As someone still venturing out of historical romance into the wild waters of contemporary (I mean I have contemporary romances on here, just very few by authors I didn't get into through their historical stuff) and who still struggles with the style*, this one was a lot of fun.

Hibbert, at least in my read, does a really good job with writing a disabled heroine and all the ways in which she has to think, constantly, about moving through the world with a disability. 
And I love that Hibbert wrote a story about a Black heroine without making the story be about race or racism. Chloe's life is not easy, but that's not because of her race and I want more books where characters can be diverse without making the story into a Very Special Episode. Hibbert has that down.
She also has that british romance writer's flair for absurd but not impossible secondary characters who are not quite ridiculous enough to be unbelievable, but just ridiculous enough to be...an accurate sketch of friendships if the sketch was sketch comedy.

One of the things that is difficult about the romance novel is that the genre often develops conflict out of the "mess up and apologize" dynamic (also known as sin and repentance) which, like, so does Tanakh, it makes a lot of sense.
But it's also an odd line to walk because you need to move through this part quickly, but you can't do so by making it trivial because then the member of the couple who overreacts looks like a turd and you don't want the character you are rooting for to end up with a turd. Which is why triggers and trauma provide a neat solution, but then you also need a resolution in a reasonable amount of time so it has to be traumatic enough for a third act breakup, but...then you also need the epiphany that allows the characters to break out of trauma responses to be relatively quick as well.
It's a tough line to walk and I think that the upshot is that romance novels rarely offer enough time for healing.
Which is FINE, they're novels, not documentaries. But also romance is one of the few genres that is deeply invested in poetry (so to speak) as dulce et utile; that which delights and instructs. Romance novels tell us how to be. This novel instructs, in its own way, what being a supportive partner to a disabled person looks like, what coming to terms with disability looks like, what rebuilding community looks like, and what pleasure feels like. 
(I have a theory that, when romance novels don't land, it's because the lesson they are imparting—intentionally or not—is not one I believe is worth learning.)
But because the romance novel is seen as both fantasy and instruction, the question of how to disentangle the two inevitably arises. And it feels like recovery is presented as instruction when, if only for reasons of compression of time, it ought to be treated as fantasy. Or that it is instruction, but the things that allow recovery to happen on that time scale vary.
IDK, there's still a lot to unpack, but I think that reading romance novels predominantly as  instructions for living, with fantasy doing little more than compressing timelines provides an interesting lens through which to look at the genre's evolution in the last 5-10 years. (Not to mention the ongoing instructions in masculinity that pervade the genre, but are rarely read by men.)
———
*Look, some of us are literarily anywhere but here and I recognize that does make things a bit tricky when reading something in the here and now.

I ended up reading this when one of my children was not feeling well and so insisted on making sure we all had a miserable night and so, long story short, I was up at 2am and needed something to read.
Reassuringly sweet romance that I could put down when I was tired and pick up when I couldn't sleep—What else could one ask for?
Queer historical fantasy romance is my comfort food and while this story wasn't trying to be surprising per se, the twists were just the right level of turn.

This book is actually 6 stars, I just ran out of stars.
Also, audiobook read by Robin Miles, who I adore, but I almost didn't care that I loved the narrator because the book itself was beautiful.
I wish I'd read this when I started teaching. hooks speaks so much to both the fears and joys of teaching; her understanding of liberatory pedagogy and what it means to get beyond the authority who conveys knowledge is one of those "YES" moments. Where even when I know these things and have seen my teachers use a more engaged pedagogy in their classroom, I've needed the words for it and, more than anything else, needed someone to articulate the thoughtfulness of the ideas behind the why.
Also, when she quotes Paulo Friere: "We cannot enter the struggle as objects in order later to become subjects" and talks through wrestling with it. (The context was not teaching Niddah, but now that I think about it...)
So much to chew on and adding this to my list of "stop reading authors because they just died and discovering how good they were and then mourning them all over again".
It's like 50/50 whether it's better to appreciate the author while they lived and then be sad when they die or to not know enough and then discover them in their literary afterlife. 
Thank God for the writings that allow the greats to live on long after their deaths.

Possibly a generous two.
Things I liked about this book - The Maharal is pretty cool, although I feel a little slighted that the man who was so vehement in his Torah scholarship comes across so quietly here.

Also stuff. Harkness has a very good feel for stuff, historical and contemporary, and the descriptions of clothing and objects make for really intriguing reading.
Shame it doesn't extend to the people.

The generous read is that it's difficult to enjoy wish-fulfillment stories when you're wondering "who the heck WANTS this?" This was not a book written for me.
First of all, Diana and Matthew's relationship is based entirely in "We don't talk about Bruno...or anything else" and like...WHY? Whyyyy? It's so irritating.

Also like the whole "my vulnerability is that I need to be super masculine and possessive in order to stop acting super possessive" and I just...is that compelling? Is that attractive?

There's this hilarious moment where Harkness lampshades that she's just writing another set of vampire romance novels and has her characters bickering about it, and you can tell she kind of wants it to be a deconstruction, but it's just a lampshade. You're not Jane Austen on the novel in Northanger Abbey here. ("I knew Jane Austen and you, ma'am, are no Jane Austen")

These characters are not interesting enough to carry the plot. I don't care about them. I don't care if they are happy because they do such a terrible job, for no apparent reason, of making themselves happy. It's like watching the Aladdin sequels where, for plot related reasons, Aladdin forgets everything he learned in the first movie about  honesty and good relationships. Narrative tension in this book is driven by no one EVER changing based on their realizations or having a conversation with each other and that's a good thing?

