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This is one of those 5/5 ratings where I don't think the book is perfect, but it gets it because it is so intensely targeted at my own interests and I'm so grateful to have read it. Some bullet points to entice you:

• anti-capitalism, anti-cop
• train heists
• found family vibes
• first person point of view with an internalized narration to a second person "you"
• fantasy religions that don't feel like direct analogies of real ones
• revenge plot and revolutionaries
• gaaaaaaay

The book is so unapologetically queer and kinky, it's great. The author credits Stone Butch Blues (among many other things) in the end notes, which feels entirely unsurprising. The gender-y and queer bits also both intersect with the in-world religions in realistic ways.

It's a book that desperately needs a map; there's a pile of countries, religions, and politics especially when it hits the Chauncey estate section. The book does a good job of keeping it all ~~straight~~ queerly differentiated but the world has so much texture--it's a ttrpg campaign setting crying out for illustration! It also feels like a living world; characters having a life both off-page and outside of the protagonist make it feel even more real.

The book opens with a labor dispute and police violence and sworn revenge, but from there it doesn't shy away from critiques of power and incrementalism and reformers. There's some wild rich people monologues where they unintentionally bare themselves as soulless vampires. There's a bandit charade of a hidden equitable country, pretending to be part of a baronial system.

Sunlight licked between bruisy limestone smokestacks and telegraphy spires, and the crumbling knuckled colonnades of an empire that's long gone.

I found the writing to be a delight: the narrator is at times unreliable, and the writing is full of dreamy metaphors. At times, somebody will bust out with a multi-page exposition about religion, or a set of introductions to a full dramatis personae worth of baronets. The final lap of the book has its own tonal shift that I won't get into for reasons. Somehow this all held together for me; maybe it's that none of these parts overstayed their welcome. I'm sure some folks will bounce off of this writing style, but I'm not folks, that's for sure.

Being a Hereafterist is a commitment to creating a brand-new world all the time. It is the method of making a new world, it does not stop, we are never there yet. We have never arrived at a restful Hereafter, we must keep making. We will become a liberated collective, a plague will roll over us, and a famine, and fifty thousand bullets, and we will need to make choices. We will need to change. We must resist the ossification of precedent. We march toward Hereafter, not tomorrow, we march past tomorrow, we know tomorrow will be hard.

In the end, this is a fuck yeah revenge story about disaster queers fighting capitalism with violence. It's less about answers or even hope, and more about conveying a sense of angry determinism working for a future none of them will see.

Finally, Emily has a cozy little family to keep her company while she's, uuh, being the queen of a drama heavy fairy kingdom.

I finished this a few days ago. It's a lot of fun, basically Emily is going on an expedition with a larger and more neurodiverse group than she's really comfortable with, and a lot of entertaining-from-the-outside/horrifying stuff happens, for variously good reasons. Waiting for that third book in the library app!

It's very similar to Migrations in some ways: the way the personal, societal and ecological blend and make the story really hard to summarise, for example. It's about things like wolves and violent men and trauma and knowing what is dangerous and what it is even happening. The world feels more real and the storytelling more polished, which leads to an even more perfectly frustrating reading experience. I kept begging the book not to go certain ways, and it mostly obeyed, luckily.

It took me a while to get back into the story. It's certainly a fun story with tons of absurd escapes, but not very fluffy, as everything is pretty horrible, the world and the situations, and all the relationship stuff can only do so much.

Liked it :) not as much as T. Kingfisher's other fairy tale stories that I've read so far, but there's sweet characters and the plot is fun. I especially enjoyed how all the disclaimers around Anja's healer title are handled.

Also ich hab es vor allem wegen dem Titel lesen wollen. Es war dann aber schon ein bisschen überraschend. Es ist eine queere Klimakrisen-Story über das Internet, unter anderem. Eras Tante muss ungefähr so alt sein wie ich, sie kennt Foren und frische Zwiebeln und die Bananen, die es aktuell gibt, aber keine Modem-Töne. Zwischen Wetter-Extremen und Kapitalismus bleibt ein Wohnprojekt als Zuhause, das vor allem ein Gartenprojekt ist, und der Luxus essbarer frischer Pflanzen ist für Era und ihre Mutter aber durch die vielen, vielen Mitbewohnis und offenen Türen getrübt. Und dann ist die Geschichte nach ausgestorbenen Vögeln strukturiert, was mich an "Migrations" von Charlotte McConaghy erinntert hat, aber doch sehr anders ist. Insgesamt.... bisschen sperrig, bisschen langsam, bisschen das awkwarde Gefühl, mit der Autorin unbekannter Weise vor 15 Jahren in angrenzenden Twitter-Bubbles gewesen zu sein. Ich mag es.

I love Samin Nosrat's other book, and the show, and the Home Cooking podcast, so I expected to love this too. I didn't. I think part of it was that it didn't work well for me as an audio book, at least not one to listen to while doing counting-heavy crochet. It would have needed more attention to get all the the cooking advice. But also.... I think the message of the book was supposed to be that food is an everyday thing and it's important to make food that works and is enjoyable for you. Instead, i kept wishing i was someone else. Someone who likes cilantro, for example, because Samin Nosrat likes cilantro and i want to share that joy! Oof. Maybe it wasn't the right moment for this book.