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This is the first book in a new James SA Corey series, and I enjoyed it a bunch.

High stakes academia gets interrupted by alien invasion; their research then becomes even more high stakes while having to navigate trauma and powerful alien political currents. A pithy but unhelpful summary is that this book is about systems thinking vs the just-world fallacy.

The aliens are interesting in several fresh ways; one in particular is that they largely don't give a shit, emotionally speaking. They aren't angry or greedy or vengeful, which gives a much different flavor to an alien invasion. A lot of enjoyment in any book where humans encounter aliens is also about their relations and the slow reveal of who and what the aliens are, and so I'll hold back some more spoiler-y opinions.

(One side note about this book is just how straight it felt. Maybe I just read too much queer fiction on the regular, but this [like other books by these authors] felt subjectively in the vein of "old school heterosexual science fiction" that I might have read when I was younger. Not everything has to be everything, but it was just something that stood out to me.)

3 stars: enjoyed this book, you might like it too

This is kind of a weird review because I feel like it was a different book than what I expected.

What it ended up being was a history of how femininity was socially constructed, in the context of social class, in Britain over the last few hundred years, and how the construction of modern femininity (as distinct from medieval femininity) was very closely intertwined with the construction of social classes as the middle class emerged. It did this largely through the lens of embroidery. It felt surprisingly modern in how it talked about gender as something changing and socially constructed and existing in the context of other socially constructed concepts, but it did feel very narrowly focused on Britain and Britain-adjacent areas.

Except for at the end in the more modern area, I don't think it really demonstrated embroidery being subversive. Embroidery was used to enforce norms of femininity. At the same time, women rejecting embroidery, in the context of the various feminist movements, often reinforced the idea that things associated with women were inherently inferior. It did talk about how people related to embroidery in different ways and how people could make a world of mandatory embroidery/mandatory femininity more tolerable and find some agency within it, about how embroidery could both trap women and offer them freedom, but it felt rather incongruous with its title. I feel like the book described the situation honestly and accurately, but if you were hoping for more subversion, there isn't a lot in this book.

Relentless Melt starts off with young Artie Quick attending their first investigation class at a night school for young men run by the Y.M.C.A. The teacher, an older policeman, observes that Artie appears to be a young woman wearing a young man's suit, making them ineligible for the class. Nevertheless, he seems inclined to keep Artie's secret.

Artie is taking the class to, as they later figure out, make sense of why their brother Zeb has abandoned the family for a life of crime. But at the outset Artie thinks they're intrigued by solving crimes. And so Artie and their best friend Theodore, a young adult with family money but living on his own, decide to practice solving crimes by investigating a scream heard in a local park late at night.

The book is a little bit coming of age, a little bit amateur sleuths solving a mystery, and a little bit of magical fantasy. When Artie's investigations instructor suddenly cancels class, Theodore convinces Artie to join him at his school where he's learning a bit of being a magician. Theodore's one spell he's working on allows him to quietly sneak quietly by casting a sphere spell around his feet.

You'll notice I use the they pronoun here. A lot of what makes this good is Artie feeling how their sense of self changes when they're wearing a men's suit. Neither Artie nor Theodore quite knows what to do with themselves, Theodore's attraction to Artie, and Artie's feelings of ambiguity to Theodore.

The character study is intertwined with a lovely mystery. The scream they heard leads them to a criminal enterprise that is abducting young women, including the daughter of Artie's teacher. The sleuthing led to something I was not expecting in the least, and yet it made for a great story.

Set in early 2020, two of the three main characters are inmates at an Arizona women's prison. They get an early parole because the prison needs to reduce its population because of the pandemic. Plonked in a cheap motel and told that a charity will feed them and also that they are restricted to their rooms until conditions have been met. But of course they aren't fed, so Florida sets out for Los Angeles to get her car because a car is freedom.

Dios follows, but the two are not friends. Dios' purposes is to instigate Flordia. They disembark early, spend a night breaking & entering, drinking the booze left in a boarded up bar, and cause mayhem in a rural homeless camp.

Lobos is the L.A. cop assigned to investigate a murder when the bus arrives in L.A. carrying the body of a man whose throat has been slit. She zeroes in on the absconding inmates, and investigates all the places where Florida haunted prior to incarceration. At the same time, she's also dealing with the trauma of a soon-to-be ex-husband who is spiraling into mental illness.

Florida has fallen into a life of getting others to be the drivers of what she wants to do. This is the heart of her conflict with Dios, who wants Florida to own up to being an instigator. Dios herself is an instigator. I never really could wrap my head around why Dios cared that much about Florida, but I suspect it would make a lot more sense to me on a re-read. Lobos is constantly looking for her husband among all the homeless camps surrounding the places where Florida might be, frustrating her well-meaning but also casually low-grade sexist new partner. How she interacts with him is a gem of a component to the book. He just can't believe women can be the instigators of violence. To him, womens' violence is the result of mens' behavior.