Julia

This beautiful book is easy to love! Ononiwu Kaishian moves gracefully between science writing and personal memoir, and in fact rejects any binary between the two, just as she writes about our misapplied binaries to the natural world. A calming, poignant read.

This essay collection is lovely, as I would have expected after also loving Red Paint. I think probably my favorite part is how this collection isn't chronological, exactly, but weaves in and out of various parts of LaPointe's life before and since her autobiography. It's a beautiful love letter to her home: land, and human and more-than-human family.

This was good! My primary complaint is the cards at the beginning of each chapter. I get how they relate to the overall plot, but they were just too...rhyming. Will read the second, so world-building was good and I care about the characters. I especially appreciated the psychological angle of the protagonist's challenge. More "what is the self" than the typical romantasy!

No notes. This was deeply funny, deeply weird, deeply insightful, and deeply erotic.

I continue to be totally charmed by this series. Totally charmed! I may go back and add in the final half star. I think I just want more Emily and Wendell? He was sick for most of this book! Waiting for the paperback version of the 3rd book but will definitely read. One huge bonus to all this charm is that the plot remained tightly edited and not too long, so it zipped along just like the 3rd.

Beautiful, heartbreaking, hopeful book. Kin to There There, of course, but also an evolution in Orange's writing and a thing of its own. I also can't think of any writer other than Louise Erdich in The Round House who captures teenage boyhood better. I go to a family reunion every year with a book swap, and this is my book for this year. I do wish there'd been a teeeeeny bit more in the earlier parts of this family tree, but also that's part of Orange's point - what do people lose when forcibly disconnected from their own lineages?

I was discussing this with a colleague/friend, and we stumbled into “gobsmacking” being the most-right word for Orange's astounding prologue, and that's how I felt about the especially stunning, agonizing, beautiful last chapter, too. Lots and lots of other beautiful/powerful moments throughout, and this strikes me above all as a love letter to Orange's community (both people and place). A favorite quote: “Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.”

My bestie recommended this back to me when it came out, and I have no idea why I didn't just read it immediately! She and I are literary "twin flames" (thanks, Megan Fox, for the parlance), so she was 100% accurate in her educated guess I would love this. 10/10; no notes. Read the last third really slowly because I didn't want it to end!! Epic, intimate, searing.

I don't think this quote from the final pages can be captured in its full glory out of context, but it was rattling around in my head for days afterward and came up in another book club when someone was talking about the tightrope between nihilistic despair and hope: "A breeze would blow them over, and the world is filled with more than breezes: diseases and disasters, monsters and pain in a thousand variations.... How can I live on beneath such a burden of doom?.... Circe, he says, it will be alright.... He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive."

Okay, I am stating in writing for perpetuity that I need to focus my energy on COMPLETE D series. It's not that I can't stand a cliffhanger, but it's gotta be a GOOD cliffhanger, and my primary beef with Onyx Storm (other than it's hard to maintain same spice intensity when the protagonists are in a committed long-term relationship hah) is I can't tell if there were lots of loose ends that we're going to get AMAZING plot cohesion in the next books, or if there are loose ends because the editing should be tighter.

Very cute. I feel like Heather Fawcett & Freya Markse have some fun commonalities. Emily Wilde is an absolute nerd, Fawcett adeptly depicts neurodivergence, and the world-building around faeries is just so fun to read. I'm hopeful the sequel will include some spice, but the plot is captivating enough that I'll read regardless!