Reviews and Comments

I genuinely love how Kingfisher writes adolescent children. They are never stupid or naive, but they still possess innocence and have much to learn. If you liked A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking, I think you'll like this.

My one complaint - did it really need to be Baba Yaga who got the whole magical journey started? Why her? Look, I don't want to say that people who are not of Rus or Slav descent (or other culture with stories about Baba Yaga) can't use her in their novels, but it always seems like they make her into generic crone witch instead of tapping into what makes her so unique.

I'm going to come back to it after tackling some of these other books.

I feel like I need to reread the original Poe story before I can give thoughts.

It's interesting to compare this to the Fall of the House of Usher TV show on Netflix. That version of Madeline and Roderick, which I loved, are so, so different, it's hard to believe they have the same origin.

This is a pretty good primer on a few different AI technologies by experts in the field who are generally positive about AI development. It provided a good contrast to the (well-researched) generally negative videos and articles I had seen on the topic so far.

The best part of the book is the extended metaphor in the introduction, comparing the term "AI" to the term "vehicle". Vehicle is a category covering everything from bikes to trucks to space rockets to boats, but if we didn't have separate terms for all those things, we couldn't have meaningful conversations about them, especially their benefits and harms. This is one of the big problems we are running into with discussing "AI" now.

I found the section on predictive AI excellent. It's essentially the core of the book and was really informative since I knew next to nothing about that.

On the other hand, because I already had learned a lot about generative AI (language models, image generators, etc.), that part of the book wasn't too helpful to me and I skimmed a lot of it.

As someone who's been a little overly privacy obsessed, I already had done most of what this book suggested, so it wasn't for me. I could see it being a good intro for someone who was just beginning to think about digital privacy, though.

Best example of courtly political intrigue in a fantasy novel? If not the best, easily top five. I can see why Addison chose to write about another character in her next novel in this world, though. She created a fascinating and developed elvish steampunk world, and we only get to see a small bit of it because main character Maia is stuck in a handful of locations that are mostly ancient buildings. Also I appreciate her showing how boring the everyday actions of governance can be.

Bonus points for accurate use of the English formal and informal first- and second-person tense. Thee and thy isn't formal just because it's archaic, y'all. The narrative indicates that in these elves' language plural and formal would be different, unlike in English, but I was able to follow when it was the former and when it was the latter.