viola

a beautiful fantasia of oversymbolization and queer mysticism

didn't quite stick the landing (perhaps unintended implication: you can't trust anyone... unless you've done k or molly with them), and the opening and part 1 were overall far more effective than part 2, but still some great themes and engagement with what it means to live a queer life throughout

like if stone butch blues and baru cormorant were happy <3 good but unfortunately the earthshattering remained contained in the story and did not reach out to me

fun religion thoughts though. we are the chaos and blackness from which your Nature spills forth and all that

putting the gnostic in "diagnostic"

well written! hooray for neurodivergent people. very lib politics though lol

unfortunately the part the author was most interested in was not that interesting, and the rest really wanted to be baru cormorant

i didn't find the titular story as sharp as it definitely had the ability to be. the lumberjack perspective was great though (and hearing Torrey Peters read some of it live was hilarious)

brainwyrms did it better tbh. the lack of explicit kinkiness was crazy

“every day i clock into the dyke drama factory”

motivated me to actually learn more physics. so that's something i guess

a modern and vital engagement with the chthulhu mythos meditating on the relationship between rage and destruction, community and creation, the countervalence of hypervisibility and invisibility with threat real and perceived

not as stryker as i wanted it to be. overly simple tbh

babel; or, the necessity of violence
love me a book with a secret alternate title
succeeded, if bluntly, on many points. however, i feel that the key part of revolutionary politics is building solidarity—which it felt like this novel undermined precisely by making silverwork a single point of failure that could be toppled by a few, rather than requiring unified class action. this made the politics feel overall unrefined, despite the solid underlying messages

trans 101 to the max. at least its by a trans person

why did the robots dedicated to throwing off vestiges of humanity, in a book dedicated to queer teens, keep binary genders????????

This book meant so much to me when I was searching desperately for trans lit that felt like it was for trans people, not cis people. I'm glad teens now have more and better.

so so racist

Oh YA.