In the acknowledgments/author's note, Scalzi talks about how this book came to exist. He was working on another, more "serious" book. But then 2020 happened and working on something that intense and dark was just not within his emotional capabilities. After struggling with the book for over a year, he eventually abandoned it. According to him, the next day the concept for this book just plunked itself into his head and he wrote the first draft in just a few months. 

This book is not serious. It is actually pretty ridiculous and a little nonsensical. Some people might be confused about why it has won awards, but I think the above paragraph is actually the exact reason why the book has won awards. The book captures something about what we have wanted in the world and what we still want in the world. This is a variation on the cozy fantasy energy—a kinda goofy, kinda ridiculous science fiction novel that doesn't take itself too seriously. 

The characters are loveable; the plot is simple; the bad guy is very inherently villainous with a really straightforward motivation. There's nothing that's hard or confusing. It's a literary soft place to land. I really enjoyed this. It isn't difficult; it is fun. Don't go into this expecting some nuanced or original critique of...anything really. But you will have a good time.       

This is a hard book to review because how you engage with this book and respond to its style and contents will be very personal to you and your experience. The book is poetic and philosophical, ranging over dozens of topics in a fluid, almost stream-of-consciousness, manner. For some, this style might be frustrating. Macfarlane doesn't linger on a topic; he circles around it, gently brushes by it, teases you with ideas and concepts. There's infinite space between him and the reader for both parties to have their own space, their own thoughts and feelings. Throughout the book felt as if Macfarlane was constantly walking ahead of me, but turning back to extend his hand, guiding me through the path he cut. 

What is this book actually about? Well, caves. Kind of. Caves, icebergs, tunnels, mushrooms, space, World War Two, economics, politics, history, the Paris catacombs, religion, underground rivers, mining...  It is about everything while not being about one specific thing. Every reader will have a difference experience; if you are re-reading this book, you will come away with an entirely new experience. My copy is page-flagged and highlighted, but I believe that if I re-read the book in six months I would find entirely new quotes and entirely new experience all together. 

All that to say, this was a beautiful experience that will stay with me for a long time to come.  

I was surprised at how much I liked this one. This has been a BookTube/BookTok darling for a bit, and I've been disappointed many times by the very hyped books, and I don't like YA. But Holly Black had been a Guest of Honor at ICFA, so I decided to trust people. And I was pleasantly surprised. It was a lot of fun. The stakes of the book rose at a normal pace; the characters were believable in their actions; the fae were appropriately terrifying and weird and capricious. It was actually a really good book and I already put the second one on hold at my library. 

I'm not trying to be shady here, but I was really expecting this to be like someof the other faerie smut genre based on what people on the internet were saying. So when this had a pretty compelling plot with interesting characters I was surprised but also pleased. I don't really like DNFing books, and it is particularly difficult to DNF really popular books like these. 

I hope Jude goes darker in the upcoming books. I want to see parallels between her and Jia from the Dandelion Dynasty. Someone who is willing to make herself the villain so that someone else can be the hero. A true morally gray character. We don't have enough of those.    

I thought the sequel was not quite as strong as the first one. The characters were more fleshed out, but the author was going back over the same critique and comedy as in the first one, nothing really new was added to it. It was a fun book to read, don't get me wrong, but it just wasn't as insightful as the first one. 

Another book I went into without looking up anything about the book. I was well into chapter one before I realized that this book is a companion novel to The Glass Hotel. While The Glass Hotel was much more lit fic-y, this was much more firmly in the science fiction camp, particularly the second half of the novel. Like the other of Emily St. John Mandel's books I've read, this had beautifully drawn characters that she allows to express themselves and meet the reader in fluid ways. She always focuses on trying to capture something of the character through her writing and structure rather than forcing them into traditional narrative techniques, and this is becoming more deftly done and more obvious as her career continues. I know not everyone likes her books for some of the exact reasons I do like them: they are moody and atmospheric; usually the "why" and "how" of the book are left to the end. But I love embedding myself in a character's perspective and experiences.

