Reviews and Comments

I appreciate the writing challenge Rosen sets for himself here because the detective operates underground/outside the law and can't just go to the police at the end.

This was suitably twisty and turny for a mystery novel, and I enjoy how Rosen writes all different kinds of queer characters.

It kind of tried to make a statement about freedom of information and reading, but didn't really have anything new to say.

The story was fairly conventional but the character work was very strong. I liked seeing how young Elwood was personally affected by the civil rights movement, especially in contract to Turner. That's an angle I haven't seen very much.

I had seen the movie before reading the book, so I knew the twist at the end going in. I kind of wish I had not and I had been able to see it develop on its own. I thought the encyclopedia scene was important to Elwood's character development, and was surprised with wasn't included in the movie.

I listened to on audiobook and the narrator generally did a good job giving the characters unique voices.

This was enjoyable, but I didn't like it as much as Nothing to See Here.

Now is Not the Time to Panic was more personal, and also had a great sense of time and place. It captured what it felt like to be a smart, weird kid in a small town in the South.

Wilson has a way of making the main characters feel real and the side characters a little cartoonish (e.g., the three brothers).

I think the audiobook was read by Judy Hopps?

This is very interesting as a product of its time, in that it's attempting to grapple with racism and tell a story where the black character is the hero, but ultimately has the black character dying for the sake of the white protagonist. The author had good intentions, but didn't seem to have made black people part of the writing process.

The story was exciting and set up a lot of challenges for the protagonist, but I would have appreciated one or two more twists and turns.

Listened to the audiobook. Well performed, but the accent wouldn't fly today.

4.5 stars for procedural/plotting, 2 stars for characters. Averages out to 4 stars because there's a lot more of the former.

Excellent procedural problem-solving writing and enthusiasm for science that bleeds through the page. The science facts and problems were fun.

I found the characters pretty flat. Noone other than Grace passes the Phantom Menace test, and Grace's emotional arc didn't work for me at all. The reveal toward the end wasn't justified by what happened before or after.

Looking forward to the movie, wondering how they'll make it work with Rocky's speech and the timeline.

I think "breezy" and "lightweight" often mean the same thing, but you use one or the other depending on whether you liked the book or not, so I'll say breezy.

I enjoyed the contrast of the characters and how they arrived at the same problem (unwilling to express self) from different angles (lack of confidence, trauma).

I thought the Natalie/Alex relationship was well written and liked how Natalie used therapy-speak to run Alex down.

This was generally well pitched to a YA audience. Suggestive instead of sexual, profanity was used sparingly and was effective when it was used.

The book was entirely uninterested in men, which is totally fine.

I think a month was too fast for the amount of events that occurred, but I'm not 18 anymore.

Found out afterward that the book was semi-autobiographical and written by two wives, would be very interested to find out what their writing process was.

Listened to the audiobook in one day on a long car trip. I thought the audiobook was generally good, except a little too much performance.

Continuing my practice of reading a poem every day. Picked this because I like "Danny Deever" from Starship Troopers and "Boots", which I first saw in the 28 Years Later trailer.

Going to be an exercise is separating the art from the political context.

A lot of these aren't great in isolation, but taken as a whole they give a great glimpse of Marina's mind and have a complete, satisfying arc.

Individual favorites are:

Starlight Water Space Fresh Air Fizz Four Seasons Tiny Leopards

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.