Becca

This was the most adorable. Exactly what I needed in a cozy, lazy dark days of December. I'm not usually one for a rom-com, but throw in some astrophysics, an existential plot about fitting in and some high school bully revenge fantasy and now, you're speaking my language. This reminded me in all the best ways of [a:Lydia Netzer 4886414 Lydia Netzer https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1384708162p2/4886414.jpg]'s book: a book about nerds told from the perspective of someone who clearly loves nerds, a dry sense of humor and a heavy hand of astronomy as both critical plot driver and also metaphor for trying to find one's place in the world.

There has never been a book more aptly judged by its cover: everything about Paperback Crush invoked a certain type of book from my childhood. Speaking of covers, I was not expecting this book to be formatted by picturing the (similar) covers of every book included, so let's start there. Originally, I was weirded out by the choice to include such heavy graphics but (A) I think it was necessary for the amount of discussion about cover art and how it changed over time and (B) Paperback Crush is about a certain type of book. Not the books that your parents bought you, or that you read for an assignment in middle school, but the books that you read guiltily during silent reading time at school when you should have been reading something “better” or gulped down lying on the floor in someone else's bedroom during a slumber party while everyone else was asleep. And therefore, with very few exceptions, I recognized the covers without really remembering the titles. (Okay, yes, by “you”, I mean “me”.)I grew to love having the covers for a third reason: seeing them again, most of them literally photographs of a cover, often with creases or discoloration, really provided a nostalgia hit. And ultimately, that's what Paperback Crush is about: nostalgia for these certain types of books. I didn't really consider how much my view on the world was influenced by coming of age in the land of aspirational fiction – a world in which fictional characters rarely had problems, and when they did they were outlandishly large – rather than ten years prior, the world of “problem” fiction about divorce and drugs or ten years later, the world of paranormal romance. I'd considered the BSC (babysitters club) and SVH (sweet valley high) to be canonical tween fiction, the same way that the Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew were canonical tween mystery books. Thinking about the way that fiction of a particular time influences that generation was one of the most interesting parts of the book.I was hoping for a truly literary analysis of YA literature, but Moss has a lighter touch, mostly creating a taxonomy system and cataloguing examples in each category. Sometimes this goes deeper, like reviewing how rare characters of color are in 80's YA lit and exploring YA books written specifically for the African American community (I found myself wishing she'd done something similar for Jewish YA lit, besides name-checking BY Times. I hadn't known that my [b:Atonement of Mindy Wise 4655575 Atonement of Mindy Wise Marilyn Kaye https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/50x75-a91bf249278a81aabab721ef782c4a74.png 4705932]-[b:Anastasia Krupnik 116494 Anastasia Krupnik (Anastasia Krupnik, #1) Lois Lowry https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1476942137s/116494.jpg 827585]-reading-youth where all characters celebrated Hanukkah, had embarrassing Old Country relatives and parents who dropped Yiddish casually was cultivated.) Mostly, this is light but fun: did you know that they hired actresses to pose for all of the BSC covers? There's an interview or two, as well. On the other extreme, sometimes Moss dips into her own personal childhood memories of particular books (like the universal confusion about Claudia's wardrobe.)On the other hand, mostly Moss stays away from either personal woolgathering or in-depth literary analysis. And while I would have liked either one to be a little deeper, it left plenty of room for my own reminiscing. So, on that note, there was a profound nostalgic joy in discovering books and associated memories long-forgotten. It felt like a picture album from my childhood, and I'm pretty sure it has a long life ahead of it as a great coffee-table-conversation-starter.(I received a free copy in exchange for my unbiased review)

