What, and let me emphasize, the HELL?
I absolutely wish I knew how to describe this book. It's not a story per se; although it is not quite a thought experiment either. I wish I knew what I thought of it.

I apparently begin Rowland's books with a dislike of the main character and all their irritating foibles but also I am invested and part of the problem is that her main characters are so often personifications of the worst parts of ourselves and letting that part both heal and be.
But wow are the worst parts of myself irritating sometimes.

It's not that I didn't enjoy this book; it was extremely cute and delightful and it's one of those things where the things I like and the things I disliked were packaged all together as one.
On the one hand, I do like a good "they're so good for each other and they make each other feel safer" and on the other "marriage 👏 is 👏 not 👏 therapy 👏". On the one hand "this big deal is not a big deal because we're here for you" and on the other hand "could you people please have a conversation!"

So, like, a mixed bag of tropes, some of which I liked better than others. I did very much appreciate that, as is necessary for any Bujold fan, there was a slightly disastrous dinner party.

Gila Fine is excellent and I thoroughly enjoyed this book and the way she told these stories.
My biggest frustration, I suppose, is that I was not entirely sold on the stereotypes at the beginning. It occasionally felt like Fine had the conceit of the stereotypes and needed to present the stories as ever so slightly more one dimensional than they are.
The richness of the story and her use of literary techniques to think about the stories as capable of making meaning was absolutely wonderfully done. She also makes much of this conversation extremely accessible by bringing some of the more obscure scholarship into a book that is written to be more narratively engaging.

I also find her tendency/willingness to take the works of Boyarin in particular, but others as well, and accept their analysis while still rejecting the direction such work goes. Fine often reads spaces for women into places that academics are more likely to read rabbinic situation of themselves as both self and other in a way that leaves no room for actual women. It's not an argument that lends itself to truth claims, though it does fascinate me how the Torah continues to make itself into what we need it to be.

Starting off the year with a bang and a whimper of terror.
Fundamentally, The Little Mermaid is a horrifying story and what Khaw mostly does here is simply divide out the horror evenly.
This book is also helping me nuance my theory of books that speak to morality - horror is usually a genre that speaks to who we find terrifying and, in doing so, sets up a kind of morality about the universe of who is good and who is bad by who is threatened, by whom, and who survives. Fairy tale horror plays with this and it has a lot to say about who is bad and much less to say about who or what is moral. (Which is a fascinating twist on the fairy tale, which is very much a story about how to be good by the time it gets to the 19th century.) In part, I think it's a deep awareness that you can't talk about morality in a world of monsters who make monsters. The mermaid and the plague doctor are who they are because of what was done to them so this story is a continuation of who has the right to transform someone else's body. Which is the horror in the depths of the little mermaid.

Sharon Shinn was writing romantasy long before that term portmanteaued its way into reality and I still think of her, along with a number of others, as the real definition of the genre. 
This is absolutely a reread and I have no idea when I first read it. Presumably before I started tracking my reading?

I also suspect this book gets the “the protagonist is a teenager so the genre is YA” treatment and, yeah, nope. I don’t think so. I’m not sure if I can describe why - it’s not that its not interested in Corrie’s moral development, but rather that…Corrie’s moral development furthers the plot, while in YA the plot furthers the protagonist’s moral development. Also this story is shockingly uninterested in ethical conundrums, for all that there are many.

She did the whole purple wedding thing before GRRM and like…crickets.

The other thing that she does  is the trope of man who quietly adores a woman who has absolutely no idea about it. Which is perhaps just a point about how influential Austen was on the genre and we all live in the shadow of Darcy, Wentworth and - in this case especially - Knightley. Or there’s something to be said, given that such suitors are often foils of men who are overly aggressive in their interest, for the fantasy of a man who is so polite in his attentions and so careful that one genuinely can’t tell he’s in love until he says something. The consummate gentleman who doesn’t make his feelings his love interest’s problem. There may be something there. 

It's always fun when you can tell that the author of a book imprinted on the exact same Disney movie that you did. Gratuitous descent down the staircase and all.
Beauty and the Beast never gets old (it is the tale as old as time, after all) and Sandhya Menon's take on it is as sweet and fun as the rest of her books. I could have used a little less time in the land of "the reader knows things that the main characters could theoretically work out", but I always have weird rules for that in my head. I'm not entirely sure it stands up to much analytic scrutiny and I'm just as sure that it does not need to. It's just fine the way it is and I am a sucker for this fairy tale.

I have SO MUCH SYMPATHY for everyone who spends the book wanting to absolutely deck Avra because absolutely deserves it and it took a while for him to shift to entertainingly infuriating rather than just “oh god this.”
Some of it was waiting for the genre to click and realizing what level of humans humaning we are working on. And some of it was just…Avra realizing he could be less annoying. 
Julian, though. Absolutely amazing. 
And the perfect absurdity of the very serious plot. 
Also I started reading this about one hour after watching the finale of the most recent season of the great British bake off and, wow, is that a good pairing. 

It’s very weird to be at the end of this series, at least in terms of what currently exists. I also have a hard time explaining why I appreciate it so much - it feels to me like it combines the best of old school fantasy with significant modern sensibilities. So much of it reminds me of the fantasy stories I loved as a teenager - honor and quests and saving the world - but so much of these stories are also just suffused with the sense that fantasy is a key medium through which we talk about the world as is and discuss the world as ought. These books are, literally, sword and sorcery while also conversations about morality. 
This one was great, both the arc of the story overall and the roadtrip escape and also how Aras, despite being no where near main character action, manages to be absolutely hilarious. Now HE would be fun to introduce to Miles. 

This book was very cute and I clearly read too much T. Kingfisher because I wanted just...a few more severed heads, so to speak. 

I understand the idea of a world where nothing goes bad (ish) and a world where there is bad stuff and there's also good in this world and it's worth fighting for (she says, smelling of po-tay-toes from having finished this book while frying latkes), but this one felt a lot like "there's lots of bad stuff, but it's mostly happening over there and to other people and you can absolutely trust the people in charge that bad things won't happen here". Despite any number of encounters in the middle of the book that suggested that was manifestly not the case. And also it felt like a series of encounters mostly strung together by happening to the same adventure party, which would probably have been more my thing if I actually enjoyed playing D&D.

Okay, this is much meaner than I intended to be; I thought it was really cute and sweet and was not trying to be deep and complicated, but a comfortable and cozy fantasy. And I have an ersatz set of criteria that not even I know that determine when the involuntary suspension of disbelief kicks in.