Each chapter of the book is set in a different year, following characters who are all connected by hearing a violin and a whoosh sound. This lasts only for a few seconds, but it is a core memory for all of the people involved. After each of the characters has their experience, we are introduced to someone who is trying to figure out why and how all of these people shared this experience, separated by hundreds of years. While there definitely is a mystery element to the book, this is far from being the main point. Any reader expecting something that is very science-y and trying to solve some great cosmic crisis is going to be disappointed. This is a book about how people cope with strangeness in their lives and what memory means to us.   

Reviewing sequels is difficult, particularly when I really liked the first one. The second was also good, but the pacing felt off in places. Now, I did read the two books pretty far apart, so take that into consideration regarding my thoughts here. The emotional trajectories of some of the character arcs (particularly Nitsos and Rhea) did not feel steady. At the end of the first book, Nitsos's position seems like it is going to be very important, but that promise is not fulfilled in the second book the way I wanted it to be. I really loved Rhea as a character in the first book, but some of her choices seemed...weird in the second one. I liked her story overall, but a few places (such as with Falka) felt a little forced and didn't seem to add much to Rhea's arc or the book as a whole. 

I loved Chrysanthi (and Andrija!). That narrative was emotional, engaging, and weirdly charming. Some of the emotional stakes did not seem as high as the author might've wanted them to be, but overall, her story and the way her story ends particularly were well-done. Some people might not like that the book is so character-focused when there is a lot of politicking and war and such going on in the background, but the focus on the four siblings stays true to the energy of the first book. This is a series about the characters and how they deal with what is happening, not about what is happening itself. 

I'd recommend the series to people who like rich people problems (and their downfall), people who prefer stories that aren't about saving the world, and people who like rooting for the anti-hero. 

I picked this up for two reasons: First, I'm reading all the award winners for this year, and this novella won a Locus award (and I won't be surprised if it won a Hugo, too); second, I was on a T. Kingfisher kick. That's all to say, I didn't really look into this book before I read it if I had...I probably still would've read because of the award-winner thing, but if not for that, I would've skipped because I don't really like re-tellings of classic literature. This is not a judgment on them, just not my personal favorite. I was about 15% in when I was like, "Oh wait. This is The Fall of the House of Usher." One of the main reasons I don't enjoy retellings is that then I know how it is going to end, and it takes some serious storytelling to make the story interesting to me again. This is why myth and fairytale/folktale retellings tend not to bother me as much; they are already designed to be retold and adapted, and changed for specific cultural moments.

On to the actual book, I did enjoy it. The things Kingfisher added were enough to update the story and give it just enough of a change to still keep my interest. But because the story is supposed to be spooky, knowing how things are going to go takes some of the dread and suspense out of it. Although I did read the climax of the book in the dark, and that definitely added a spooky factor that gave me a singular creep. I'm going to guess if you go into this not knowing much about the source material, it will be much creepier. I did really like the narratorial voice and the way Kingfisher managed all the world-building. I know there is going to be a sequel, and I'll probably read it based on the narrator and world, but I'm curious to know if it is going to be another retelling or an original story. 

I would recommend this book for people who like retellings of classic/gothic literature and/or for people who like distinctive narratorial voices. 

I don't usually like middle-grade or young adult, but this book was absolutely adorable. Mona is a fourteen-year-old girl who is dragged semi-unwillingly into a conspiracy against the magickers of her city. Mona herself is a magicker, but the only thing she can magic is dough and baked goods. While she insists this isn't a "useful" skill, her talent continually comes to the rescue of herself and her friends. Neatly buried within the charming plot are some lovely meditations on the nature of power and the people who have (or do not have) it. 

Mona is a delightful narrator and sounds like a fourteen-year-old girl—not too childish, not too adult, navigating the confusing liminal space of early adolescence when everything is changing and in some ways you want it to change, but in other ways you want everything to stay the same. The supporting cast of characters is also delightful and easy to fall in love with. Everyone is easy to root for; you want everyone to win because they all worked so hard and deserve it for being generally good people. 

Throughout the book, Kingfisher comments on how unfair and unreasonable it is that a fourteen-year-old girl somehow becomes responsible for the fate of the city. This is generally my complaint with young adult books especially—I'm supposed to believe that the only viable candidate for herodom is sixteen? And that this sixteen-year-old has a developed enough prefontal cortex to handle the complex politics and strategizing of saving the world, universe, etc.? Mona's self-directed quest is primarily to find an adult who can solve this problem—a significantly more logical response for a child than assuming she can just save everyone all on her own. 

