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Does anyone want a “cozy” story about the grief of disappointing your friends, and the agony of saying “no”?

Maybe it's my age, but I think I can always deeply appreciate a story centered on the idea of a change in life direction--there's a job that's consumed you to the point of you making it your identity and suddenly it's taken away from you (see: Bujold's Memory), or where a fulfilling job that your family and friends all expect you to do that has lost its luster, or when you've been doing the same job for hundreds of years and who would you even be if you weren't doing that. I am just a sucker for stories about new directions.

It's not that Viv wasn't changing her life in Legends & Lattes, but she wasn't really struggling against herself: she knew she wanted to hang up her sword and open a fantasy coffee shop. It doesn't quite resonate the same way as Fern's struggle does in this book, and it makes this book much stronger. Honestly, I most appreciate that this Travis Baldree book has an answer to the "how do I change my life when it's not working" question that doesn't end directly in fantasy small business. I also appreciate that Astryx and Fern are both thematically struggling with their own relationships with their own work, and have different answers to that question.

This is still a fluffy story (and if L&L wasn't your thing, I don't know that I'd recommend this one to you), but this is absolutely the strongest book in the trilogy for me.

Additional minor rambling:

Because Zyll is an uncontainable goblin menace and Astryx is on a hopeless quest to contain her while somehow bringing her to justice, it creates a nice plot dynamic. Astryx doesn't have to be the terrible mercenary out to get a bounty on a loveable side character--it can be comic relief where Zyll escapes her bonds but then comes along anyway. It removes some seriousness, and makes it more about the relationships between the characters. And, Zyll at least gets some explanation in the end for her behavior, so it's not entirely fluff either.

(I think also you might want to have read Goblins & Greatcoats to get an introduction to Zyll and the titular breadknife. It's not that important, but it also makes that appearance of the titular breadknife even more random without that morsel of backstory.)

If I had any negatives, it's that I still squint so hard at the economics of this world. The threat in this story is that friends will be disappointed in you. There is very little worry around the fact that you (and your friends) have invested huge amounts of money in opening a bookstore business in a new town. In some ways, I feel like the small business capitalism aspect of these books undermines the cozy flavor that it's going for. I think there's just a dissonance to me where concerns about money are brushed under the rug and there's an assumption that everybody and everything will be fine without any worldbuilding or explanation for why that is.

Fun, short, quotable.

The first book in this series was a riff on the Fall of the House of Usher (that we read for #SFFBookClub), and the second book intersected quite well with Easton's war trauma. This third book reads like a monster of the week but without much else going on in terms of themes or character development. A good snack of a romp, but not very filling.

(Also, shaking my head that there's no Eugenia Potter in this one either. It does at least have Gallacian rock pronouns going for it though.)

The biggest feeling I come away from James Islington's Hierarchy series is that it seems like it should appeal to fans of Brandon Sanderson. If the first book was an introduction to the world and young protagonist, this second book is much happier to dish out worldbuilding details about what's going on in the larger world(s). It's a grippy action book, and the way the worldbuilding is slowly revealed is my favorite part of this book. The second book also manages to pull out its own big ending surprises to drive who knows what will happen in the next one.

My biggest complaint is that this is primarily a plot-driven book and the protagonist is a bit too special. If there is a competition or challenge of any sort, Vis is going to overcome it every single time, no matter the odds, and no matter if he's never fought in magic armor or snuck into a pyramid or driven in a magic chariot race or trained to be a dancer or whatever. The book doesn't leave that much room for characterization, and secondary characters are pretty heavy-handed about their one-note thematic opinions.

Overall, I just wish the characters were a bit less flat. I feel like this is the kind of book I would have devoured when I was younger, but cool worldbuilding isn't quite enough sustenance these days.

The situation was terrifying, but the project itself was awesome.

A bunch of my friends were rereading this book before the movie came out, so I thought I'd join along. Project Hail Mary is another space engineering procedural with Andy Weir protagonist voice. The characters are pretty thin, but I think you're reading this for the science problem solving. I always appreciate interspersed flashbacks (especially here where there's a bit of a reason why Grace continues to remember more over time).

I also personally don't know that this book makes for especially great movie material, but what do I know. (On this reread, there was also some airquotes jokes that really didn't land for me along the lines of "wow it'd be bad if I were fatphobic/racist/a pedophile" and I'm throwing a few side eyes.)

joke tagline: a secret former prince struggles to move up the ladder at magic school for future senators in post-apocalyptic fantasy Rome

It's grippy. It's bloody and violent at times. The fantasy worldbuilding was fun. I wouldn't quite say it's YA, but it is also a young protagonist in a school setting where some moments resonate with the Hunger Games. It was enjoyable in a childhood need for fantasy book with a young protagonist in a capitalist-metaphor magic dystopia sort of way.

What this book does especially well for me is how many different directions it pulls the main character in. He's keeping his past a secret and trying to follow his own goals while simultaneously investigating a mystery, being suborned by rebels, and trying to succeed at school. There's a lot of lying and sneaking that's delicious. Being overconstrained by external forces helps balance out the plot elements of Vis being too capable across multiple disciplines.

It's also got some excellent plot twists (more like twist of the knife for Vis) as well as some wild worldbuilding at the end setting up for who knows what book two (or three or four) will look like.

@Tak@reading.taks.garden I wish bookwyrm had better fields for editor / illustrator so that it didn't make it look like Litany for a Broken World was written by Karen Conlin

I guess I could re-add them all in a different order??

Dead Hand Rule is third (of four) books in Max Gladstone's Craft Wars sequence. Interestingly to me, this book works a lot better for me than Wicked Problems did.

Their power might be vast, but it was bound, as surely as any djinn’s: to wield it they had to be themselves, and they could not act in ways unlike them. If we let them sit there growling at one another across conference tables, that’s all they’ll do, until the stars fall down.

I've seen Gladstone pitch this book as featuring "wizard Davos", which sounds like it shouldn't be good, but somehow works. The heart of this series is economics (via magic metaphor) and this book features large powers in the world coming together, but not actually able to work with each other to stop impending doom. The end of the world is coming, and they're all working to try to get a short-term or long-term advantage over the other rather than to try to stop the invasion of spider capitalism gods.

Some of what also worked in this book is my own expectations. I loved the narrow character focus of Dead Country and its themes. I was unprepared for the second book's extended Marvel Universe shift into bringing every character we've ever known onto the page. This was also a shift from all of the previous Craft Sequence books, which tended to be more self-contained. In any case, I was more prepared for what the scope of the third book would be, but I also feel like it was more tightly written. The focus felt much more on Tara and Kai as primary point of view characters, and interspersed others as needed.

Subjectively, it felt like characters had a little bit more room to breathe rather than be pulled by the madcap plot. I think some of this is the the plot all takes place in and around Alt Columb (which is where the first Craft Sequence book in publication order takes place). All the players of interest are already in the same place, rather than jumping around the world and picking up additional parts of the cast.

All in all, I quite enjoyed it and am deeply looking forward to the final book in the sequence to see what comes.

Small things I really enjoyed about this book that I'll list without any context: * the Donnie and Gav comedy routine * fucking Eberhardt Jax * Denovo's machinations coming back much more strongly here * Elayne Ex Machina * Abelard coming into his own too * nonexistent Temoc/Kopil shippers eating well

(Also a shout out to the Hidden Schools blog which has a lot of series analysis, but especially has a great "story so far" summation prior to this book.)