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This book is a sequel to What Moves the Dead. It was a little unexpected (to me at least!) that there'd be a sequel to something that was a riff on the Fall of the House of Usher--where do you even go from there? Apparently, another mystery! This time it follows the same set of characters (Easton, Angus, and Eugenia Potter), but instead is set at Easton's childhood lodge in Gallacia.

What I liked about this book was the way it much more tightly wove together parallels of Easton's war-related PTSD and the horror of dreams. While What Moves the Dead felt more like several unrelated stories grafted together, this was a more cohesive novella.

(If I had any petty wishes, it would be to give Eugenia Potter more of a role here. She gets some good quotes, but is ultimately a background character that almost didn't need to be there. I also wish there had been a little bit more worldbuilding about Gallacia. Even for being set there, it felt like there was little elaboration on the fictional country past what we had already learned.)

When a post-human spacecraft and a human love each other very much...

Overall, I had mixed feelings about this book. The writing is from the third perspective of Jayanthi (the human) and Vaha (the post-human Alloy pilot/spacecraft), but is very much in each of their thoughts. Subjectively, it felt like a matter of fact writing style that just didn't quite grip me. I wish I could pin down more why I struggled here with this prose. That said, there were a bunch of things I enjoyed about it:

This book played with some neat ideas. One is that "all matter possesses some level of consciousness" and thus people are encouraged to change themselves rather than environments were possible (big To Be Taught, If Fortunate feelings). Jayanthi has sickle cell anemia, and the book uses this as a prime example of talking about how bodies are not good or bad but rather ones that are more or less suited to particular environments. Along these same lines, the Alloys can go through a process of "full rebirth" and totally change their bodies and genetics, although there's some limits there.

There's a surprising amount of disability topics here too. Jayanthi declines at several points to change her biology to remove ways in which its perceived as hindering her (as well as declining to edit her mind to remove unwanted desires [!!!]). There's also some bits about Vaha's relationship with prostheses and relearning to fly that I think were really well done. All in all, it's more disability politics than I expected even if it feels like a number of perspectives lean on some pragmatic reasoning that "biodiversity is important" and "your lifestyle adaptations may provide useful knowledge to others". (And, these also seem like Jayanthi's own biased perspective as well.)

This is a very different story than a A Half-Built Garden but there's some echoes of it regarding the parentalism towards humans and the climax of the book focusing on legal arguments. In this book, I feel like the Alloys have a more well-trodden "can't trust these humans based on their past behavior" bent (vs the Ringers more novel "our own vast experience tells you you're wrong"), but I feel like this book takes it to new places, where it tries to ask questions about how to determine when a group of people have changed enough to be owed self-determination.

Don't get me wrong, I love Katherine Addison in general. I love a good novel that comes from the realm of fanfic (hello, Winter's Orbit!). I love mysteries and a Sherlock pastiche. I love gender stuff! With all of that, I enjoyed the writing itself, but the book tried to do too much structurally and it didn't come together for me.

The Angel of the Crows is a Sherlock story, but the setup here is that Crow (Sherlock) is an angel and Doyle (Watson) took an injury in Afghanistan from a fallen angel that left them partially a hell hound (in a werewolf sort of way). Crow here is awkward but also kind, and so the relationship between Crow and Doyle where they each help and care for each other in their own way works for me. (I personally am alienated by "jerk Sherlock" and don't quite understand why anybody would ever like him.)

This book is also a direct retelling of a Study in Scarlet, the Sign of Four, part of the Adventure of the Yellow Face, and Hound of the Baskervilles. My Sherlock knowledge is not the best, and so it's possible there's other references I missed too.

For me, these Sherlock stories hewed too close to the source material. It's not that there aren't minor shifts around in the story to accommodate for the more supernatural elements in the world or of Crow and Doyle, but it's not quite enough to make a compelling story for me. When I already know what the Barrymores are up to in the Baskerville estate or about the treasure in the Sign of Four, I need something more: either something much more unexpected to happen, or for it to stretch the worldbuilding, or for it to highlight character dynamics in some fresh way. It just wasn't enough change in most of these cases to feel like all this merited a novel-length retelling with so many of the same details.

(I will say that the most fun twist was the nicely foreshadowed subversion of Mary Morstan at the end of the Sign of Four.)

The worldbuilding is a bit wild: airships, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, clairvoyance, angels, but also at the same time (somehow?)! a largely unchanged Victorian England. I have so many questions about "alternate history with magic" style changes where the magic and supernatural elements haven't deeply transformed society. There's also no indication of when or where all these things started existing or being possible; just that they're there and are largely accepted parts of society.

I was hoping that the reveal of worldbuilding was leading up to something like a supernatural mystery, or a case that more closely involved Crow and the angel consensus, or something with the vampire Moriarty plot, or even something to reveal deeper information about what angels actually are. In the end, we get a moment of connection between Crow and Doyle, but unsatisfyingly are left with nothing to tie together any of the disparate Sherlock stories, the supernatural worldbuilding, or the many loose plot threads.

I love the concept of the Wayward Children series as a whole, but individually a few of the books have been hit or miss for me. If I had to pick, In an Absent Dream and this book have been my favorites out of the whole series, largely in that they both focus on a single character and so the plot and theme can be a lot more tight in the short space of a novella.