Previously on Rebecca Reads Tana French: I was a mystery book junkie for all of my childhood, but I fell out of the habit as an adult – I found the plot twists too obvious and the characters too derivative. So when Tana French was first recommended to me, I figured I'd read one and move on. Instead, I became completely entranced with her approach to mystery. Murders tear at the fabric of what we believe makes us human. French uses this tear the same way that speculative fiction writers use magic or giant robots: to explore what makes us human and where the borders of humanity are. Although Witch Elm departs from French's previous formula by not including the detectives as protagonists, it's otherwise true to form. The book centers on two main themes: first, the warmth of families, and on the obverse the distance that can grow in relationships by pretending that everything is normal and second, who well one can ever really know themselves. French excels at evoking visceral feelings – both positive and then rapidly cooling as things go wrong – and here the set up of friends, romantic relationships and family all feel very real. The new format really gives her space for thematic development and she uses it to approach these questions from multiple angles even before the central crime comes to light (over 100 pages in – a corpse in the witch elm, details borrowed almost completely from the “Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm” case)I really loved the exploration of self and how well one knows oneself. Although not the protagonist, the most vivid character is the spiritual patriarch of the family, Hugo, slowly losing his personality to a brain tumor, and his response to why he never had children of his own: “one gets used to being oneself” sets the tone for the whole book. What does it mean to be oneself? Who are we? Do we ever really know how we will react to events that unsettle us. It's a very 2018 book: in the face of rising white nationalism does one resist or cling to routine? (I'm turning out to be the latter, much to my own dismay. If that's you, too, this is your book.)Much like other French books, the whodunnit of the murder is not the point, although I found the plot twists more satisfying than usual perhaps because they all happened from the lens of a pretty unreliable narrator. Also, I love unreliable narrators and this was a very satisfying instantiation – ostensibly, the narration is simply unreliable because the protagonist is recovering from a concussion; however, even before the head injury, the narration reminded me of [b:The Farm 17557913 The Farm Tom Rob Smith https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1391017911s/17557913.jpg 24485092] – the narrator would report out his happy-go-luckiness and how fine everything was, while clearly panicking. I enjoyed the exploration of what it's like inside the psyche of someone who's invested in being OK – it's a common personality trope in real life and pretty alien to me.It's clear that without the detectives, French had even more room to blend into “literary fiction” and develop her themes. On the other hand, I thought it also resulted in a loss of the internal skeleton of the narrative. Without it, some parts seemed bloated, while others seemed overly condensed. Particularly the last plot twist, which was given so little space within the narrative, suffered from this. Nonetheless, French is the only mystery writer whose books are appointment-reading for me and this didn't disappoint.(I received a free copy in exchange for my unbiased review. But also I'd already bought a pre-order copy before I won the giveaway.)

Look, I have a to-read list that realistically, I already won't finish in my lifetime unless the singularity occurs, and that's without adding any impulse reading to the list. But I was in the bookstore Bern train station, looking down the barrel of 12 hours of travel to get back home, all of my books AND all of my library ebooks that I'd brought with me already read and this was the only English language book that they had I'd ever heard of.

So. I didn't really have high expectations. And, you know, it kept me occupied for most of my flight, so that's a plus. But it's DUMB. So, so dumb. First of all, Clinton should not have written a book with a focal point of an impeachment scandal. Especially in which the impeachment scandal is apparently caused by the president trying to be a national hero. Also, the monologuing. So much monologuing. Most of which I ideologically agree with, but, still.

All of which would be forgivable if the action/adventure part of this show were good. Or lukewarm. It's 12 hours of travel time – good is unnecessary. But it wasn't. It was dumb: first of all, there was very little action. Second of all the Surprise!Traitor was so obvious I called it 500 pages in advance. No exaggeration.

So, I guess, in conclusion, if you too have nothing to read and half a day of travel time and this is the only English language book you can find, go for it! In any less extenuating circumstances, do yourself a favor and find something else.

I apparently need a shelf for things I read because it turns out that I need more books than I can carry for two weeks in Europe and there's no English language bookstores in the Swiss Alps and my library app limits what I can download internationally.

This book is utter crap. Complete and utter crap. Paper thin characters. The least mysterious mystery. I'm not totally sure Megan Abbott was ever a teenage girl, but, wow, that is NOT what it's like. Also, it reads super slowly. I seriously considered DNF'ing it despite having literally no reading alternative. Not really any redeeming features.

So, this was a fun romp into the world of park rangers. They're dashing and daring and spend a lot of time in extreme weather situations with tourists doing dumb things. The book pacing is a little odd, the chapters are disconnected, and mostly it reads kind of like a listicle, but it's fun. I will say, this book makes a terrible travel companion. Don't be me: reading it before hiking is a bad idea that will cause you to quake in your hiking boots, imagining everything that can go wrong. Lankford pulls no punches telling us that it is only the illusion of safety that gets us into the great outdoors. I read it while hiking in the Alps and wanted my illusion of safety back!

