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A very solid followup to one of my favorite novellas in recent memory. This very much feels like a middle part, not in that I expect a third (though I wouldn't complain) but in that the physical action takes a back seat to the way characters both think of themselves and relate to each other in the wake of the events of the first story and the repercussions they've had on the world they inhabit.

Having both read this back in 2020 and now listened to it's audiobook version,

This is a perfect book as far as I'm concerned.

A comprehensive, accessible primer on the methods and struggle for abortion rights in the US (and a couple other places sprinkled in). Informative (both of the theory and the history) and very well written.

To me, this book feels like Muir wrote 3 books in-between Gideon and this, that's how much more confident this one's structure and writing feels. Whereas Gideon felt experimental and somewhat messy (in the most generous reading of those words possible), requiring me to commit more effort than I'm used to to pull me through it at times, this one had me hooked from the start, excellently paced, spinning threads that felt convoluted without requiring me to re-read fragments to make sure I'd understood what had just happened, and with a explosive last third or so that made me stay up at night reading through to the end. Loved it and can't wait to see where the series goes next.

Sep 2022 reread: yep still great. Onto Nona!

Having only read McGuire's Wayward Children novellas before this one, I was very pleased with how (IMO) much better this one was. I can understand them aiming for different things, but this one feels like it leverages many of the better parts of that series (supernatural experiences from the perspective of kids, how they deal with their uniqueness growing up, how they deal with social expectations) and adds a very generous dose of great, focused worldbuilding as well as some structural weirdness - I was apprehensive at first about how the structure of the book mirrored the twin's powers, but it ended up adding to the overall value for sure - to great success. Ultimately this is a fun, heartwarming and satisfying supernatural conspiracy/adventure book.

An extremely compelling and well structured book that also happens to be an very tough read about people's careers being derailed before their eyes as part of an assault on Iraq's education system and social fabric as a result of the UN's sanctions and the 2003 US invasion. The transcribed conversation fragments really propelled me through; the context and stories provided in-between are good, but hearing people's experiences from their own mouths is really effective and hard hitting.

Sometimes a book is just a vehicle for the kind of narratives that remind you of the made for tv movies you caught on cable on weekends with nothing else to do, complete with the paper thin characters, gratuitous violence and head empty main characters that are just a little too easy to root for. And that's fine.

This is a truly eclectic, (way) more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts novel that is at points hilarious, at points very hard to read (the book doesn't shy away from the reality of being a queer runaway kid like the MC) and overall a roller coaster of great, disparate science fiction and fantasy ideas that coalesce into a great narrative with great characters and manages to stick the landing.

A well researched book and easy to read too. I'm appreciative of the events and historical figures it chooses to zoom into, as they are often overlooked in similar "summaries" of European history and it helps fill in some of the areas of history as well as the causes and effects of the better known events usually mentioned in such other works. That said, the way it switched between the "zoomed-in, thorough view" and the "this is a high level overview just to get us to the next thing we're interested in" mode was somewhat dizzying and made the passage of time somewhat hard to grasp.

A breezy, fun adventure with some nice urban fantasy-ish world building on the side. It didn't ever grab me like other fantasy series can, and I felt the supporting cast didn't get as much development as I'd have liked, but it was an overall good time, the magic was fun and I found myself reading more than I intended as the chapter lengths were short and I could easily read one or two more than I'd originally planned before bed.