I really enjoyed all the characters in this book and the magic and the story and the villain was reasonably scary and everyone's ongoing poor life choices usually made sense in context (as a removed reader who can see all moving pieces, perhaps I have some evaluative distance that the characters do not).
And also I was...uncomfortable with the degree to which revolution as a method of dealing with injustice is not merely critiqued but vilified. Isn't it interesting how there's a city of people desperate enough to die for freedom and yet no villains among the nobility who appear to be withholding it? It's the deeply realized people against *the idea* of aristocracy and Miller takes the side of the aristocracy by consistently seeing them as people. It's a both-sidesism that completely elides the power of the aristocracy to let people die.
The story is very carefully told to be "I believe in change, but not like this".
Which is frustrating because I *liked* it and there's a story in here Miller doesn't tell about how a focus on economic elides the way that gender plays a role in power and oppression and that you cannot build a fairer world on economics alone. Miller almost goes there at the beginning, but then just lets it slide.
Having said all that, the sewing bits in here were exquisite.

Lo's prose is beautiful and she handles the intricate story she's weaving here with a deft touch that makes it come alive and makes the past feel ever so present in a way that erases so many of our misconceptions about how different things were "back then". And does so with honesty.

Ugh, Solomon has an amazing gift for blending heavy concepts and literary topics with the visceral and the fantastic. They operate on basically all those levels at every point and it’s stunning in every sense of the word. 

Okay, so what I learned from this book is that cleaner wrasse are AMAZING (which of course is why I always played them in Odell Down Under...a game that was only fun when you were either a cleaner wrasse or a great white shark).
Godfrey-Smith's investigation into consciousness is fascinating and ultimately just kind of a "where we are now" of the research and possibilities. It doesn't really move the field forward, but if you are interested in the idea and want to dive deeper into speculation about the origins of conscious experience and subjectivity, it's great.

Okay, I SUPER want to take a class (or even teach one, I suppose) that actually reads this right after reading Dracula because what Zárate does here by taking the style and fascinations inherent in Dracula and queering it and also investigating it is really interesting. There's enough material included with the novella to make analysis somewhat unnecessary, but the choice to make queer desire explicit and also the consequences of both queerness and queerphobia explicit recasts the original in a really interesting way.
And also I wonder what the choice to use Dracula's fascination with mediation and continue the found text approach does to this story. Does it merely keep the interstitial text in line with the original or does it change our experience of The Route of Ice and Salt. I'm not sure, that's why I need a classroom to talk it through in.

Stunning fluff, A+ at fluffage, I highly approve.
— — — 
Okay, so today's random disquisition on recent trends in romance novels. And, like, recent trends is ridiculous because the novel as...improving literature (*cough* Samuel Richardson *cough*) is very old as a concept and the idea of the romance novel that tells the reader what to want rather than describes the reader's extant desire is also not new nor is it possible to distinguish the prescriptive from the descriptive and so I'm not even going to try.
Having said that, recent trends in the romance novel field include novels that attempt to not merely imagine but inculcate the virtuous life. We'll use this one as an example, but I could also direct the reader's attention to Courtney Milan, Cat Sebastian, Alexis Hall, and so on.
Aside from venturing swiftly into the realm of deep fantasy - what if the gorgeous actors were just like us - this is also engaging with questions of what it means to be a good person. Granted, it's a romance novel so definitionally being good cannot mean getting it right or always making good choices. Romance novels require screw-ups. But the way Dade tells her story pointedly skewers the difference between messing up and being wrong. Stories like this have no patience for wrongheadedness and no problem articulating what wrongness is (sometimes more easily than in non fiction forms). 
The fantasy of romance is that every single human being has value and that someone one day will see it. (Given my own theological leanings, its the latter half that I consider to be the fantastic.) The delightful trend in current romance of saying everyone means everyone and writing stories about unapologetically Black, disabled, fat, and/or queer protagonists who find love as they are is a deeply political statement. And it applies to both sides of the partner-equation. In cishet romances, I'm seeing many more men struggling with mental illness or invisible disabilities and that's amazing! (And also the presumed female audience often means that the men are rarely physically disabled and that's worth noting.)
This book is less subtle about it, weaving it into the plot that is itself a work of literary critique (and an extremely thinly veiled rant about GOT, but I digress) of what constitutes a good romance and good character. And also I think there's something fantastically subversive in the romance novel that has come to see itself as offering moral instruction to the reader.

"If I had a nickel for every book I've read this year about an extraordinary woman mathematician solving a hitherto unsolved problem and also WWII, I'd have two nickels. WHich isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice." - Dr. Doofenschmirtz

But seriously, this book was very different than Chung's The Tenth Muse and it was surprisingly sweet and uplifting for a book about shiva. Rojstaczer is not skewering his characters' foibles, but he is drawing them to the surface and writing a story about identity and belonging and the ways in which idiosyncrasies become culture. It is the mortifying ordeal of being known at its best.

This book is beautiful and painful in equal measures. The way Prescod-Weinstein talks about her research and presents the science behind it is just the best of what science writing can offer. And the way she presents the rest of her career—the activism, the struggles, the sheer anguish of doing what you love in a society that does not love you and will not admit it—it's not ugly because she's still a consummate writer, but it is the deep dark colors of a bruise instead of the night sky and it's impossible to miss or disregard that change.
Her story is not new, but her framing that this isn't a story of accomplishment beyond the odds—even though it is—but an indictment of the society at odds with itself that, in seeking a specific kind of truth, in unwilling to consider what it does not know that is still true and what it *knows* that is false.
Also she opened with the blessing of yotzer or and closed with tefilat haderech and I just...*sigh*. It's everything.

Oh, Tansy! This book is a meringue. Light, fluffy, sweet, and deeply enjoyable when done well. I always appreciate when people with a deep fondness for how ABSURD regency romance can be just decide to take it on and run with it.

But I wanna know MORE! How dare you leave me cliff hanging here?
Which is, I suppose, what makes a good thriller. And why I'm about to head off to track down the third book.