[b:The Girl With All the Gifts 17235026 The Girl With All the Gifts (The Girl With All the Gifts #1) M.R. Carey https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1403033579s/17235026.jpg 23753235] was a once-in-a-lifetime sort of book: smart science, interesting existential quandaries. The Boy on the Bridge is the Girl With All the Gifts redux. But unfortunately, literally: the smart but loving female scientist, and the precocious but different kid and they travel with a small crew who are deadset against them, all together exploring a land laid waste by the zombie plague. Unfortunately with all of the clever twists done already in The Girl, there wasn't much new and I felt like The Boy largely dragged. That's not to say there weren't well-drawn characters and emotional beats – there were, but it really hit basically all the same emotional, plot and character notes as The Girl did.

So, I love microhistories. There's just something SO satisfying about learning a lot about the world by ostensibly learning about something small and contained. And Salt is basically the ur-microhistory – one of the first and most famous books in the genre.

By my typical standards of microhistory, Salt is a win: every conversation I had while reading it eventually came around to me saying something like “so did you know that one of the major advantages of the North in the civil war is that they had more salt mines?” and (since I read it while in Austria) “did you know that they used to open salt mines to the general public as adventure rides?” And I did learn a lot about (broader) history through the infinity stories of “this area used to belong to tribe, but nation came and took it over because it had a good access to sea salt” but overall, I found the book boring. Not that the topic was boring, but, well Kurlansky's writing style was not ideal for me...he simply doesn't have any form of linking information. He'll state a sentence but not link it to related concepts in the chapter, or provide any sort of information about why that particular fact is interesting. If background information is needed for context he doesn't provide it. My own textbook writing is filled with linking phrases like “therefore, it follows that...” or “in light of this, it's particularly interesting that...” to keep the reader grounded in how things relate to each other. Also, each chapter contains recipes for no clear reason. Often the recipes use quantities that aren't defined anywhere and Kurlansky won't tell us what he intends the recipe to be an example of?

Kurlansky also perseverates on some topics: like salted fish. I think there were three chapters on salted fish, and yes, this is a microhistory, but there's really a limit of how much I want to know about salted fish.

But the content was excellent and I'm glad I read it. Just, next time, hopefully with any degree of structure

I gulped this book down after finishing Too Like The Lightning. It honestly stood up to binge reading. I thought I had Palmer's number this time through – and in some ways I did in that twists were less shocking than they'd been in the first book – but this still managed to be a genuinely thrilling book with a lot to think about.

Here's my final warning: I was the first person in my group to finish Seven Surrenders. Friends don't let friends read Ada Palmer alone. This is the sort of book that you need a buddy to digest with.

Every year, I get super behind on reviewing books because I read something that I just can't capture in words. Too Like The Lightning was that book this year. Not that I don't have things to say about it: I went a month where it was the only thing I could talk about. But I don't have anything intelligent to say in under 20,000 characters.

I might stick to what Jon told me to convince me to read it: Too Like The Lightning is the first book in a long time to truly thrill me. It's a view of the future told by someone who really gets that the future is the future – as far from us in mores and habits as the Victorians on the other side – not just Now but with flying cars. Palmer really feels out how things will change, and then layers on top of her fascinating setting, compelling, flawed and unreliable characters. And then, like an Escher drawing of stairs twists, and twists, and twists all somehow staying in the same place.

It is NOT for everyone. I wish I had been warned about just how over the line the content gets sometimes, but (except for one chapter at the beginning of the sequel) it's almost all purposeful to get the reader to question what our boundaries and morals are and why and what's a product of our moment in time.

Sometimes I get on runs of books that just fail to thrill me. I like Matt Fitzgerald's points: humans evolved over millennia to eat basically all food and all fad diets are dumb. This is also a pretty obvious point to anyone who's spent any time thinking about food or metabolism and since I'm a professional metabolist...

I was hoping either for scientific rigor or bystander fascination (e.g. a review of the craziest fad diets of all time.) Instead I got a lot of common sense: people are healthy eating a wide-range of foods in moderation and there's no magic diet mostly stated without citations.

I will say, though, I was grateful to the chapter dedicated to the overhydration cult and the dangers of free water intoxication as that's my personal pet peeve.

Unclear who his target audience is: most people who already think about these things already know what he's saying to be true OR have their heads buried in the sand of their favorite fad diet.

