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I found these generally took more effort that reading a regular novel because each time you have to adjust to the world of the story, you can't just dip in and out.

The stories I liked the most were the "Black Mirror" style ones where there was a strange technology or a twist. The "queer person turns into a monster" stories kind of ran together for me.

I also liked the stories for non-Western cultures that explored their own monsters.

Of the poems, Floral Arrangement I was the one I liked the best.

The world building here doesn't fundamentally make sense, there's no universe in which building 200,000 mile rails to colonize Jupiter is more feasible in terms of knowhow or resources that fixing Earth or even colonizing the Moon or Mars. However, you owe it to the author to suspend disbelief on the central premise and go for the ride. The worldbuilding about all the heat and light coming from gas flames was so good it felt like it was the initial idea that the setting formed around.

The strengths were the worldbuilding and the formal language that made everything feel retro-futuristic.

The primary weakness, in my view, was that a good mystery often involves a unique or creative "perfect crime". In order to write a perfect crime, you have to work within the rules of the real world. If your perfect crime involves a creative interpretation of a fictional world, the rules you yourself made, it feels less clever. As an example, there's a reveal that a suspect had a creative way of riding the train. This didn't really feel like anything to me because the author hadn't previously established how people normally ride space trains.

There wasn't a lot to the love story, but I am guessing it will build in later installments.

I liked it and thought it was very funny that "conservative" is a swear.

Theo was a worse person than Kit but a better narrator and Theo's section were more fun to read. Kit's sections were more of a chore and I didn't much like how he described things.

Theo was a good example of a nonbinary character and someone who was emotionally closed off.

The characters could be frustrating when they made up reasons not to be together. I get that that's kind of the point, but it rankled over the course of the whole book.

Wish fulfillment book that was honest about what it was. Author was clearly putting themselves in the role of Theo.

I'm not a foodie so the food descriptions didn't do it for me. Not the author's fault, but I sometimes felt like I was missing out.

This was very deeply researched and very academic. Summers did a deep dive into decades and decades of archives. I especially appreciated when individual case studies were used to illustrate a point in the hospital's history.

The book didn't really feel like it put parts together. This had much more value as a presentation of research than a piece of writing. I had trouble latching onto a coherent thesis or throughline.