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This is the second book in the Fitz and the Fool trilogy, and the fifteenth full novel in the Realm of the Elderlings series overall. Spoilers in general, but primarily for Fool's Assassin. 

Like Fool's Assassin before it, this is an extremely slow-moving book. In fact, it moved so slowly that I had to check to make sure that Fitz's daughter, Bee, had in fact been kidnapped already at the end of the previous book. Since I read it as an ARC, and this not until six months or so after the paperback came out, it's been quite a while and I considered the possibility that the kidnapping scene I remembered had actually been an excerpt from this book. We're well into the book before Fitz or the Fool realizes what was obvious to the reader midway through Fool's Assassin: that Bee is a White. There are reasons why one of the biggest LJ communities devoted to the world a couple of trilogies ago was called fitz_is_stupid.

Slow though this book is, it will rip your heart out, over and over. Robin Hobb has spent decades building these characters and making us love them all the while that we want to grab them and shake them. This is absolutely not a book to start with. It's not even a sub-series to start with. More so than the Tawny Man trilogy and Fool's Assassin, I would say it's necessary to have read all of the Realm of the Elderlings novels before this, not just all of the Fitz books, since near the end of the book it intersects rather heavily with the Rain Wilds quartet. But it is so worth it.

Overall: A

When Maria and Jay first met, he made some wrong assumptions about her and acted like a jerk, and she called him on it. He knows she's right, which is irritating. Every time they meet thereafter, they can't help but snap at each other. Unknown to them, they've been friends online for a year, where their relationship has been becoming increasingly less platonic.

Maria runs a blog in which she works out the statistics of various apocalyptic scenarios under her initials, MCL, and Jay has been commenting on it under the handle Actual Physicist. Under their online personas, they flirt with math. I'm not normally a huge fan of enemies-to-lovers scenarios. (Which is not at all to be confused with obsessive love/hate relationships, of the kind more likely to be seen in Sherlock/Moriarty fanfic than in Romance novels. Those aren't supposed to have happy endings and therefore are an entirely different thing.) But in this case, I was convinced that both of them, but especially Jay because it's more his fault, realize how they've messed up and that they're going to need to do better in the future. But most important is the dialogue. This is Courtney Milan, and so, as always, the dialogue is pure gold.  There is, as I mentioned, flirting with math. And we meet Anj, Maria's former roommate and a lead in a future book, who has a genetically engineered glowing shark named Lisa, which is a good enough reason to read a book right there in my opinion. There's even a cameo by Adam Fucking Reynolds, which you will probably appreciate more if you have read ​Hold Me, but there aren't really any spoilers for it, so feel free to read this first and the story of how Maria's current roommates got together later if you're so inclined.

For those making it a point to diversify their reading: Maria is trans and Jay is bi. For Jay, that basically just means that one of the two significant exes he mentions is a guy. For Maria, things happened in her backstory due to her being trans that affect her relationships in general, but in her relationship with Jay in particular it's a non-issue. There's also not a couple in the cover art of any book in this series that doesn't appear to be interracial.

I'm looking forward to every book in this series... but maybe mostly the one with the code name "Sharks."

Overall: A

The Year of the Crocodile is a short story in the Cyclone series, about when the parents of the hero and heroine in the first book in the series, Trade Me, finally meet. It takes place about halfway through the second book, Hold Me. You don't have to have read Hold Me, which follows a different couple, but I can't imagine how much somebody who hasn't read Trade Me would care.

If you've read at least so much as the review of Trade Me, though, you'll know that the parents were one of my favorite parts. Particularly Blake's dad, who is commonly known as Adam Fucking Reynolds and whose primary language is asshole. Furthermore, he does business in China, and Tina's parents are considered cult members by the Chinese government and had been sent for "reeducation." It's not immediately clear who is the irresistible force and who is the immovable object in this scenario.

The banter. MY GOD, THE BANTER. There's not a lot of consequence to this story. It's just an extra glimpse into the lives of the characters from the first book, as Tina and Blake's relationship hits the point where the parents meet. But it's a thing of beauty. The dialogue is always the greatest strength of a Courtney Milan book, and here, where a large portion of the story is told from the POV of one of those characters who was never meant to get a book but has demanded one (actually a massive forthcoming epic), it's as strong as it ever is.

​Overall: A

Donella Ferguson Watson, a devotee of busy London life rapidly approaching spinsterhood, is "rescued" from that fate only to find herself in a controlling, sexless marriage. Though she first thinks that the reason is an incident from her past that her husband found out about on their wedding day, and he offers another, seemingly practical reason, she comes to believe that the truth lies with his obsession with Arabella Scott, a suffragette in prison in Perth whom he was tasked with force-feeding.

​This is an intense, gritty look at England and Scotland in the 'teens, before and during the Great War. Early on, Donella sets up the distinction between the slow moving, nostalgic image of the English countryside and the dirty, petrol-scented approach of modernity, and the book lives in the latter from then on. This is the searing look at the women's suffrage movement in Britain of 2015's Suffragette, with themes of obsession, mental illness, and what wouldn't yet have been named but looks a lot like Stockholm syndrome. It would be off-putting to say the least if it wasn't the tone you were looking for, if, for example, you just picked it up off a display of fiction about pre-War England, but if you're going for something darker, it's remarkable.