Dear Flavia De Luce,
It's not you, it's me. I was charmed at first by your precocious but naive approach to crime-solving, not to mention your chemical knowledge and derring-do. But I'm not good at series and so, even having spaced reading the three books apart by nearly a decade, the things that I once found charming now strike me as twee and a little redundant. Don't get me wrong: I'm thrilled that trimethylaminuria was the final clue to solve a murder and I'm in to Christian separatist sects but the story overall failed to catch my interest. OK, I lied, it's not entirely me: I thought that the story dragged and some clues were a little to on the noise (like the omnipresent fishy odor). But overall, I'm just not built for series that are all a little same-y. So Flavia, I still really adore your pluck and scientific detective work, but I'm not going forward with the series.

Love,
Me.

The underlying story here is fascinating: illuminated manuscripts representing muslim thinking through the ages are strewn about as family heirlooms in Mali surrounding the area of Timbuktu. Initially scattered in the face of French colonialism that resisted evidence that Africans and Muslims were highly intelligent with a pre-existing deep culture, many of the manuscripts were being ravaged by time and the elements. A single man, Abdel Kader Haidara, heir to his father's own massive collection, was recruited to save the manuscripts and house them in a formal library in Timbuktu. As a native, armed with his knowledge of the local culture he manages to ingratiate himself and buy back manuscripts. As a well-spoken, well-read individual he also manages to ingratiate himself with NGO funders to plan and build a climate-controlled building in Timbuktu to house the documents (despite building the first library on a floodplain by accident and having to ask all of his funders to refund him!) Then Al-Qaeda invades Timbuktu and wants to destroy the manuscripts as they are largely Sufi in origin and have a more nuanced approach to Muslim law. Abdel, aided by his family, “Emily” ([a:Stephanie Diakité 5078224 Stephanie Diakité https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png], for some reason her real name is obscured but her bibliography is listed, which confused the heck out of me) and crowdfunding to evacuate the manuscripts to safety.This is a great story. Unfortunately, this is also about all you get of the story in over 300 pages of the Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, which probably would have been better if left as a longform article. It's not all bad: I learned a lot about the major players in Al Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb, Islamic and North African history, and the Tuareg ethnic group, which is something I wouldn't have otherwise been exposed to and it was interesting. But the writing style really got to me: a frequent complaint I have of popular nonfiction is it is often multiple longform articles strung together, which requires a strong editor to make it cohere. The Bad-Ass Librarians is the most flawed book in this direction that I've ever read: characters would be introduced and discussed in four or five chapters and then all of a sudden at their sixth mention would get several pages of backstory, much of it redundant to their shorter previous introductions. Acronyms would remain undefined for their first ten mentions then arbitrarily expanded on the 11th. This was particularly unwieldy because I think some parts of the book were originally from unrelated articles and plopped down unedited in the book, which made the whole thing feel very incoherent. Remember the story that I told you was the ostensible premise above? Hammer goes over a third of the book in the middle without mentioning a single person or concept from it, instead giving us the entire backstory of a terrorist who never turns out to be related. My final complaint is that Hammer's self-insertion is really distracting. I love self-insertion in non-fiction (says the girl who's read everything Mary Roach has ever written), but Hammer does it in a way I found intrusive, perhaps because I was frustrated with his diversion from his premise. We hear what he was thinking about while he rode a boat down a river to meet with a source, and what type of iced tea he drank while sitting in a hotel lobby to meet with another source and I did not find it evocative of Northern Africa or introspective I found it completely useless noise.So overall, these is a really weird book: I'm glad I read it because I learned so much about a region and a history that I had little prior knowledge, but I found it extremely frustrating to read.

It's difficult for me to understand how a book could have such deep, creative and compelling world-building and such shallow and cliche romance.

The good: The world Taylor built is really lush. The politics in the war between the angels and chimera are nuanced and interesting, and more than that, you get a feeling that there's a depth of culture to both sides much more than what you even read.

The start of this book is one of the best I've ever read – I loved the descriptions of Prague and the rapport between Karou and Zuze. I found Brimstone and Issa and the rest a compelling mystery, and I felt myself quickly caught up in the mystery of who Karou was and what the teeth were for.

For all that there are hundreds of books about the morals for and against magic, I thought that this was the first that really made doing magic feel weighty, but not objectively bad and I loved that. I liked the metaphysics of magic in general.

I love books that explore the tension between “real life” and the supernatural and for at least the first half of the book there was still classes and grades and friends that Karou was trying to balance with saving the world.

