This was such a beautiful continuation of the original story. I loved how Wecker kept pushing the question of "who do we become?" alongside" how do we become?" for each of her characters, what it means for them to care, and the ways in which being in community is the defining feature of humanity (even if not of being human) and what that means about the self in relation to others.
Also, the descriptions are just wonderful.

This is the most Elul book I have ever read in Kislev. 
It’s an incredibly sweet book and one that requires a certain willingness to be serious about goodness. It’s often silly and sometimes sarcastic, but it’s a book entirely without cynicism. It’s a book about redemption and grief and also it’s building a new myth about the afterlife for a world where “I will not forsake you forever” is something we need to say to each other.
It is ENTIRELY my jam and the whole sufganiyah with it. 

The Great Gatsby is finally out of copyright. 
Is this where I confess that I haven’t read Gatsby since 9th grade and was extremely “meh” on it and have not read it since. 
And I still appreciated Vo’s retelling and the way that her shift in perspective (not so much the magic) deepens the menacing shadows and raises the stakes. I can’t decide whether anything will make me like the story itself and yet this does what it does so well. (Points docked for gatsbyness, idk even.)

The problem with having a "to-read" list that you just randomly pull things off of and take out of the library digitally is that, at no point, do you stop to read what the book is about before beginning it and so you're playing a game known as "this is fascinating, I wonder what this book is about".
The nice thing about this book is that you are supposed to spend quite a LOT of time wondering what this book is about. That's kind of the point.
The build at the beginning was slow, but once I realized that the story was not actually the story I thought it was, I got quite sucked in.

I am not entirely sure how I feel about Casey's portrayal. She reads like an autistic character, situated between the traits stereotypically associated with autistic people and more fleshed out. I can't tell if it's deliberate, although if it is, I gotta say that's super-depressing that we're still making autistic people feel less than human half a millenium into the future.

Reread because my Mystery Maccabee is a fan and I was trying to get the color right for something and then I just got sucked in. 
I’ve definitely read a good amount of this series and definitely have not read all of it. Maybe I’ll finish it this time…
Dragon and naval battles are fun, and it’s fascinating seeing Novik’s evolution as a writer.

So, first of all, Ladin is a gorgeous stylist and I’ve heard her teach before so I knew this was going to be good. 
I’ve been reading a few pages every week since Simchat Torah and it’s an amazing long form drash. She does the thing that rabbis can do where they meld the personal with the interpretive to make the text shine anew and make the listener/reader rethink their relationship with both. 
It was serious Torah. 

So this was the actual book that had been recommended to me. (The previous 2 / 12 were just because I couldn’t start in the middle.)
Anyway, eldritch but pure cinnamon rolls are the actual best and the librarians of the Ladysmith are a delight.

Are these books getting more and more improbable with each new adventure? Yeah, kind of?
Is it in a way that absolutely pays homage to the ridiculousness of the Conan Doyle originals? Oh yes. 
Are the main characters extremely fun? Definitely. Am I here for the respectful treatment of autistic characters? Oh yes. 

As perhaps you can tell from the tags, this book is a LOT of things. It's also just extremely cute. I have read a LOT of Jordan Hawk in the past two weeks and I have no regrets.

Let me be clear, I had ABSOLUTELY no idea what I was getting myself into when I picked this up. To the point that what I knew about this book was that there was history and romance and possibly magic.
Which is not, like, wrong, so much as it is, to borrow a line from Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, a charming understatement.
There's a lot of eldritch horror. What Hawk does here is take the Lovecraftian mythos and find some queer heroes and, having done that and apparently started a massive series in the process, dissects and critiques Lovecraft's idea of monstrosity and evil to the point where he revisits the monsters from earlier in the series and asks us to reevaluate what we know about them It's a series about not fitting in and making homes with the other weirdos and also Whyborne and Griffin banging like a screen door in a wind spell.
There is less sex as the books go on, which makes sense—at a certain point, the drama is not will-they/won't-they anymore because we've gone through all of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of queer romance: denial, fear of inadequacy, distrust of partner's motives, fear of loss, and acceptance, at which point the relationship is pretty solid and the sex no longer advances the plot and so, by nature of the fact that 11 books is an epic horror series, it happens less. 
The question of whether this is a romance series where the plot cthulhu escaped or a fantasy horror series that takes relationships and the erotic seriously is honestly a good one. I don't know. Maybe both? It feels like the kind of series that can only exist post-fanfiction precisely because it is not beholden to genre form. Or because the genre that it is was one invented by fanfiction in the first place: the evolving story that was originally character-focused, but then grew to encompass a grand plot. This series, especially when you attempt to read it basically in one go, has big "this was supposed to be a one-shot" energy to it and I kind of love it. I also appreciate fanfiction for making this kind of narrative more familiar to readers and creating a mode for the romance series that isn't "one couple per book". I like those too, but variety is delightful.
I have absolutely no idea how much of my experience was colored by read the series in...umm, nine days? Probably a fair amount. I debated whether to put this in to storygraph as one book or 11, but since I do not remember what day I finished each of the other books on and while I can probably make a guess at what happened in each book, thanks to Hawk's convenient approach of naming the book after the location of the narrative, I definitely cannot make intelligent commentary about them on their own. Also, people notice when you read 11 books in a row, for some reason. 
Cool cool. Off to read Rath and Rune, since that was why I picked this series up in the first place. *lolsob*