The problem with liking an author who writes in a vast and wild array of genres is that sometimes they go from one of your favorite genres (gothic horror with woman and house) to one of your least favorites (noir). And I still thought Moreno-Garcia did a really good job making me care and telling the story with both sympathy and cynicism. It was that blend that made it work for me, coupled with what seems to be her trademark move of taking a genre and shifting the gaze so that the people at the periphery come into the center. There are beautiful women and hard-boiled detectives and powerful men and...we don't spend time with them. This is the noir that centers the bit players and the people who get drawn into things. It's so much more of what I wish noir would be.

I always feel extremely weird rating books like this because the metric just doesn't work. Did I like it? I mean, I don't think it's the kind of book you like, it's the kind of book you trust.
Delahooke presents a really compelling argument for approaching behavior and helping kids using this framework and, yes, I mean, I think she's right and also I came to this book with everything I am that made me open to her arguments. I wonder how they would have landed to someone who was not autistic and bought into DIR/Floortime.
Also, it's very funny to me to run into things here that I saw on my mother's bookshelves. It does make me feel better; I probably could evaluate the science and the research papers if I wanted to, and also the whole point of the book is to...not have to do that.
This feels weirdly equivocal; I thought this book was fantastic and should be required reading for people working with kids. But I wish I knew whether I was convinced because she's right or because I like what she's saying.

Oh GOD this book.
Okay so, like, first of all, you have to understand that the print is TINY. It's nearly 600 pages of densely packed academic publishing style print. 
(Also I'm reading the other reviews on this, which I absolutely should not do, and wow is this book polarizing.)
Palmer is writing within the Le Guin and Delany approach to science fiction; the one where what it means to engage in the process and where the nature of what it means to be human is the interesting research question that lurks at the heart of every story. How do we talk about these things we haven't figured out how to talk about is by telling stories about them and that is Palmer's project. The story she tells is SO unutterably bonkers, though, that I laughed when I was asked what the book was about. Also it took me a month to finish. I...it does not take a me a month to finish fiction.
I'm deeply curious what this series will be like on a reread and even more in audio (because heaven knows I can't read the Greek).
I don't even know anymore; this book is one of those "if there was an easier way to explain what was going on here other than writing the book, I rather think the author would have done so."
But also obviously it delighted me.
ETA: The way Palmer writes and thinks about disability in the future is not AT ALL the point of the story, but it permeates the narrative and you can see the commitment to disability acceptance and support in the way she thinks. There was a moment near the end that was so incredibly thoughtful about the disparate nature of human needs and just...in a book that is so complicated and weird and asking you to think; it's really nice to also see the "and obviously this is the ethical thing to do" as well.

In absolutely no particular order.
1 - Simon Vance KILLS it as the narrator, as he always does for Kay's work. 
2 - There's this specific style of fantasy that is technically fantasy because it is not set in our world and there's usually a *something*, but where the fantastic elements are slipped in because the story that the author is trying to tell is really a history unbeholden to History and where it's nice to have a little wiggle room with the laws of nature. Ken Liu and Guy Gavriel Kay are my favorite authors writing in this vein, mostly because they both understand how to write conflict without evil. Oh, there are the occasional villains, but war and conflict is the story of two people trying to do what is best and willing to both kill and die for it. (Kay REALLY likes the two honorable albeit not pious men set against each other.) Anyway, it's hit or miss for me as a genre, but lands SO well when it's in the hands of an author who sees real people on the page.
3 - Kay writes religious people extremely well. He understands that history is filled with those who are devoted to their god but are not particularly devout in their actions. And that belief in God shapes people's experiences of the world and the way the think even (especially) if they are not interested in following the rules set down by that god or that god's clergy. Kay GETS it.
4 - Kay is a bit of a stylist; he's one of those authors who can't help but interrupt himself and think about what it is to tell a story. Sometimes he even deigns to give those lines to his characters and, better yet, have them remark on the coincidences of their meetings. It is a bit contrived, I admit. And I love it, I love self-consciousness so much...which, incidentally, is a critical part of understanding my literary tastes. Any book that wants to think more about its own role in being a book and conveying stories to people is a book for me.

Aww, this book was exactly what you would expect from Bear and I really appreciated it and feel like there was a LOT of wisdom to be gleaned (and the work of stepping into wisdom-gleaning-space is itself work).
And the illustrations definitely were a key part of the experience.