The medium: Karou is the Mary Sue to end all Mary Sues. She's slender (as we're told at least seventeen times) and The Best Draw-er and Everyone Loves Her Ideas and she has
“naturally” blue hair and never gets scared and is good at everything. But...I kind of liked her anyway. She's strong and self-contained and has a ton of agency, even once she meets up with the male romantic lead.

The ugly: Ugh, the romance. I'm not a romantic; I don't read romance and I certainly don't do paranormal romance, so clearly not the intended audience. But he's handsome and perfect and they're instantly in love and ugh, ugh, ugh. And even though they're star-crossed lovers from a past life, they were instantly in love then, too. So.... And when they're together all of the descriptions are bland and shallow and cliche.

Supposedly the sequels are more world-building, less romance. I'll check them out...

Margalit Fox is probably my current favorite non-fiction writer. She has an unrivaled ability to both tell a very detailed story and also provide a context that makes it meaningful. In this case, the story is the wrongful imprisonment of the Jewish German immigrant Oscar Slater, and the navigation of his subsequent release by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The context chapters are wide-ranging, for instance: the history of criminology versus true forensic science (the former assumes the type of person a criminal is, then looks for clues to support it, while the latter uses abductive reasoning to come to a conclusion), Victorian sensibility and the life and times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (who apparently really hated being called Arthur casually). But the bulk of the context chapters focus on the xenophobia of Victorian Scotland with a particular focus on their anti-semitism and abject hatred of immigrants. Obviously, I found this highly relevant to current events.

I felt like she had a little more zip when writing about linguistics in her two previous books. I also missed the formal alternation of chapters – in Conan Doyle for the Defense there's a poor balance of thematic chapters and plot chapters in some sections. Nonetheless, I learned a lot and really enjoyed the narrative while doing so.

I...didn't get it. Honestly, that might be all there is to say. There were a lot of moving parts and a lot of evocative language, but ultimately, it didn't go anywhere to me. I felt like the pacing was so odd, there were topics that Gibson really perseverated on, like: someone broke into Damien's apartment! The apartment was broken into! Was the apartment broken into? We think someone broke into Damien's apartment! All of a sudden, it just occurred to me that the apartment might have been broke into and I need to process it because we've never discussed it before!
The pacing with characters was even stranger: Bigend's ex-girlfriend - who was never introduced on-screen, but was supposedly Cayce's best friend, who would spontaneously send e-mails and I had to remind myself who she was every single time. A lot of characters (like Magda and her brother, Ngemi and Hobbs) appeared from nowhere but somehow were implicitly trustworthy and part of the party?

Also, pilates. So much pilates. And yes, I really side-eye books where the male author spends a lot of time discussion the female protagonist's clothes and workout habits. Also, seriously, what is the obsession of male authors with destroying female character's clothing? This seems to be a trope of male action authors and it's dumb. How does Cayce manage to destroy two priceless jackets, one of which she's had for years in the course of a couple of weeks?

But my biggest problem is that it never went anywhere: the footage, Cayce's surreal logo allergy, her father-the-spy's mysterious disappearance: all of these gorgeous starting pieces didn't grew thematically, didn't grow together and ultimately never felt satisfying on a plot level, metaphysical level or thematic level.

Eric Fair's writing is spare. Almost telegraphically so. It adds a layer of harshness to his narrative about how he fell into his role as an interrogator in Iraq. We all know how this story is supposed to go: a perfectly ordinary person gets in over his head, then realizes it, pulls out and writes an apologetic memoir. But while the core beats of the narrative may be the same, Fair refuses to write that book. Instead, he writes the book of how his insecurities overwhelmed him and he avoided the moral high ground at every turn. His writing pulls absolutely no punches from that. The result is that his memoir is haunting and a terrifying tale of how easily a whole country can be pulled into a dark place, especially once for-profit companies join a war.

When I put books on my to-read list, I usually write a few sentence synopsis. For this I had:

“A precocious child protagonist, who may be autistic, his child-minder, his famous novelist mother and somewhere, a plot. It's quirky! And zany! And hopefully not ridiculously twee.”

Pretty much sums it up. It is a little twee – Frank is not really an accurate portrait of an autist, as much as a portrait of an idealized-self-insert sort of child: extra precocious, loved by adults and with preternatural insight – but in a cute way.

I often look for flawed characters that the reader nonetheless comes to really like, and Be Frank With Me really excels at that. All of the characters are substantially flawed but likeable and them coming together as something that resembles a family of choice feels really satisfying.

