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I loved this book for several things:

• How real and solid the historical-London setting felt. I'm used to that sort of thing feeling very flimsy, but this is an author who clearly does deep research and lets it suffuse the writing without getting all 'splainy.
• The very palpable tension between the protagonist's precarious position and her need to have some freedom.
• The delightful-if-implausable retconning of Sir Christopher Wren's secret motive for shaping London the way he did.

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This is one of a few books we've read for #SFFBookClub that consists of a series of ostensibly separate stories which collectively build one world. I loved the quietly unsettling mood of a lot of the stories, and actually enjoyed how much the author keeps the reader guessing until about half way through the book. But the two stories--one about halfway through, one near the end--which do the most explicit explaining ended up doing too much of that for my taste. I think a certain amount of tying things together was needed, but making things too neat was a bit of a loss, and the big picture story doesn't work as well for me as all the facets in the individual chapters.

I had a lot of fun tearing through this book. At first I felt like it was a bit too directly "colonised Philippines but with magic" to be interesting fantasy, but in the end Buba used the magical elements to really bring out the clash of two religions and cultures in a powerful, interesting way.

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This is the book version of the theme-and-variations composition structure used in classical music and sometimes techno. The first chapter is a lovely and sad story in its own right; it almost feels like what Chekhov might have come up with if he'd been writing with today's gender and sexuality sensibility. Each thereafter takes mostly the same set of characters but with progressively larger twists - at first it's very much "what if protagonist had made a different choice at this key moment?", but it gradually shades over into wilder sci-fi speculations.

Strangely, it was the wilder variations that really made the book click for me. Before things got really weird I was starting to question how the book was going to sustain interest for 11 chapters, but North answered that question very effectively. I don't think it would have worked to go directly to those, the smaller variations feel needed for the coherency of the whole, but I loved the effect of the whole set together.

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This is a tightly focussed that tells one story from one character's perspective, against a background of a much bigger collapse that doesn't really get discussed. I think that focus is one of its strengths, at the same time as I'd love to see the same story through the eyes of a couple of the other characters in it.

Wasserstein also uses the story as a vehicle for some trans parent trauma catharsis, by way of a character who is the sum of every bad parental reaction to a child coming out as trans. It also pokes a bit at the tensions between anarchist commune idealism and practice, and at the simple truth that one's clone would still be their own person. Which is a lot to pack in to a novella!

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The concept is one I really want to like: a twist on the Count of Monte Cristo that recasts it to make racism the motivating factor of all the betrayals, and uses a future setting to make a point about the durability of colonialism. But the pacing is so off that it takes away the impact from most of its own story.

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This is the rare sequel that I like even better than its predecessor. The action is all in one world this time, and that lets the magical physics element disappear into the background. It also lets Ashtown and Wiley City both feel more developed - they're much more complete places in my mind now. More importantly, this is a much more direct, much more straightforwardly angry book. Johnson clearly wanted to wield a chainsaw, and she's very good at that.

It was not an escapist read in 2025, but the conclusion was very satisfying.

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I'm still not really sure about this book. I should probably reread it since I think I went to fast and missed some things. It was definitely interesting, but it seemed like there were too many characters for such a short work. None of the characters or the world itself were given much depth. #SFFBookClub

I'm about 45% in and I'm thinking this may be a book where I feel I missed so much that as soon as I hit the end I'll just start over to grasp it all. #SFFBookClub