics in naming sections may have endeared him to me even more.
Garcia is a masterclass is writing an evenhanded polemic and everything about this book was so well done. 'Shkoyach.

One of the things I find so fascinating is the things for which I will suspend my disbelief.
Magick potions? Fine.

A student ten years out of undergrad getting into a prestigious master's program after having spend two days on her application

? In this economy?

There's a certain amount of "debut novel shakiness" here as the author finds her voice and the story figures out where it's going and what it's trying to say. And I'm not entirely sure that it itself knows, beyond having made some choice I would categorize as somewhere between interesting and questionable in doing so. One that REALLY annoyed me and was just gilding the lily of making an unlikeable character into a waste of space that felt irritatingly overblown.

Just let women leave mediocre men, don't make them evil.

Another book that was fun and fine, but not a story that delighted.

Having said that, the idea that ordinary women deserve to be recorded was by far the best thing the book did.

I think I kept wanting this book to be more than the sum of its parts and it just...remained the sum of its parts. And the parts were fine and I'm always here for a good feminist dig at Puritan cultures and also...definitely not enough time spent with the trolls. Troll culture was great. 
Romance aspect was extremely delightful; there's something deeply fun about playing with gender roles.
The downside was how predictable the plot felt and it feels like the story knew it was hitting all the beats in order, but didn't quite know how to shift and tell itself differently so that it didn't feel like it expected you to be surprised. When things happened, it wasn't the "Finally!" of a kickstarter getting funded when you weren't quite sure it would make it, but the "Finally." of my two year old being willing to put down the bubble wand and go to school.
Between that and the absence of deep history rather than a lot of world-building felt a bit like window dressing, it was a book that I enjoyed, but could imagine loving a different version of it far more than i liked this one.

I have read this book so many times as a child; less recently as an adult as I've taken up reading all the things for fun and profit.
And I've always loved it. Diana Wynne Jones ruined me very early on for most other authors doing "magic in the real world" books because she's just so INTERESTING in a way that so few authors consistently managed.
Also the way she's so elegant with descriptions. Her characters never use comparisons beyond what they have access to, and yet everything is delineated so clearly. And the way that bleached/washed out is both a description of the experience of shame, but also the description of being taken over by another person. Literally everything about it is exquisite.
I've loved this book in so many ways - for the plot, for the relationship, for introducing me to Tam Lin - but this is the first time I've read it as a parent.
Holy hell, DWJ is brutal when it comes to parents in her books. I'd forgotten that, reading it as a child. The worst part is that she never exaggerates - the simple selfishness of every single one of the adults is the least fantastic part of the books. It also sets up an interesting parallel between Tom and Polly, both needing to claw their own way out of very different but equally vampiric families. It's practice for Polly, but you can't help but wonder if Laurel comes out looking better than Ivy (and noticing, of course, the name parallels and Reg=King.) Polly can do what she does because she's done it.
This book is so crunchy in all the best ways and finding all these new ways of seeing it is a delight.
Still actively swearing at the ending, though. And I suppose I always will.