Harland's depiction of Nell as uncompromising when it comes to her freedom and the security of her family is unmatched, exploring how going against the gain with a bull-headed kind of stubborn grit is both an admirable quality and a problematic one in varied circumstances. It's the kind of realness that is often left out of tales meant for 'female empowerment'.​

What truly sets Renegade Nell apart is its masterful blend of action, humor, and heart. Each episode is a rollercoaster ride of adrenaline-pumping stunts, clever plot twists, and laugh-out-loud moments, all woven together seamlessly against the backdrop of a richly imagined historical setting. The costuming details are glorious, both in highlighting the practicality of outfit choices and also addressing the often cavernous gulf between the options available to the upper and lower classes, as well as to men and women.

The show directly addresses the concepts of gender presentation identity politics, presenting thoughtful, and discussion-inspiring commentary without making it the focus of the show. There is a wide spectrum of masculinity and femininity showcased within the show, and the only comments of dressing 'properly' for one's socially ascribed gender-adjacent social role are made by old men, literally laughed at, and swiftly (if not always easily) dismissed. Likewise, the issues of race-relations, lingering issues of slavery, and the issues of immigration in direct and unflinching ways, but without derailing the narrative. Furthermore, the concepts of 'right' and 'fair' in terms of social governance and the socio-political contract of the governed being the ones with real power all get directly addressed and discussed as things that require proactive and attentive maintenance to ever have a chance at being implemented without falling into corruption.

From the breathtaking cinematography to the stunning production design to the incisive call-to-action social commentary, every aspect of Renegade Nell is executed with precision and passion, immersing viewers in a world that feels both exhilaratingly fantastical and authentically grounded.

In conclusion, Renegade Nell is a tour de force of storytelling brilliance that deserves to be celebrated far and wide. It's a must-watch for anyone craving adventure, humor, and heart, and a shining example of the magic that happens when visionary storytellers dare to defy convention and chart their own course. Disney+ has truly struck gold with this captivating series, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

            Also, El goes God-Mode! She has all the power in the universe and NONE OF IT MATTERS. Power isn't the answer. Power doesn't fix things. Power doesn't make things easier or better or safer or Good. All having power does is give you a legitimate choice. Because being a little bit Evil to protect your children by being complicit in a greater Evil isn't really a choice. Some people can break through that kind of thought, but a lot of people can't. There were plenty of normal people who joined the Nazi's because it was safer than fighting them. There are plenty of people who don't speak up to support gay rights because they have young children in school and if their kids's schoolmates get spoonfed hate for gay rights and their family is seen as gay sympathizers, their child will be bullied. There are plenty of kids who are bullied because their parents are vocal activists and to make it stop they adopt an aggressive anti-whatever attitude and themselves become aggressors. People can be awful, and the worst thing in the world is that they're usually at their worst for what they perceive as good reasons.
​
          Power doesn't solve problems. But it lets you have a legitimate choice in what you do about the issues you face.

​          The only thing that solves problems is the decision to be Good, no matter what. No compromise, no accepting the lesser Evil; it's not practical and it's not easy and it doesn't do much if you do it alone, but you can join the Nazis or join the French Resistance.

         I will say that it doesn't flinch away from saying that the outright Imperialist activities of America in the 1940's~80's are objectively Imperialist, but it does brush over the horrors of those consequences in a similar way to how it brushes over the fact that Britain is basically the Evil Empire.

         ​I do highly recommend this book for anyone at all curious about History, even the layest of lay-persons could find it entertaining and informative.

                This means, in a partly unfortunately exertion of balance, that the big selling point of the Poly-ship is actually a little downgraded in my opinion. It's fairly well constructed in terms of establishing both emotional attachment and physical attraction between the trio, but I still read it much more as a falling-together of desperate hearts rather than a true-love romance with 3 participants instead of the usual 2.
            That said, however, successful marriages, and what I consider to be genuine love, is not comprised of the fairytale, shippy, true-love magic that most YA romances peddle. The way healthy love works is that individuals proactively decide to love each other and continuously chose to make it work. Active discussions, healthy communication of wants and needs, self-reliance despite dyad (or triad, quad, etc) integration (which applies to non-romantic bonds, such and Family and Friend sets and is also known as "we thinking", ie, 'we're going to the beach this summer')... all of that is present in this novel and necessary to a truly viable healthy relationship. And yet, the whole 'we are literally the only people in the entire world who treat each other like humans' thing is NOT a healthy motivation nor is it a convincingly romantic motivation for a love match pairing...
              I'm curious to see how it all works out in the sequel, particularly as... well... Spoilers.
           Overall, this is a brutal, but gloriously well-depicted world with characters in varied states of mental collapse that reflect genuine psychology in both range and severity. The body-count is high, the brutality is significant, the presence of consent is glaringly absent in a number of circumstances, and the positive influences are non-existent, but there's not explicit sex, no drugs, alcohol abuse depicted as a disease, and the non-con elements are never excused or apologized for. It's not a book for every 13-year-old, but honestly I think it suits a vast majority of them.
           Parental discretion IS advised, but I strongly recommend that this novel be seriously considered as a viable  option for any teen reader!

