This story also goes into spycraft with excellent accuracy in regards to how it affects the psychologies of everyone involved, as well as looking at how effective / ineffective it can be (and how a lot of how things pan out, whether for better or worse, is usually less to do with intentional action and more to do with relentless effort to keep the story spinning). It really got into the nitty gritty of it with exceptional clarity being given to the moral quandaries that come hand in hand with doing bad things for a good cause.
                The one thing that DID bother me a little is almost negligible: it was simply how they kept referring to Nikolai as 'Highness'. It's a thing I had noticed in King of Scars, but he was such a new king I felt it was ignorable, but by this point he should be solidly established as a 'Majesty'... Though I have seen it translated as such in some Russian lit, so maybe it's a Russian thing I'm not familiar with (I has simply assumed that the address translated strangely). Idk.
                 Anyway, plot-wise, the story developed with some EXCELLENT twists and turns that I was not expecting and yet fit within the narrative as part of a perfectly natural evolution. This one improved upon King of Scars by validating some of the boring bits in that novel without laboriously lingering over the rationales, it simply employed the results of what happened then into a present moment (with just enough recap to keep a reader up to speed, but not so much that the time it took to read the pervious installment felt wasted).
               The character development was also top notch. The admissions that anger comes from fear, that guilt is just a need for control, and that love and friendship are not things that can be affected by rationality or attempted decision-making are all wonderful and expose themselves within each and every character individually. Every character has a distinct arc of development that carries them through the motions of the main plot as a slap-dash combination of their individual stories. Zoya's development, in particular, was fantastic. I never really liked her until this one. I stopped disliking her in King of Scars but WOW did she blossom into someone awesome here (I think she's now in my top 3 of character faves for the whole series).
               Honestly, Zoya's development in this is just so far beyond exceptional that it truly makes this book a marvel. I know that it's a bit unfair to judge books on a comparative basis, but I just have to point out that Zoya's handling in this book is about 50 billion times more elegant and well-crafted than Nesta's handling in A Court of Silver Flames (which is a review I'll have up in full next week). Zoya and Nesta are both extremely angry characters with razor sharp edges and anger issues that bubble up to cover feelings of inadequacy and a soul-deep fear of pain and loss. They're both grieving lives they used to know, and suffering through a crude and unpleasant adjustment to living with trauma. From their similiar circumstances, they require similar methods to help them heal. Nesta's story follows a perfect guideline of How NOT to Handle a Person with PTSD, and is frankly 700 pages of dangerously irresponsible drivel (that doesn't work) and it wraps up in a last 200 pages with a shorthand version of what happened to help Zoya start to heal scrunched up awkwardly at the end like Maas got yelled at by a psychologist. Meanwhile Zoya's journey takes place at an even-keeled pace across the entire (much more succinct novel) and it starts right from the beginning with addressing what is healthy vs unhealthy in terms of coping mechanisms -- all while dealing with protagonists who are younger (and therefore more entitled to handle things poorly). Bargudo does an EXCELLENT job and that fact has certainly catapulted this book into my top 25 of all time!
              Over all, it was extremely well done. I will say that it was not quite life-changing, which several of Bardugo's books have been, but it was definitely one for the top 25 I've read ever, and top 10 for having read in the last decade (or rather it's the one to kick off the new list for this new decade). I am VERY excited about where this is going to lead the Grisha Verse as the series continues to develop!

                  ​Still, I do absolutely LOVE this one and highly recommend it to all audiences!

              Only August had any actual problems to deal with but the bulk of the narrative was focused on the two girls who had no real problems whatsoever. And the ending resolved with August's dad swooping into to fix things for him, and his joining the girls in realizing that none of them had any real problems to begin with... The inevitable thing was simply the obvious arrangement that ensured that none of them ever had to deal with any repercussions of a problem that was never really significant anyway.

             As a thought experiment, it was kind of neat.

            As a story? It was pretty lame.

​            I'd only ever recommend it as a low-stakes beach-read / distraction type endeavor with which to while away an afternoon.