This is one of those stories that is not precisely magical except that the magic of living in the world permeates the character's perspective and I am always wondering whether there are speculative elements wandering through the text or I just have my own reading stance that's hard to shape.
This is the kind of book that probably gets called a "slim volume" as a way of negotiating with all the *waves hands* everything inside it. Which is true. It's a book that, to me (and, again, because of where I stand) talks about the parent/child relationship and the work that parents do to give their children the world, except it's not the world, but <i>their</i> world, and in the refusal of the gift comes both heartache and growth. While at the same time I don't want to universalize a particularly African American experience and the story Shange tells of the Southern parents who want their children to win at everything they didn't have and the children who refuse to play the white game entirely; instead seeking something that is wholly theirs. And while the attempt to make that which happened un-happen is (always) fruitless, the home we come back to is never the home we left. Which is also the point.
It's also the story of a time that has become history, told from its own present (and with its own presence) and looking back with all that knowing is a kind of strange distance to a story not meant to be distant.
Also holy cow, did this book make me hungry. Speaking of legacies of the body.

I see we've progressed from just stopping the book where it is to cliffhangers. I would like some resolution, please, I did not realize I was signing up for a trilogy. (The perils of literally anything sff, I suppose.)
And the story is fine and it's interesting to see the characters from another point of view, but I feel like I've been promised quick answers or at least to have things go somewhere and the arcs of these books are just not satisfying.
Also, disability rep is super complicated and I am very pleased to have a disabled character as the protagonist and also...this occasionally feels like a book written by someone imagining how much it must suck to be disabled. It's not that Rae's way of relating to her body, and specifically her foot, is unreasonable, it's more that she is overall a pretty practical person at home with her disability and who more or less acts like she owns it and then *thinks* like someone who is constantly grieving the body she doesn't have. It feels like the text can imagine the disabled character who goes through the world with the quiet surety that comes from knowing that she both has limitations and is not broken, but the text can't quite imagine how that character might think about living in a body that needs tending to for what it cannot do without constantly grieving its existence. 
And obviously the answer isn't "don't write it!" or even "do better" because the purpose of critique (certainly in an online review) is not constructive criticism from a writing group, but a way of thinking about the text. And this is what this text made me think of and wonder. What would it look like to have that more whole depiction? What it is that feels off to me and how? What is it about the text and what is it about my readerly stance towards it?
Anyway - I still kind of want to read the third one, but I also feel like this series is wearing through my commitment to it.

This book was written 4 years before So You Want to Be a Wizard and it shows. Not in a bad way, but you can see Duane already engaging with the questions that define her oeuvre - names matter, people matter, goodness matters, it is our job to hold back Death in whatever way possible.

There's a line from...DWJ, I think, where she's talking about the difference between writing for adults and for kids and that the latter is so much easier because you can trust kids to pick up on subtlety, while you're always worried about adults missing things and so feel impelled to beat them over the head with your point. Duane trips a little bit over that in this book in a way that she doesn't in SYWTBAW, in part because I think that she's working these ideas out and, as I know so very well, not being entirely sure promotes verbosity.
There's something absolutely fascinating about reading sff from the mid - late 20th century that are working on trying to figure out gender stuff and specifically the ways in which men and women are gendered. And while it is still operating within the binary and very much of it's time, it's asking the about the ways in which masculinity (and femininity) are not inherent to being male and female. Not to mention the way that Duane is both questioning heterosexuality (or orientation as a thing at all) and also gets a bit stuck in the pro-natalist argument for heterosexuality and tries to work around it in a way that is not strictly necessary.

Also, Sunspark = Fred. Change my mind.

Okay, having said all of that...I am SO UNUTTERABLY HERE for the theology, which is what I started with. "What does it mean to do good in the world?"

(Also, WTF with the original cover? Seriously?) 

Also also, can JKR just *stop* so that Diane Duane can stop haunting the walls of her scottish castle and finish the fourth book in this series?

This series is basically if ASOIAF was based in Chinese history instead of British, but with Neal Stephenson's fondness for "technology!" and Django Wexler's deep empathy for his characters.
It's also completely its own thing, but if you like any of those, this series is such a good read.
Also this book was like 700 pages of deep existential questions about the nature of cultural identity and conquest and what is right for a ruler to do and then 300 pages of the Great Dara Bake Off and part of why Liu is SUCH a compelling writer is that I loved both. (There are literal actual dragons in this book and they are fundamentally less interesting to the text than the bit where someone invents the instant pot and I cannot tell you how much glee I had.)
Like so many epic fantasy series, this duology is getting rather long, but Liu promises the next book will be the last and I'm very much looking forward to it.

Me, reading a book based on a fairy tale that I know: Oh, this is going to be great!
Me, remember what happens in that fairy tale that I know: Oh. Right.

This book did such a good job with the goose girl story and the way it wove together aspects of the narrative and also I have so. many. questions. remaining about the worldbuilding and what's going on and is there going to be resolution to all these bits of story that are still lying around.
This book apparently subscribes to the Neal Stephenson theory of "the book is over when I stop writing" and that makes me want to know what happens next, but also DEEPLY irritates me in the lack of closure.