The Theranos story is so fascinating. Carreyrou paces the book evenly, slowly building his case. I borrowed this from a clinical chemist who plays (per him) a bit role in the story, appearing in a couple sentences within the book. When I returned his copy, the two of us sat in his office just marveling at how things progressed so far. Within my own little clinical chemistry domain, CLIA looms like a Greek god – all-powerful and all-knowing. Should we accidentally make a typo in our data, CLIA will send bolts of lightning to destroy us. The idea that a lab somehow became CLIA-certified with such significant variance in their data even before the straight-out fraud is almost unbelievable.

In addition, this seems like any doctor in their right mind would know what to make of Theranos. My best friend who works with silicon valley startups asked me about it several years ago, when I was still in residency, and I told her that the problem with capillary draws was hemolysis (blood cells splitting) and that you could never get some accurate results do that - and that's baked in to the blood draw, before you even get to the machinery. Any doctor worth their salt knows this.

So this is an almost fantastical story about how someone by force of personality alone paraded out technology that everyone knew was impossible, and somehow, without ever really inventing anything became a billionaire running laboratory testing in clinical labs on patients. It's pretty serious and scary stuff.

While reading it, I couldn't help but be amazed by the number of smart, well-educated people who were at least temporarily a party to this, often bullied by fancy lawyers and nondisclosure agreements. I think there's a lot here about how much the assumptions of civil society are really what keep us in check more so than institutions like CLIA or CAP. Once someone starts operating in bad faith, it's pretty scary how far they can get. On the other hand, Theranos was pretty much brought down by Carreyrou assisted by a pair of early-twenty-somethings who felt they had to speak out. So I think there's also a lot here about the importance of protecting whistle-blowers and the media.

This was such a lovely little book (it's actually quite thick – but it reads fast.) Chambers writes a lovely interstellar setting, with seemingly endless diversity of alien cultures, anatomy and biology. I really felt that the world building was stellar and that I could delve into each of the alien races. I also really liked that humans were kind of a lesser-race in the galaxy – nice twist.

As billed, the best part of the book is the chosen-family relationship that develops among the crew of the Wayfarers, despite interpersonal tension, major cultural differences and occasional fights. Their care for each other and the way that they all learned to understand each other was really evident. There's something really satisfying about reading about characters who are deeply-developed and obviously well-loved by their author, and I'm constantly complaining about the dearth of literature on platonic non-familial relationships.

And while I'm annoyed that most of the races in the galaxy were bipedal and used DNA (why DNA? Fine, if it's going to be nucleic acids, RNA, novel sugars, novel bases? There have got to be more self-replicating molecules in the galaxy. Geneticists of the future, I'm jealous.) but at least Chambers lamp-shaded how unlikely this is, and I felt like it was genre-aware.

Don't be swayed into thinking that this book is perfect: it read pretty disjointed. Each chapter seemed more like a TV episode in a semi-serial show than a book chapter – often characters or plots were limited to a single chapter to be explored, concluded and discarded. The character and setting development definitely outshone the plot.

Overall, a really nice debut novel – perfect warm & fuzzy reading, especially for Firefly fans.

Dr. Gregorio is a urologist by day, turned YA author by night. She set out to write a book inspired by her first patient with a disorder of sexual differentiation. It's a cute book that clearly thinks of itself as An Important Lesson On Tolerance, and as such comes off a little on-the-nose. There's “flavor” added to try to flesh out the book, but a lot of it is pretty shallow, and of course the happy ending includes the main character finding (heterosexual) romance, because it's not a book to challenge the status quo of 17-year-olds-must-have-boy-friends-to-be-happy. But it is a cute YA novel in which both the adults and teens are ultimately well-meaning. So if feel-good YA romance is your thing, cool! I wanted a little more nuance.

P.S. Ahhhh, why did no one offer the protagonist herniorraphy without gonadectomy? She was freaking out about having visible hernias. Those can be repaired before you make a decision about gonads. I'm pretty sure a urologist knows this better than I do. I got very distracted about this.

Math! And social justice! Two of my favorite things! What's not to like?

Unfortunately, kind of a lot. Look: people who read math books for fun are math nerds. Dumbing down math concepts with cutesy terms is not needed. It will not make people who would not otherwise read math for fun read your book and it will piss off the rest of us. Also, it's lazy. And it's bad math – O'Neil uses the term “weapon of math destruction” (over and over) very vaguely, so that she doesn't have to define exactly what she's talking about. Oh, she claims that she has a clear definition, but then she calls things like Racial Profiling a WMD (cringe). Racial Profiling isn't an algorithm; it's a cognitive heuristic and it doesn't relay on Big Data.