My only reservation is one about structure. Although there is a bit of back and forth in the timeline, it runs linearly for most of the book, meaning that we get the majority of Arabella's story before returning to Donella's. Since the suspense is mostly drawn from Dr. Ferguson Watson's relationship with Arabella, and the impact that it has on his marriage, the most interesting parts are over with before we see their outcome. More frequent alternation between the timelines might have kept the tension a bit higher. That might have made this book a keeper that I'd want to reread some day, but as it is, I still certainly suggest that anybody who remotely thinks it sounds like their thing read it once.

​Overall: A-

It's been a long wait for the fourth Sir Apropos of Nothing book, and an even longer wait for me since by the time it came out last summer I was already neck-deep in Notable Books contenders. For the most part, I'd say that Pyramid Schemes stands well on its own, with only passing references to Apropos's earlier adventures, but the last act of the book will be best appreciated by those who started at the beginning.

After having wandered the world for longer than he ever expected to be alive, Apropos, now probably around forty years old by his best estimation, has arrived in the country of Rogyt. There, due to his ignorance of the law declaring that all first born sons of an enslaved race called the Shews must be killed at birth, he accidentally brings about the death of the boy destined to free them. Their god then appears to him in the desert and declares that Apropos must find a way to set them free instead. Aside from the Exodus, the tale that follows brings in elements of Ben Hur, the curse of the Mummy, the story of Cleopatra, and more.

In some ways, Apropos suffers from the same difficulty as Harry Flashman does: having declared himself a coward and a scoundrel, he does tend to spend an unusual amount of time doing heroic things. However, I think that the end result for Apropos works out better. Unlike Flashman, at his heart, Apropos really does care about other people. He may expect that he will let them down eventually, and his inclination to risk his own skin more than he has to for them may not go very far, but he doesn't want to abandon or disappoint them. It's just that he's as much of a skeptic about himself as about the rest of the world. He has believably matured through the years, which is necessary to make the reader accept the end of his story. If this is the end of his story. It's certainly the beginning of a new chapter in Apropos's life, but whether it's the end of his published "memoirs" or merely the set-up for the next installment is not apparent. Considering how long it took before David was able to get the rights back and publish even one more Apropos book for us, I don't know how high my hopes should be, but if there is more coming I'll be ordering as soon as the paperback's available.

Overall: A

 Betrayals is book four in the Cainsville series, and I am starting to detect a pattern. Odd numbered books relate to the case of Olivia/Eden's parents and the murders her mother committed. Even numbers are more about individual cases, although they still relate to Olivia, Ricky, and Gabriel's place in the fae universe. In this case, ostensibly this book is about a series of murders of lamiae, Greek fae who typically appear as teenage girls, but it's really more about the evolving relationship between the main three, particularly the rebuilding of Olivia and Gabriel's relationship after he betrayed her trust in the last book. And that mystery does come together well in the end, despite my concerns that it wouldn't considering how far it actually is from the point of the book. But it does.

I'm not somebody who typically has guilty pleasures. Most of the time, if I like something, I genuinely like it and don't feel bad about it because liking something is reason enough. Every book to its reader. This series might be a guilty pleasure. It's all been done so many times before. I know all the parts, and I can see them moving too easily, and it's just not special enough to distract me from that. But I can't stop watching them. I should be so damn sick of broody Gothic heroes who can't get too close to anyone by now, yet I'm on Team Gabriel (TM) all the way. And I was genuinely surprised by the ending of this book, and am now less certain about how I expected things to be tied up. I wish I knew if it were planned for a certain number of installments so I would know how close to the end we were and how much I ought to be hoping for in the next book. Which I will definitely be reading even if I'm also repeatedly thinking "Again? Really?" because it is crack.

As an aside, although this is not anything I remotely expect will happen, this would be the easiest love triangle to resolve with "And then they lived polyamorously ever after" in the history of love triangles. Everybody involved has recognized that she has an unusually strong bond with both guys no matter what and the guys have both promised they'll never interfere with her friendship with the other. Aside from the fact that Gabriel can't get his head out of his broody Gothic ass long enough to recognize that Olivia might love him the same way he does her even while he's holding her at arms length, it's not that big a step to her not having to choose. And he's going to have to do that at some point, anyway. (Also, it's really impressive how well he can keep his head and that stick up there at the same time.) But if any of the parties involved were willing to consider that kind of arrangement, somebody would probably have at least thought about it by now. We do get into all of their heads at one time or another.

I'm not sure this series is good. I'm not sure it's good modern Gothic. No matter what genre a book is, the way in which it satsifies genre conventions shouldn't make me go "Seriously?" or "Because of course he does" as I'm reading it. But I do know I'm going to have to keep reading it.

Overall: B-