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The most important thing to know, if you're going to read this, is that this is not a standalone novel! This is part 1 of 2 and it does not end with a resolution. I considered quitting at the halfway point, but I made myself hold on to find out how it ended ... and it didn't.

A basic summary: In a magical version of late eighteenth century Europe, change is brewing. In England, Pitt the Younger and William Wilberforce want to improve things for Commoner magicians (who aren't allowed to do magic) and achieve the abolition of slavery, both through sensible incremental legal means; in France, Commoner magicians rise up against the Aristocrats, led by Robespierre, a secret necromancer with the power of mesmerism, backed by a mysterious, powerful benefactor. On Haiti, the potion that keeps enslaved people docile zombies has failed, allowing a violent rebellion against white plantation owners.

The writing is very good, and I truly came to care about the characters. Robespierre in particular is compelling - he has a real emotional journey, and of course, a tragic end.

Altogether, though, I don't think it deserves the comparison to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I see where they come from, but ultimately, JSMN is a novel that stands on its own feet, with sparse but extremely consistent worldbuilding, and very strongly drawn characters. This novel is, again, not a standalone, and I found the worldbuilding pretty erratic and the characters a bit samey. Where JSMN is extraordinarily intricate, with a constantly moving plot, this novel seemed to have a lot of filler - it certainly could have handled the whole plot in one book, rather than leaving it to a second to finish.

I'm also uncomfortable with the way that the Caribbean plotline is so sidelined. The prologue is Fina's perspective as a child being stolen into slavery and drugged with the potion that will make her placid and obedient. This sets up the horror of slavery as a central pillar of the story ... but it actually isn't. Fina gets much less page time than the other characters; Pitt and Wilberforce concentrate on abolition quite a bit at the beginning, but it gradually loses out to the situation in France. It seems weird to me that nobody involved in the editing process, in this day and age, threw up a stop sign and made a change.

Perhaps a little unfair of me to review and rate without finishing, but I don't see the point in forcing myself on when at page ten I'm wishing I were done.

I would never have thought to pick up a book on writing by Chuck Palahniuk because we're such very different people with very different styles, but there was a glowing review on Writer Unboxed so I thought I'd give him a shot. The very beginning was compelling, but when I got to "Textures", I hit a speed bump.

The idea of mixing narration, second-person instruction, and onomatopoeia is great advice for a specific kind of voice (to be fair, the authorial voice of someone who's into Palahniuk, probably), but ... it simply doesn't work for everyone and every story, likely not even the majority of either. And when I hit the anecdote about a girl in his writing class who noted that men use sound effects when relating stories and women don't, with his response effectively, "men are better storytellers because of it," I realized that this just wasn't the book for me. There may be gems here and there in the pages that can be useful to any writer, but I have many other things to read and enjoy.

A fantastic memoir of growing up in a Sicilian community in Rochester in the 1920s. This hits close to home for me as I'm Italian/Sicilian on my father's side; my great-aunt married into this community (or, well, what was left of it; by that time it had dispersed).

It leaves me somewhat depressed, as this world (like the worlds in all older memoirs) is totally disappeared, but so close to us generationally. Mangione was able to go back to his parents' hometowns in the 1930s and meet their friends and relations, and see firsthand why they left. Today my Italian relatives are likely third cousins at best and would probably have no stories to share of my great-grandfather and great-grandmother. I have no stories of them passed down in the family - as a third-gen child, my father couldn't even communicate with his grandmother.

It does leave me curious as to the experience of girls on the writer's generation. Minimally educated, expected to marry close to home, and held to a strict standard of propriety, they would have had a very different life. I can't imagine a Gerlanda going to Sicily in the 1930s to gather material and write.

I think that if you like Reign or the Luxe series, you'll probably really enjoy this book: it has a loose historical flavor while actually being a soapy drama about rich modern young people. And that's okay! But I was expecting it to have more substance.

The premise of the alternate universe/alt-history is very interesting - England won the Hundred Years' War, creating the British Empire several centuries early and holding onto it into the twentieth century, and magic is real. Unfortunately, the book just didn't delve into that (beyond the issue of having a Valois family in the shadows) and it's all kind of superficial, an excuse to avoid having the actual tangled politics of Europe in the 1900s/1910s and a way to make the crown extremely important. It just felt like there was so much scope for worldbuilding there that was just left on the ground.