A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking is a delightful quick read that anyone who likes quirky, cozy stories will enjoy. 

This book was an oddly cozy read about planning a murder to exact vengeance on someone's abuser. The fairytale vibes are strong, although this is unlike any fairytale you've ever read. 

The narrative focuses on Marra, the youngest princess of a very small kingdom, wedged between two large kingdoms, that maintains its independence only because of its access to the only deep-water harbor between the three of them. Thus if one of the big kingdoms attacks the harbor kingdom, the other big kingdom would retaliate very Cold War-style. The queen of the harbor kingdom must strategize and politick her heart out, using her three daughters as pieces on a game board to preserve the safety of her people. So when the opportunity arises to marry her daughter to the heir to the northern kingdom, she seizes the opportunity. Marra, as the youngest, watches all of this happen before she is sent to a convent (to keep her safe? to keep her on reserve?). But when she finds out about the treatment of her sister in the northern kingdom's court, she resolves to do something about it. Along the way, she collects a motley (and endearing) assortment of companions: a dust wife, a godmother, an exile and ex-slave, a dog made of bones, and a chicken possessed by a demon. This crew is united in a sense of justice and admiration of Marra's dedication to a lost cause. As the characters repeatedly say—they will probably fail and die. Toward the end of the book, Marra states what is the thesis of the book: 

And this is what truly matters, not the doing but the trying. The book brings up issues of sexism and patriarchy all over the place, and all of those problems are still there, but maybe things were made a little bit better by the efforts of the gang. And maybe if more people valued someone else's life more than they valued one of their teeth (iykyk), then maybe things all over could get just a little bit better.

My biggest critique of the book was the opening. The book starts in media res, and we get some back and forth with the timeline until everything is all caught up. Since the point we start at in the first chapter is pretty dark and gripping, I felt like this was included here just to grab the reader's attention, even though this narrative device is never used again in the book and did not add anything to the experience for me.  

In the end, the book is about women's rage, power, and magic, the power of a found family, and the loyalty of a reanimated dog. 

Also (very, very end of book emotions)

no one can convince me that the dust wife and Agnes aren't going off to live their best cottagecore magic lesbian lives

This book was just fun. A classic mystery (as in the genre sense) with some good twists. Achieved the key function of a mystery: present the readers with all the clues but still make the final reveal exciting (if not necessarily surprising). There are definitely Sherlock Holmes vibes, but not in a bad or distracting way. If you ever were like, "wow I wish there was a gender-bent, even gayer, version of Sherlock Holmes mysteries set on another planet" then... ta-da. 

I don't want to get much into the main themes of the book because that would give away some of the clues, so I'll just focus on the setting. The book is set on Jupiter, and seeing how humans have developed ways to live on a gas giant is really interesting. Trains are a big part of the plot. Some people might be bothered by the lack of detailed world-building, but because this is a novella, there isn't much space to go into the science of how this all works. The reader is just supposed to accept things the way they are. Making the book longer would've made the mystery drag; adding more world-building would've broken up the tension too much. A novella is really the perfect format for this story. Also, some of the tech they describe sounds really cool. Especially the heated chairs? How cozy.

Mossa and Pleiti are really likable characters. Mossa is the detective, and the way she is described makes me think she is on the spectrum. I'm not an expert, but from what I understand about ASD, she seems to fit some of the symptoms, although a diagnosis is never mentioned on the page. Pleiti is a scholar and adorable. The way she writes (as she is the first-person narrator, remember the Sherlock Holmes vibes I mentioned) could be a little off-putting to some people as it is kind of strange, but I think it fits the style of the book very well. The reader gets a sense that this is set Elsewhere and Elsewhen—and also Pleiti's over-educated self (which she makes fun of). 

Overall, this is a cozy little mystery that features compelling characters, a fun mystery to solve that isn't very dark or gruesome (there are no dead bodies or otherwise gruesome events depicted on the page), and can easily be read in one sitting.