Awww, they're really cute! And I really like the way that Milan thinks about managing mental illness and neurodiversity in non-contemporary times.
But also I would have read this book for the chicken joke.

The thing about reading an authors back catalog is that whatever it is you fell in love with in their most recent work isn't always there. Or it is, but not in the same way.
I can see the bones of The Changeling and The Ballad of Black Tom here, but also it's its own story and also LaValle is doing different things that felt, at least in the beginning, more like Mat Johnson's Pym. 
But the end, ugh, the end was beautiful.
This wasn't a book to get swept up in, which may be on me for reading it when I wanted to be swept up, and yet I appreciated what LaValle was doing and the way the end almost rewrites the entire book for the reader and reframes it. But also I might have recognized and appreciated it more if it wasn't, you know, January 2021 and we all weren't DEEPLY exhausted.

I think I wanted this book to be something other than it was. The supernatural elements were there to drive the plot, but they weren't really part of the story in their own right and as soon as you introduce weird stuff going on, that becomes the interesting part of the book to me.
The historical world building was gorgeous, but it wasn't quite gothic enough for my tastes. And for all that the characters grew on me, I think I wanted more than a character study.

I'm so ambivalent about these books because the plot and story is so interesting and the writing always takes me something like a third of the book to get used to it and to stop finding a distraction.
But the story itself is so good. I love a good locked room mystery in space and MRK delivers here.

I have a few additional comments - one is the absolute gut-punch that is people asking about kashrut in space because it's 2020 and that still happens much less often than I wish it did. The globalization that happens as a result of catastrophe means that, while the world itself may be worse when it comes to loss of life, the moral world is growing by leaps and bounds in the book and you see that in the little glimpses of a world that is more seriously reaching towards post-racism than ours is even now.

Also, the amount of work that MRK put in to accurately, unglamorously, and compassionately depicting anorexia was extraordinary. In particular, the way she wrote about food from this character's perspective was an extraordinary use telling through showing.

The third comment is me being a jerk. I am so so pleased for the people whose names I recognize who have been Tuckerized in this book and I know it's a big deal to them and, every time it happens, I have to stop reading and walk away for a while because it basically kills any narrative momentum and investment I have in the story until I can go back to the story with some distance from having been in it and thrown violently out. I hate it so much, you guys, and I'm so sorry.

Okay, so the first thing you need to know about this book is that it is visceral. The descriptions of injuries are, while not gory, graphic in the way that descriptions of pain by explaining the injury that causes them can be. 
Which, in many ways, is the point of the book - collateral damage, the people on the margins, who gets hurt when the Titans battle. 
And that’s also not really the point because the book is only SO interested in that question because it’s also a revenge story in the mode of Edmund Dantes and, in trying to be both, it does not quite manage either. 
But for all that, it was a fun and engrossing read and the premise is still brilliant. 

In college, I took a class with Dr. Nina Auerbach (ob”m) about gothic stories and women and, while I can’t remember the title, the premise was that every gothic novel is the story of “girl meets house”. (Edit: found it! "https://www.english.upenn.edu/courses/undergraduate/2008/spring/engl290.401)
Catherine House is a beautifully unsettling addition to the genre. If The Magicians and Rebecca had a baby, it would look like this. 

I love Bear when she writes space opera and this is no exception.  I wish I remembered her other book better because this one definitely plays off of that and it would extremely helpful.

This was an extremely straight forward book...by Yoon Ha Lee standards. But the way Lee weaves together the historical source material, then magic, and the characters is just really excellent. If you like Lee’s work, but found Ninefox Gambit hard to follow, this may be perfect for you. 

Sweet, sad, one of the books that could have been a novel, but McDonald opted for atmosphere and evocation rather than going into more detail. Which made sense with what he was trying to do and also made the book feel a bit misty. 
If that is your thing, go for it.