More problematically, I think she uses this term to obscure that a lot of her points are actually about cognitive biases, racial inequality and socioeconomic inequality, rather than the data science used to enforce these. She herself acknowledges that some things (like, e.g. racial profiling) have happened to exactly the current degree long before data science was available.

Overall, I found her approach really shallow. She's a former tenured ivy league math professor! I wanted her to write a book that only she could write – full of nuance and equations I needed a scratchpad to struggle through.

Nonetheless, I think some of her points were good: that machine-learning algorithms are dense and require supervision and critical thinking as to their results rather than blind trust. It's an important book for the math-phobic.

Oh, this was lovely. I kind of always want to know exactly what it is that other people do all day, so finding out in detail not just how modern dictionaries work, but also the politics and intricacies of being a lexicographer (and how Kory Stamper feels when she checks her e-mails) was deeply satisfying. Stamper does a great job of making every detail of the dictionary-writing process accessible. Each chapter focuses on a principle highlighted by a specific word and start very basic (like how hard it is to categorize parts of speech) and venture into the quite abstract (the way that implicit biases affect definitions and how the definitions used can be perceived by readers.)

The strongest thread throughout the book is basically an ode to descriptivist linguistics as well as a dismissal of the prescriptivist (and, to be frank, neurotic) approach that Stamper perceives in amateur logophiles.

Overall, the book is personal, funny and educational - a rare combination. If I had one complaint, it would be that the self-deprecation wears very thin, but that's easy to overlook with so much more to like.

Super compulsive reading: all of the best parts of a police procedural with some nicely developed magical systems, all set in one of my favorite cities in the world.

The crime was creepy, but evocative. However, I felt like Punch and Judy manifesting in horrific ways has been done before, for instance by both Diana Wynne Jones and Neil Gaiman.

I liked Peter Grant and his character development. I liked that he was kind of spacey and distractable and well-paired with the detail-oriented Leslie May

I had two big complaints: one was the objectification of the female characters (about which I'd been warned, and also promised that it improves throughout the series, which hopefully is true.) The other is the pacing: climaxes of one scene would jump cut to hours of studying Latin for no clear reason. This is at its worst at the very end, where I really couldn't quite figure out what actually happened because the action was stuffed with exposition and another case. In a lot of ways it reminds me of the Rook: mystery/urban fantasy mashup with world building that occasionally butts its way into action.

Overall, it's chock-full of my favorite things: deeply urban (London, no less), interesting mystery and well-designed speculative fiction. Perfect camping reading, and I'm totally tempted to binge read the rest of the series

So there are some really strong points to this book: I thought the coming of age was really well done, with a very nuanced protagonist. I thought Nix was a very realistic teenager, who despite her challenges being very particular to the fantasy setting, dealt with them in a way and had an emotional development arc that really spoke to adolescence. I really liked the evolution of the relationship between Nix and Slate - and a paternal relationship as the central relationship to a story is new and interesting. The Hawaiian setting is gorgeous, lush and ethically gray.

I really liked the concept of the Temptation – a ship that could travel to anywhere where there was a map. I thought the idea that the past is mutable, and the “true past” that they go to is whatever the map drawer believed to be true. What does it mean for the past to be “real” versus “fantasy” and who gets to decide? I wish the rules were drawn a little more clearly (what's to stop them from drawing their own maps whenever they wanted to return somewhere?)

But the book was imperfect. They circled around the central plot again and again without bringing any new information to it and without every resolving it. Which I think I took harder from a debut novelist -- how can I trust her to resolve it in the sequel? I would have totally read a historical fantasy set in 19th century independent Hawaii, but that was not the book I was billed: I was billed time traveling tall ships. So I was disappointed that they spend way less than 10 percent of the book in any other locale at all, and I was also disappointed that the map illustrations didn't match the maps in the narrative. I also thought that the romance arcs were lackluster. People are so into Kash, but I found him very bland and generic love interest. Blake was a little better in that he actually had character development and a strong perspective, but, yeah.

I'll probably read the second book in the series, but I gave this one a lot of credit for being a debut; I'm expecting the sequel to be substantially better.