          Reading this is certainly a monumental undertaking, being that it's nearly 800 pages of intensely detailed scientific rigor, but the result is entirely worth the effort! I will say that some parts of it, particularly a few of the early chapters, are a slog for anyone who is not familiar and keening interested in the finer point of microbiology, cellular neurology, or endocrinology. Sapolsky's writing is exceptionally clear and his points in these early chapters are well laid out, but, even so, the material is simply dense.
             While I wholly understand the reason that these chapters are placed early in the sequence of the thesis (being that the book scales outward, starting with the literal smallest piece of potentially relevant biological influence and incrementally moving out to the macro-scale evolution of globalized, cooperative culture), it's a shame that the intensity and niche specificity of the early chapters come before the parts that a layperson could more easily connect with... I'm sure plenty of readers who would have delighted in the second half of this work were unable to make it past the first half.
             Still, I would HIGHLY recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in the mess that is the modern human, go for the audio book and just let the words wash over you (possibly skipping many of the early chapters).

            First presented in the UK in 2017, the OST hit YouTube in early 2020. As a MASSIVE fan of History and also a fan of musicals, the fact that I missed this one's appearance must be chalked up to the fact that I was deeply distracted by the whole 'the world is kind of ending' hubbub from that particular Spring...
        Anywho. When I was first introduced to it, conceptually, I was deeply skeptical. It seemed like a wannabe Hamilton at best, and a garish, misinterpretation of history at worst (and most plausible). It seemed like a tragedy waiting to happen.
           But I quickly warmed up to it. The songs are hella catchy. And it's SUPER punny, in the best and worst ways.
So, I took a closer look.

            It takes the pieces of what hurt for the women of the ~16th Century and makes a vicious, biting, soul-deep echo of pain hit modern audiences for how little progress has truly been made in regards to certain issues. Essentially, it reframes the Court of Henry VIII as a High School Drama style, angst-aggressive Soap Opera, translated from the highest stakes of Court into a social smack-down that Gen Z can fully comprehend.
        It takes the stalwart dignity of Catherine of Aragon and makes it into Beyoncé's steadfast, self-assured bulldozing. It takes Anne Boleyn's brash aggression and translates it to the bratty, self-centered inconsiderateness of Avril Lavigne's F!ck the Rules dramatics. Anne of Cleaves's glorious wit and self-possession is spun through Nicki Minaj's hyper-brash independence and assertiveness. And the tragedy of Katherine Howard's confused innocence in playing the games of grown ups gets filtered through the biting, pervasive, inconsolably vile parallel of Brittany Spears's hellish strife...
           The characters are not historically accurate to their contexts, but, for the most part, I feel that the contexts of their struggles are historically accurate to the 2010's. It takes the particularly firmly-rooted context of the characters and transposes them into an equally solid and temporally rooted context. It's not accurate to the facts, but I feel that it's someone even more true to the spirit of the struggles because of that inaccuracy.
          My mum doesn't agree. At all. She adores the Wives' (and is a staunch believer in the concept of context IS character) ((and she's utterly baffled by the concept of a 'modern AU' as being an accepted trope of modern literature))... So she started out excited at the concept and ended up utterly pissed at the flippancy.
           Mum does have some very valid criticisms.
        Even I can admit that calling it Plot Lite-tm is actually a deeply over-generous assessment of the plot's non-existence. And I definitely dislike how Jane Seymour isn't shown as an active schemer (she was aggressively attempting to sway Henry from Anne, after all, she wasn't just a shrinking violet with genuine love for Henry). And Catherine Parr was also scheming, and very effectively so as she served more as Henry's hospice nurse than as his wife (rather than how SIX portrays her as feeling any kind of genuine affection for Henry).
          But still, I feel like my favorites were done well, with their base personalities given room to bubble up with Gen Z humor and heavily staged TikTok vibes.
        (Well, Anne of Cleaves became his Sister, she didn't get divorced, and it was an absolutely brilliant move that she managed to pull off under her own power, which wasn't really presented at all... And the reason Henry didn't like wasn't due to her looks, but because she didn't understand the game of Courtly courting (he snuck into her room, disguised, and she didn't let him kiss her 'because she could see though the disguise and knew her true love', which pissed Henry off like someone showing up to a freshman frat party with a cop as their +1) but still, Anna's track is hella catchy and it did show off her self-possession and utter competence, so I'm mostly okay with it.)
       It does the opposite of Hamilton, rather than attempting to cover a factually true-to-life History in its full context with a modern lens to view it under, Six takes snippets of well-understood, deeply personal modern stories, and slips them backward in time to re-frame an audience's interpretation of the dramatics of History.