Also, Harkness's treatment of queer characters leaves...a lot to be desired.

Marlowe is a walking stereotype of "gays thwarted in love are evil" and the one happy queer couple ends with one of them dying off-screen to save a baby. So...two for two with bury your gays and it's not that you can't have jilted ex is evil as a plot for queer people but when that's it and no one else, including the selfish monarchs treat Matthew that way? I have questions and all of them are why.
I will grant that I absolutely stan Kit Marlowe and so I want to see fully realized and thoughtful portrayals of him and also, like, I was actively irritated at how contrived this was.

I am definitely not the right audience for this series.

This book was exquisite. Hall is in his usual top form of taking the irritating tropes of romance (people refusing to have conversations, dukes in love with social inferiors, psychological trauma) and asking "okay, but like what would these look like if they were actual rather than manufactured impediments"?
And, also true to form, Hall is writing about class and the way that it shapes and cuts and squeezes and constrains. And, yes, obviously also gender, but the relationship between gendered power and class power plays out in really interesting ways.
Hall's other story—the story of the absolute reasonableness of historical trans people which we already know exist—is the background on which this story writes itself. Especially given the current wave of transphobia, it's nice to have someone respond with "yes, and...we have a romance to write."

It always feels slightly strange to me to read books in remembrance of the author, in part because there's always something depressing about the "there won't be a new book" realization, but at least there are still more of McKillip's books to read.
But I was so glad to read this one; McKillip is one of those authors whose style and language catches and envelopes you in the wildness of it. And this is, more than anything else, a story about wonder and what it is to find it and what it is to fear it. And it was also a story that was wondrous.

I feel like the rating for this series is almost entirely about "how much tolerance do you have for people not having conversations"
Which Milan is very aware of, especially by the third book, and threads the needle pretty deftly in justifying why (it's usually reasonable fear and trauma, so points for that). 
And also there were moments of "have you people considered not hurting each other to protect each other!? Maybe?"
A significant amount of what I appreciate about Milan is that she has such fun upending tropes as well - often the places where you would expect the separation to show up are the moments where her characters say "yeah, so what?" Which is very nice.
And also this was a series about three brothers, each traumatized by a fundamentalist mother in a different way, and each coming to terms with their (lack of) religion in their own way and like, there was just so little about the theology. Which I know she talks about as distancing herself from "inspirational romance" (meaning Christian...*laughs in Orthodox Jew*) and this very clearly is not that and also...some non-inspirational romantic conversations about faith would be very nice.
(Also, now that you've written Hamilton's Battalion, go back and write Richard Dalrymple's story!)

I keep trying to start this review and explain why it is that I found this book utterly captivating in its weirdness and I have no idea how to.
The mix of matter-of-fact-ness and weirdness, the stories of not-knowing each other, the whole premise of weirdness and who/what is other and how we find about ourselves set to the backdrop of zoology is just natural in its strangeness.
Magical realism is culturally constructed and it still surprises me the degree to which an author's background shapes my response to how they write in this genre.

You know when a book is a good book, just not a book for you?
I could tell how much I would enjoy this book if I was a different person, one who was in the mood to read about teenage fury and who liked giant mechas (yes, I realize the obvious flaw in my reading choice).
The story was great, the anger was visceral, the love triangle was *chef's kiss* and I NEVER say that. And the aesthetic was just not me and I'm tired of angry girls. I think I've reached the age of wanting angry middle-aged women. Anyway, if you—on the other hand—want glorious girl rage and giant mechas, pick this book up.

I am precisely the kind of hypocritical little brat who would dismissively call this "Twilight for Academics" while raving about another author writing a queer Fifty Shades retelling.
And, like, granted, part of that is everything is better when queered, which sounds glib and is untrue but often I find that the queering of narrative brings the fissues of heteronormative assumptions to the surface and makes the author grapple with, in particular, questions of dominance and gendered assumption of power. If the maiden and the vampire are both women...okay, fine, then it's Le Fanu's Carmilla, but that's already an interesting text. What makes that move so compelling is that it calls into question the whole conversation about  love as possession and the attraction of dominance and power and the inherent animalism which is actually paternalism that frames the vampiric desire to own as good, actually.
If you have to negotiate that without the stereotypical gendered component, I think it can be more interesting. 
(And if these authors ever in their lives read an accurate depiction of kink and consent, it could be a MUCH more compelling story.)
Which, I think, is where this book lets itself down. It's interested in the trappings of academia without engaging in the academy's larger critiques of power. It's like Diana is constantly pushing against Matthew's actually pretty reasonably boundaries around his own feelings and completely unwilling to engage with the way he fails to respect hers.
Like it's fine, I enjoyed it, it was a good shabbos afternoon, but it doesn't have anything interesting to SAY. This is a book that thinks "preventing people (even if creatures) from loving those of other races" is a radical rallying point and I just have a hard time getting excited about fantasy that thinks Love is Love is an interesting thought experiment. I think I am not the right audience for this book, which is also worth noticing because I wonder if I would have been had I read it in high school or college, back when Rochester was a character I was willing to defend rather than appreciate.