This was a nice and fun read that I probably would have enjoyed much more if I remembered ANYTHING about the first three books other than that I enjoyed them and someone had a gem in their navel.
But Carson does the "first girl in the army" routine  well, the story itself had a reasonable number of twists and turns, although some of them felt contrived and there was a fair amount of hand-waving the politics. On the other hand, the characters were awesome.
I just wish I remembered more about the books that came before.

And the adorableness keeps coming. Therin has a good sense of the line between characters making the same mistakes over and over again and balanced with "love is a not a cure-all for trauma". The places where her characters fall back into regular patterns are, overall, believable. And, of course, the magic is fun and the characters are fun and its a sweet series.

Like Gideon, this book took a significant amount of time for me to go from "what the hell is going on and why does it matter?" to "what the hell is going on and I need to know more!"
More, actually, which was frustrating. It felt like a mismatch between the writer's expectations and my own - I had a good sense of what had probably happened and I just wanted to get to that part rather than deal with all the preliminary confusion. 
Also, I missed Gideon's voice from the first book. A significant amount of that book's draw for me was that Gideon was delightful. Harrow, especially for the first two thirds of the book, is just a lot less fun to listen to.
Having said that, there were some absolutely stellar set pieces and lines in it and the last third of the book was what I had come here for in the first place.
But it was still, at the end of the day, way too much lead-up relative to payoff.

Okay, but like, how do you rate an exhaustive investigation into the rot at the root of the American project. Vital, necessary, illuminating, gives name to things I already knew, Wilkerson's work is excruciating and provides much needed language and context for the way that racism operates and the work that it does in the US. Her comprehensive analysis of the similarities between Nazi Germany and White America should be required reading. And while the book has far fewer narratives of lynchings than it could have included, her frank insistence that we - that is the non-Black we - encounter what being Black in the US was (is) like is critical, especially for those of us who did not cover this in detail in history classes. (Or who learned about one or two, but they were presented as singular events rather than nearly daily occurrences.)

Oh, wow, I really need to write down who recommends things because I had totally forgotten and, anyway, thank you Amal El-Mohtar for tweeting about this book.
It was exactly what I needed on a Friday evening. I loved every page, the art style was suited perfectly, the characters were gorgeous and so lovingly depicted in both art and text and just...the whole story came together in a way that reminded me why hopeful narratives are so important to me. It was a hug bound in paper.

If Red, White, and Royal Blue had a book baby with A Civil Campaign, it would look like this book. 
It delights me beyond reason. 
It is, on one level, about five romance tropes dressed up in a dust jacket. And it’s also a magnificent example of how tropes are not BAD and, like all novelistic convention, it is the skill with which they are deployed that makes the book. And they were perfect here. 

I’ve been reading a fair amount of magic women in historical ly based settings, and this one both continues that trend and is one of my favorites of my recent reads. Polk is awesome, she knows how to tell stories of perseverance and overcoming obstacles and the romance here is stellar. 

I'm SO glad I waited to read this rather than when I first got it out of the library and then we had a pandemic and I was pregnant because, whew, this is NOT the book to read then.
I think I'm getting discerning with my pandemic lit these days, there's just so much of it. And now I start asking "okay, but how did they do compared to what went down?"
Which is, of course, SUPER helpful.
I appreciated this book and the conceit (it has a handmaid's tale feel to it that mostly works) and I wanted more of the "how do we rebuild the world once we bet a chance story", which was like 10 pages at the end and that's the part that interests me most.

3 star books that loses extra points for

convenient surprise pregnancy despite taking precautions

. A trope I despise.
This series is starting to feel more drawn out than I want it to be. There are ways in which it's reminding me of a Disney sequel - this thing we kind of resolved last time...surprise, it's back and as annoying as ever!
I'm not sure if its a matter of shaky character development or a series getting stretched out to meet the number of books the author thought they would write. The story itself is still interesting. I'm just developing more quibbles with it as we go on.

I basically inhaled this book because I NEEDED to know what would happen next and now it's time read the next book because I STILL need to know what happens next. Seriously, there is a lot to unpack here and also the suitcase is about to explore. If you are a thriller person, this book is thrilling.