WTF did I just read, but in a good way??
I should have read this while I was reading for my quals, Rosenberg's analysis of deconstruction and 20th-21st theory was extremely illuminating.
I have no idea how to talk about this book. Although so much of the point of the book is about the inability to talk and what other means we have at our disposal for the body to make/inscribe meaning. I love the interplay between text and context, the constant pushing at the question of what is now versus what was and how do the two interpenetrate and also academics pissed off at large public universities is just *chef's kiss*
I'm too tired to think so we'll leave it at that and go to bed.

ETA: Because I was exhausted, I missed the bit about the book's performance of the book. The way in which it recapitulates the insertion of queerness into history in a way that parallel's the queer reader's discovery of their own queerness and retells the story of personal history through that lens. The book is about how we have always been here and how the reading and rewriting and the (impossibility of) archive does not break history, but allows it to exist at all. Anyway, the more I think about it, the mroe I love it in all its absurdity.

Things I found delightful about this book:
- no one was absurd for longer than a chapter. 
- everyone was hilariously themselves. 
- shockingly little awkwardness. 
- random autistic woman being cool (yes, I know, not a term that exists without diagnosis and also it’s the word we have). 
- have I mentioned how stinking cute these two are? Because they are. 

If you are looking for a sweet romance with a surprisingly high body count, might I recommend this series?

How are these two so cute!?
I mean, there was also plot alongside the “I’m so glad you’re in my life, but also now you’re IN my life and we have to figure that out”.
This book is doing a lot of quiet work thinking about gender and love and what a number of our contemporary conversations would look like airlifted into a different culture. (And also what does it mean to talk about the cultural when we’re in the realm of ethics?)
Anyway, it was super cute and obviously I went straight on to the third book.

I don't have a tag for "set in an unmagical created world"; where does that even fit into Delany's genres? Technically fantasy, I suppose, since it's a "cannot happen" story, but it still makes me irritated.
Spec-fic is a catch-all and I make no apologies.
Do I care? I mean, yes, I am literally the person who catalogs every book they read, of COURSE I care. But part of what makes this story so fun is the freedom it has NOT to care about history as such and instead to borrow from history as world building.
But like obviously I read it for the romance and the "we have to pretend to care for each other...oh no...OH NO" because when I am ever not here for that?

I can never decide whether these books get tagged fantasy or not. Magical realish, maybe? IDK. But there's no obvious acceptance of magic, just every so often something completely impossible happens...sort of.
But I digress.
The problem with reading a well-written account of a mental illness with which you are achingly familiar is that you spend a lot of time alternately yelling at the character and wincing. Sometimes it's deeply reassuring to see other people struggling and sometimes it's deeply painful to watch someone go through a thing you have been through and have come out the other side on. This was both. (Also I got...super-lucky that my anxiety only really appears in pregnancy and post-partum circumstances so the "will this last forever" for me as actually "no, it won't".) But Lee has a way with her characters and she writes mental illness from such a place of compassion. Also, and I love her so much for this, this is not a story of one conversation and a cure. Adrian doesn't suddenly realize that he's anxious because of one heartfelt conversation, he

has a near death experience where he realizes life is worth living, he gets medical help from some kind of drug that makes it easier to handle things, and it takes him AGES to get there and, even then, what we see is his coping mechanisms rather than his cure

. Especially after the romance novel's approach of "one real conversation with your beloved is all it takes to start making real changes", Lee's approach feels better.
(I don't think I'm a hypocrite—but who even knows—although I do recognize that I feel very differently about stories that make reconciliation look easier than it is and stories that make living with mental illness look easier than it is. There's a lot to unpack there, but let's leave that knapsack zipped for now.)
It helps that all three of the Montague siblings are absolutely exquisite.

Aww, this pair of absolute nitwits.
I mean, that's basically the review. 

So I've been low key trying to figure out if I could watch The Untamed basically since it came out because it's so obviously my jam except for the minor detail that it's a television show. (I don't object on principle; it's more that the format just doesn't work for me in practice and the older I get, the less it works.)
So this is the obvious solution to my problem - this is always my solution to the problem; read the book that it's based on.
The book is WILD. I really enjoyed it, but also I kept noticing the ways in which I have all these expectations about style and register that only exist because English literature developed in certain ways  with rules about what kind of language and style fits with what kind of narrative and context and I just don't know what those ARE in Chinese so I'd sometimes find myself getting thrown by extremely casual language from characters I would expect to conform to a certain register of English before realizing that there's absolutely no reason that the rules of language for fantasy written in English would apply to xianxia. And it's precisely the defamiliarization that comes from translating the language without bridging the context that makes it so interesting.
Also the story is hilarious in the way that only comedy in the midst of fighting monsters can be.

This book was really cute and I feel like I have absolutely nothing whatsoever to say about this book. Like, it was fine, it was cute, I liked it and the message and it just...idk, worked. But it didn't stand out either.

I...wanted to like this story and mostly did. The portrayal of ADHD was really good and also the awareness of how society punishes otherness—neurodivergence, fatness, the audacity to be female and not gorgeous—was extremely thoughtfully done.
And then you just throw in two tropes I HATE: "romance protagonists will do literally anything other than have a conversation with each other" and "we've spent the entire book with person A making it clear to person B that this is what hurts them and then that's how person B decides to hurt them".
And, I mean, I just...did we have to do that? Could we just...not? Could we not turn the book on the partners of neurodivergent people getting angry at them for being neurodivergent, because that's a LOT of what this felt like. 
I realize it's super complicated because so much of romance novels is about repentance and the work of making amends...and also every romance novel is implicitly an argument for what kind of behavior is beyond the pale, what kind requires groveling, and what kind is just an honest error that requires little more than an acknowledgement. The mismatch between the hurt done and the atonement bothers me. Just...

Alex was SO aware and careful of the ways in which Lauren is consistently made fun of and makes sure that she knows that. And then she leaves him and tells him she's leaving him because he's, well, more or less to ADHD and doesn't do a good enough job of caring about her. There were so many better ways to play out this disagreement and this one was just so painful and then...it had no consequences.

IDK, it's hard when so many ideas that I love (nonstandard protagonists! yelling at the GoT showrunners! fanfic!) run into the tropes that I hate. I get why they exist and I get that so much of this is personal preference, but also...it just feels thoughtless.

What in the giant space donut did I just read???
No, but in a good way!
This looks like it's going to be a book about marginalized identities and the price for talent of the real and raw kind and the effects of trauma and what it means to have a gift...and then the aliens show up and it goes WONKY very fast and then it turns out that it's a book about marginalized identities and the price of talent and the effects of trauma and what it means to have a gift and, most importantly, what art is FOR. And the aliens with the giant donut are absolutely integral to making that story hang together and become more than it would be otherwise.
Aoki argues, basically, to hell with Ars gratia artis: art is not for art's sake, but for OURS. Art is not merely how we save ourselves, but how we save each other. It's gloriously weird and I love that she wrote it.
And it would have worked with just music. It would have been fine. But the way that music and the culinary arts, both deliberately grabbing from outside the normal canon, build together on the importance of making something beautiful for another person was just...*chef's/conductor's kiss*.