          Allegiance is classified as Legends, which means it's no longer Canon, which had me wary because it's hard enough to keep track of Canon in a franchise this big even when it's consistent and experienced in the proper order, but I've never been good about Star Wars and proper order... (Like at all, the first Star Wars movie I watched while actually caring enough to know its place in any given rendering of the timeline was Rogue One...). But *shrugs*. Now, I'm diving in with lead weights in my boots, same way I did a few years ago with the DCU.
          This one is set about six months after the Death Star blows up at the end of Episode IV, and it aptly has a dash of Luke, & Leia, & Han Solo being involved with the plot. Too much for my tastes, honestly, but I can understand why they're present.
           The examination of the Stormtrooper's complicated loyalties was AWESOME.
           I definitely loved it and I deeply enjoyed how their story played out. I would've liked just a little bit more of the wavering and waffling sort of angst that comes with the concept of committing treason to avoid breaking an oath to serve and protect, but there was enough to placate me. Mara Jade's story had the best balance of internal-narrative spent on defining views and current loyalties, but her story was a bit less compelling because nothing in it actually mattered until she actually got involved with the Troopers.
          Over all, I definitely enjoyed it. The head-hopping style of the narrative felt rather dated, but considering this was written in 2007, and written specifically to fit the feel of other  Rebellion Era lit, most of which was published in the 80's & 90's, it wasn't too unbearable (even if it was a bit jarring).
           I will definitely be picking up the next one in Zahn's Hand of Judgement duology at some point, and I'll certainly be picking up a lot of other Star Wars Expanded Universe media!

           The uniqueness of the setting, which lead to the wonderful array of characters, and to the unexpected rise to prominence of Gen Watanabe, is decidedly AWESOME.
           However, like all books meant for adult audiences, it was painfully slow in developing an actual story. Unlike most adult fiction, that actually worked in its favor. The plot here follows a several-month-long incarceration by terrorists of attendants to fancy dinner party and a key theme it plays with is what happens when humans get bored (answer: dangerous things happen, VERY dangerous things).
            Also, unlike most grown-up books, this one had a point.
            This one took a situation and looked at it from a whole bunch of varied angles, but instead of just showing it to you, it made an active comment about that situation: namely that there's no such thing as 'the Bad Guys' in the real world, they only crop up in the stories that people tell to try explaining what happens in the world.
           It was definitely the best adult straight-fiction book I've read in a long while.
          That said, it was still REALLY slow and rather more boring that I generally prefer.  I did like it, though, and it was decidedly well-crafted (and EXCEPTIONALLY well-narrated), so I do certainly recommend it.

         The look at Perceptual Learning Modules is my favorite, simply because what I look at while nose-deep in the journal side of academia are the ways in which Intuition is trained, measured, and utilized in practical settings, so the PLMs are kinda my wheelhouse.
         The other great thing it mentions is called Interleaving, which I don't think Carey spent nearly enough time on. While paywalls are the biggest thing that America and upper level academia is doing wrong, the idea of disciplinary studies is the thing that education as a concept is doing wrong. Subjects are not separate. They only ever developed into separate departments because they had to argue for funding from school boards and when a department got funding, it was spent at the discretion of the department head. If the Dean of Science decided that music was lame, even though music was definitively considered a hard science for most of history, all the Science money was spent elsewhere (like alchemy or astrology...), so Music petitioned to be considered an entirely separate discipline with its own discretionary budget and such.
         I may have to write up a Culture Crit essay on the topic, because the manner in which we teach 'subjects' in school is just something that makes me want to claw people's eyes out. In short, if you're not teaching music with your math and history with your science and poetry with your politics, you're doing everyone in the universe a lasting disservice. Anyway, I really liked how Carey addressed the fact that true learning, not just memorizing for the test, is learning how to manipulate the variable rather than how to achieve an end result. It's a principle that works in math just as well as in sports, and that idea is addressed by Carey quite well.
       I also liked Carey's quote of the Henk Arts Group at Leiden University regarding their study on perception motivations with Bisaldrops (ie, if you're thirsty and stuck in a room, you notice things that relate to water / liquids more easily and remember them better than if you were locked in the same room while not thirsty). They address the idea of motivation directly and excessively affecting the ability of the brain to perceive the factors of its environment and how the idea of the "body's basic needs" includes the things needed by the mind.(There's probably another Culture Crit piece in there about Mazlo's Pyramid of Needs being outdated bullshit, but that's a rant for another day.)
         In short, I liked this book. It's a good survey of the scientific state of learning psychology and a great toe-dipping start point with accessible, accurate prose.

I definitely recommend it for anyone even a little curious about how our brains actually manage to work their magic!