Lost in the Moment and Found follows Antsy, who runs away from horrific step-dad, finds herself lost, and steps through a door into the Shop Where the Lost Things Goes. (I also deeply appreciated the Author's Note which precedes the book and content warns for grooming and adult gaslighting, but also gives the reassurance that "before anything can actually happen, Antsy runs.")

In this book, the reader gets teased with larger worldbuilding hints about the Doors and how they operate, but thematically for Antsy it's all about abuse and loss. She's literally lost and in a shop that collects lost things; she has lost trust in adults and the safety of the world; by the end, everything she's lost all ties together really satisfyingly. Some more spoilery thoughts.

Six months after Abby was born, her mother sat her down in the living room and took her hands, as she'd done twice before. Antsy sat rigid, having learned that these were the moments where her life changed for the worse, where things she didn't even know could be lost were ripped away from her and thrown aside.

This is a minor detail, and I certainly differ a lot from Antsy on many points, but boy howdy did this quote hit me right in the psychologically unsafe "serious conversations" feelings.

I saw this book get mentioned on fedi a while back, so got around to reading it. Its goal is to help people "see more clearly". The main metaphor of the book is to that we are often stuck in a "soldier mindset" (motivated reasoning to defend your beliefs, where being wrong feels like a mistake) and that we should try to have more of a "scout mindset" (finding the lay of the land and seeking truth, where being wrong means updating your map and is always a positive).

We use motivated reasoning not because we don't know any better, but because we're trying to protect things that are vitally important to us--our ability to feel good about our lives and ourselves, our motivation to try hard things and stick with them, our ability to look good and persuade, and our acceptance in our communities.

Some of this I'd heard before, but I learned a good bit too; this was a surprisingly practical book and a quick read.

Bits I enjoyed and that stuck with me:

• gives practical strategies for ways to catch yourself in the act of motivated reasoning
• says that knowing about biases (like we all do) is not enough to convince yourself you are not falling prey to them
• dismissing the idea of "filter bubbles", in that if you want to learn from disagreement, it has to be with somebody you like or respect
• gives several tricks for ways to more accurately estimate your level of confidence
• has an analysis of every time Spock made probability claims and how accurate he was

"Is there one among us who has not behaved badly in this tale?"

I would pitch this book as Gundam Joan of Arc. It follows the course of the life of Misery Nomaki :drum: who believes they are sick with the same void madness that claimed the life of their mother and causes them to hear the voice of an angel telling them what to do. They lie their way into being the foretold ninth messiah to try to get themselves out of larger trouble, but everybody believes them (and eventually they begin to wonder if maybe they're not lying to themselves after all).

I love Neon Yang's worldbuilding and characters. This book is set in the far future where humanity's exodus into the stars took them into a realm where a "nullvoid" epidemic warped people's bodies; they were saved by the Larex Forge who teaches them how to use magic stone and protects them from the nullvoid. There's also a political conflict between the throne and the church, who are at war with heretics.

Small details I enjoyed:

• One common motif here is "lies". The story about the Larex Forge is clearly a self-serving church narrative, but we only see one side. Misery lies to other people and to herself, and we only see the world through her eyes. We see a lot of the church and some of the throne, but hear very little of the heretics and what their side has to say for themselves. Also, the epilogue itself is a discussion about lies.

• I love the way that Misery changes the way they talk over the course of the book as they change from feeling like they are lying their way through the world to starting to become invested in their own ninth Messiah identity.

• The book explicitly gives everybody's pronouns, and I love that there's a minor plot detail that hinges on Misery using a pronoun for somebody they aren't supposed to know about.

• The angry royal princess with a whip who has a knock-down fight with Misery the first time they meet felt like a classic romance introduction, but I thought she ended up being a fun character. That first fight is also such a great literal introduction to the conflict between the church and the throne.

This is a book that is understandably entirely focused on the experience and biased perspective of Misery, and it leaves the motivations and machinations of throne, church, and heretics out of view. On top of that, the epilogue and ending narrative framing create far more questions than they answer and call many things into doubt. All of this together made me feel as if I had missed some significant puzzle pieces while I was reading. However, I learned afterwards that this is the first book in a trilogy, which hopefully creates room to fill in all these juicy details later.

@screamsbeneath@bookwyrm.social

I didn’t appreciate how it impacted the feel of the story though, that it allowed tension with money while still being cozy, which feels so discordant.

This is such a good way to put it. I think I wrote some of this off while reading the story, in the vein of "money for survival is just not a concern that this book wants to think about", but the book wants to both be about money and not be about money at the same time. I think that's why all times where Viv talks about paying for things stuck out to me; it is discordant and I couldn't stop thinking about how Viv was affording all this.

I am mostly thinking about what might have made this better. One possibility could be a note about Rackam paying off more than just a few days at the inn (as a kindness? as a debt?) or alternatively some previous adventure paying off well such that Viv can convalesce in the short term, but still have this extra tension about the future and feelings about where the money came from. I guess a larger change would be a world where food and housing are not concerns for people, but I'm not sure how effectively that could be established in a second book with the already established coffee shop story from the first.