I'm going to be brief on this point because I have to accept that going into a fantasy/historical/romantic YA novel was the big signal that we weren't going to have actual historical attitudes, but it was annoying to me that the characters were just making out and having sex all over the place. It felt particularly problematic wrt Isabelle, the last Valois, because she seemed to be written as the sexist stereotype, "the damaged mean girl who has too much sex". (Edit: And this bothered me but not too much, because I assumed there was a sequel where she'd at least get a happy ending à la Esther Denham in Sanditon, but in the absence of a sequel it's really, really problematic.)

To be honest, I was happy with the plot being wholly centered around courtship and romantic drama. I like marriage novels! But then the last few chapters suddenly packed in all of this barely- or not-foreshadowed magical danger, and I was not very impressed with it. I think we probably did need to have magical danger given the magic of the setup, but it was very rushed.

A great comparative look at the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth Tudor. In pop culture, the two are typically presented as strong contrasts - Mary an oppressive, unpopular ruler enslaved to her husband and forcing a dour Catholicism on her people; Elizabeth a bright and shining figure whose natural accession to the throne brought joy and freedom - but the essays in this text make strong cases for a continuity from one to the other. Section II, "Precedents and Traditions", in particular focuses frequently on ways that Elizabeth followed in Mary's footsteps in terms of iconography or presentation. Section III, "Educating for Rule", is shorter but has some very interesting information on how Mary was eventually given a princely rather than simply princessly education. And Section IV, "Love and War", includes discussion of the way that Protestant propaganda has influenced later views of the realities of Mary and Philip's marriage, which was not as problematic to the English people as we may sometimes think.

I admit that I skipped the first two essays in "Loyalty and Service" (they focused entirely on Mary and Elizabeth's councillors), but the last - "Women, Friendship, and Memory" by Charlotte Merton - may have been the most interesting in the entire book. This essay explores female kinship and friendship networks in the Tudor courts, naming children to express patron/client relationships, letter-writing, fostering, and the privy chamber.

I may come back and finish this book and update the review, but for now I'm putting it aside.

I was very excited to read Princesses as I'm very interested in royal women, especially somewhat obscure ones - and in pop culture, no royal women are more obscure than princesses who don't marry major monarchs. Unfortunately, the text turned out to be very difficult to get through.

The problem is that the book is mostly based on the letters of the princesses, their parents, and the people around them, and rather than mining them for research and then using that research to construct a narrative, it's like Fraser passively reports on what they say happened as time went by. There's no critical interpretation of these sources (they're all taken completely at face value, and even more, lukewarm statements are repeatedly taken as evidence of strong feeling - we'll be told "the girls adored their brothers and were heartbroken to be separated," followed by a quote where one sister wrote to a brother in Germany that she hoped he was well and that he'd come home soon) and no context given to explain the background of figures outside of the royal family or how they came to be in royal circles.

It's nice that this is based on primary source research, but a good history book/biography needs more than just quote after quote after quote from correspondence.

I don't typically read literary criticism, but this book on Austen's work is so readable. It's got the incisive commentary of a historian with the conversational tone of a fandom meta writer. Harding was not reading as an English lit scholar, but as an intelligent person who loves Austen. A must-read for all Austen fans, which will open your eyes to all sorts of interpretations you never considerd.

The title relates to what Harding sees as Austen's view of and attitude toward society. She was fundamentally not someone writing about a society she was comfortable in, and her characters are often not entirely comfortable with each other - there is a regulated hatred, negative emotions that are not allowed to be passionate or impolite. While this makes some consider the books stultifying, it's realistic, especially when the rules of politeness required significantly more social contact with people one didn't like.

My one quarrel with the book is that Harding clearly dislikes Fanny Price a great deal and can find almost no sympathy for her. I wouldn't say Mansfield Park is my favorite of the books, but I don't believe she was trying to write a straightforward moralizing novel either. (I subscribe to the view, whose author I can no longer remember, that MP represents a deliberate subversion of the ending that would be more common in fiction and more satisfying than what she wrote. She knew what she was doing.)