Smiley would prefer to play the game with a certain set of rules. However, he tends to win with whatever hand he's dealt. He's haunted by those who don't survive his machinations.

Nobody goes quite as deep undercover in this as Leamas in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. There's a lot more pantsing than plotting. The same amount of wheels within wheels, they're just put in motion quickly reacting to events. Quite a few side characters are ready to be expanded on.

The exploration of work/life balance added to the story, but might have been fleshed out a bit more.

I'm looking forward to both more Harkaway Smiley books and the rest his father wrote. Next up is Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

This collected 12 comics, but there was less than one comic's worth of content about Ironheart. I'm glad I read this as it's where the character was introduced, but I'm looking for more directly about Ironheart.

The storyline introducing a strangely kind Doom was more developed.

This is a mix of the TV Hulk, wandering from town to town, violent solving problems and Lovecraft's reanimator.

That mix of bipolar problem solver and conduit to otherworldly evil is impossible to turn away from.

I like the journalistic storytelling.

I'd read these first 5 issues once before but I hadn't realized how long the series ran. This is going to be a fun read.

I think I'll expand on this review, but some quick thoughts for now

I'm glad I reread this and look forward to catching up on more Doctorow, but I'm not excited about recommending this particular book to most readers.

I came to this novella barely even knowing the genre. I love a Guy Ritchie British crime movie and that's pretty much the genre here. I love that the gender of a number of characters, while important, is left ambiguous for longer than the reader would expect. Assumptions may be undermined. The hits keep coming for the main charcter. The titular wait is in an emergency room with an unidentified stranger and the main character.

The more the reader learns about the main character, the less sympathetic they are. Yet, I was definitely engaged enough to want to check out further installments in the story. Great to see LGBTQ themes in a genre I love.

I came to The Bright Years pretty much only knowing that it dealt with 4 generations of a family dealing with the repercussions of alchoholism. That thread was explored deftly and unwaveringly. There was also a thread of art, both the creation and appreciation of it.

I'm pretty sure the only other serial first person narrative I've encountered was All Involved, a novel chronicling the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Here, that structure did a great job passing the narrative torch from generation to generation.

Each chapter is a tight moment in time. A snapshot that might have been taken by one of the characters. Flashbacks are short, but powerful. There's more happiness shown than pain, though the pain casts a long shadow.

Damoff captures those moments of trauma so well. Miscarriage, the breakup/adoption, the descent to alcoholism and the separation that becomes pain by avoiding violence.

There's quite a lot here that I haven't experienced directly that nonetheless resonated. I don't usually read a mimetic family drama like this but I'm glad it crossed my path as an ARC.

Quick review for now.

This scratched a few itches.

I read this assuming it was a standalone, but it definitely ended as the start of a series. 

Julie Crews is chaotic good. She has barbed wire tattoos that she extracts painfully for blunt force magic.  She manifests the heavy drinking noir stereotype with plenty of modern and fantastical vices thrown into the mix.  Over the years she's made a handful of close friends and a lot of bad choices.

There seem to be a lot of upper class New Yorkers volunteering other people as hosts to birth various eldritch entities. Julie Crews is generally opposed this sort of thing and regularly paid to intervene in such shenanigans. Everyone in her orbit seems to be trying to establish or adjust their place in the local magical hierarchy. Julie just wants to survive, until an old flame enters the picture and there's a slim possibility of something more.

This was a propulsive read that shouldered out everything else I was reading in parallel. It fits nicely on a list with The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin and Last Exit by Max Gladstone although so far, I enjoyed Julie's entourage the least.

It's interesting how communism is described from multiple viewpoints. It's as much of a character as a city is in a noir story. The wheels within wheels are masterfully manipulated by the 3rd person narrator who zooms in and out as needed.

Both sides of the Cold War seem to want what's best for humanity but they are both ready to go against their principles to make sure their side wins. Or the other side.

This keeps you guessing til the final pages.

Next up: Karla's Choice