The thing is that I don't always love YA as a genre and also sometimes I really do and also also sometimes books get called YA because they are written by women and the protagonist is under the age of 25 so like, whatever.
The thing that distinguishes YA from adult fiction with young protagonists is that YA characters are written for an audience that is assumed to be living with a heightened emotional sense of everything. Not just that the character is experiencing the world that way, but that the reader will resonate as they are with that character's emotions. "This is the first time I've had to do something like X" is a sentiment that hits the reader where they are. Fiction not aimed at young adults, even when writing such characters, aims at "You remember how it feels to have to do this for the first time". The goal is not resonance, but sympathy. And that changes the way that the characters are written.
Look, some of the time I am totally ready to be in "this is how it FEELS to be 17" as an emotional state, but sometimes I want to be invited into a character's life, not asked to embody them.
Anyway, this is about why I was both intrigued by and enjoyed The Beautiful and also kind of felt estranged from the characters. (This book that was not written for me did not work for me, complains reviewer.)
I wanted greater distance and more information, while the book's tight focus on Celine got in the way of what interested me about it. And also it does a really good job at being what it is. And what it is is not my thing.

This was really interesting, has like multiple implications for understanding Shabbat and Issur V'Heter, and also just made me really hungry and made me want to buy a sous vide machine.
And, I mean, really, what else can you ask for from a book?

So remember how I went on a rant like two books ago about how women having character arcs doesn't make a book feminist? Right, so this actually IS a feminist book. The text itself is making an argument about feminism, about anger, about pushing back against misandry, about what kinds of rights *people* deserve.
There's also a lot of screaming. I enjoyed it a lot.
I also think that Newitz walked a fine line very carefully in thinking about violence as a means to solving a problem, not philosophically or ideologically, but practically. In some ways, she lands precisely on not being able to articulate a philosophical justification, nor is she seeking one. She's using fiction to think through very specific permutations of a problem and it's extremely interesting to watch her do so. She has some conclusions, but I find that ultimately less to the point than the process of getting there. And I loved that she did it so carefully.

Look, I loved it. There was no planet on which I was not going to love this book. I love the idea of treating things as sacred rather than deeming them sacred, I love where she takes the story, I love how she reads meaning into and out ov texts.
As a rabbi, as a reader, as a human, this book was gorgeous.

So there's a very specific tone that I feel like a number of authors have been writing in recently and I'm not entirely sure who originated it, although it seems to be some amalgam of Baum and Juster, but that sees the portal fantasy as subversive and didactic at the same time. 
I'm not sure what it's doing. I'm not sure it's sure what it's doing. But Valente's Girl etc., Kingfisher's Orcus, like half of McGuire's oeuvre, Sondheim's into the woods are all writing in this vein.
And, to be clear, it really works as a tone and a choice and while this is not my favorite of the genre, it's a solid entry.
McGuire knows the rules extremely well, which is why I admit that it irritates the nose out of me that she broke the rule of closure for this one. At the end of every book, you either get to go home or choose to stay. That's part of the story. That is THE arc. And I know why she broke that rule here (I've read Middlegame, I get the point), but because the break is in service to a different text rather than this book, which deviates from the genre for no reason, I'm grumpy. This book should have ended differently.

Okay, so this was a really good epic fantasy, hampered by doing the thing I don’t like where there are multiple viewpoints all over the place and I get why and also I just want to be inside like maybe three people’s heads total and this was a lot of heads. 
But let’s be real, no one reads epic fantasy for the plot, they read it for the joy of watching people work in a fantastic world. Suri delivers on both. Everyone is interesting and the stuff is good stuff and for all that the story is deeply familiar, that grounds the setting. 
And if I’m going to nitpick the back cover, which I obviously will, the reviews of the story as feminist are super confusing to me. I’m not sure that “women are brutal just like men” is feminist. I don’t think that makes it anti-feminist either, it seems like the wrong metric to evaluate the story. (I’m also not sold on the argument that the story, in its existing, is feminist. I find the description of a feminist as a person who believes in the radical notion that women are people to be helpful, but that strikes me as much less useful a way to understand a text. 
There has got to be a better way to say “the women in this book get to be complex like men” When the text itself isn’t really making an argument about feminism. 
None of this is the fault of the book, I just wanted it off my chest. 

I'm deeply tempted to tag this fantasy, but that would mess with the algorithm.
It's not really fantasy, but it is writing a world that never was into being. Joshi feels like she's writing an origin myth, one that grounds her experience as an insider/outsider to India in a place that feels like it is hers.
Which is good. The mistake is in thinking that this is a picture of India, it's not. It's a picture of a dream of India, which is what makes it gorgeous and why the story works so well and why everything comes together as it ought to.
Which it totally does, the subplots all balance, the writing is lovely and the recipes are, once again, deeply hungrifying.

Did I remember the first book? Not really, no.
Did that impact my enjoyment of the second book? Also not really, no.
Spacecapades, AI, stuff continues to go down, basically my kind of space opera thriller and while it was not precisely surprisingly, it was very good fun to read.

More like this, please. SF adventures in space that involve outsmarting the AI and complex ideas, but also fun characters. 
I read this in audiobook form (which, note to self, add as an edition) and it wasn’t perfectly easy to follow when the reader spaces out...not the book’s fault, but it did make one of Iridian’s mad dashes a bit confusing. I may try to get the next book in the series in written form rather than aural. But the narration was awesome, so I’m not sure. 

Okay, so there’s something that happens when you listen to a book about cleaning the day before the day of atonement. 
It’s fascinating, both in terms of disentangling the moral from the labor of cleaning, but moreover asking what it is you need to be different. How do you change? 
The space of “can I live with myself like this?” answered by “not anymore” is the motivator for both teshuva and cleaning. And the process by which we stop being the people who did the thing is weirdly similar. 
Also, helpful tips, worth reading especially if you find UfYH on Twitter to give good advice. 
The audiobook was great AND, having said that, she also reads Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire so you may find yourself feeling like you’re getting a cleaning pep talk from Shuos Jedao. YMMV if that’s a bug or a feature.