In short I LOVED it.

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(If the embed doesn't work, here's the LINK !)

            Whelp... I'm not mad at it. I set the bar really low going into this one and I'm pleased to say that it has managed to surpass those wary expectations. I'm not actively offended to the point of having to write an angry letter to her publishers / editors / agents...
         Which, despite being the lowest bar ever set, still makes this the best thing SJM has released in years. Seriously, the last time I wasn't actively disappointed by an SJM release since 216 with A Court of Wings & Ruin, way back in 2016.... And even then, I wasn't angry at it, but I also wasn't terribly pleased with it.
House of Sky & Breath is very much a relief, because I'm not actively angry, but it's also still kind of disappointing because even though I'm not offended there's not a lot to like.

          Instead, we see like 4 or 5 different versions of the same storyline with very limited set-dressing alterations. It's hardly even a 'variation on a theme' kind of thing. There's a whole bunch of angsty, honorable, super-jock, alpha-males facing unwanted / awkward engagements to shy-ish wallflowers with secret bad-assery potential that they've been too sheltered to feel ready to reveal. The stories play out slightly differently, but not with nearly enough unique and significant variation to warrant watching 5 separate iterations.
          Speaking of a lack of variation: there's still ZERO diversity. Like you can call a group of people whatever you want, give them all kinds of different powers and theoretical inter-group rivalries and grudges, but unless you make something about the sects culturally unique, it's not diversity. There's only two body types mentioned for female characters (supermodel / action-hero and pixie-lithe ballerina), and only one for guys (supermodel / action-hero). Nobody's fat. Nobody's short. Nobody's pale enough to have freckles instead of a Cali-perfect suntan, nor dark enough to use any word but 'bronze' to describe their flawless skin tones. Hell, nobody is even the smidge of not utterly pristine biological perfect that is needing glasses with corrective lenses.
             There's a mostly-off-camera solitary gay couple, and a surprise-for-the-shock-value lesbian couple that makes like a 30 second appearance, in flagrante, and there's one mention of a vegetarian being slightly uncomfortable with the vague concept of meat.... and that's it... Seriously, there's not a single, genuine ideological difference between any of the factions that are supposedly diametrically opposed and have been hated enemies for centuries.
           Still on the lack of diversity factor: EVERYBODY'S ROYAL. When ALL your characters are politically significant of more or less equals in technical political standing, basically it means that none of them are facing power-imbalance dynamics that could make being Royal or whatnot interesting. It's special snowflake syndrome, but with political titles.
Also, none of the characters change they take a few, teeny tiny baby steps towards dealing with specific traumas and such, but no one actually changes through the narrative, they reveal that they'd been changed by the magic of insta-love, but none of them actually, visible evolve in any notable manner. And Bryce is an idiot about throwing her royal title around like it's Harley Quinn's hammer and is appalled when no one else is surprised that her continuous stupid choices led to horrible consequences.
           It's just boring.
           And beyond that, the bore-factor is ramped up by the utter lack of stakes. 
         There's a period of interest, when we're caught up in looking for a lost, potentially super-powerful kid. But that plot-line gets buried under the layers of other-people-with-awkward-engagements sandwich and it resolves pretty quickly (all told, that plotline probably takes like 300 pages, max, to run from start to finish). The rest of it is a search for a vague secret, a secret that no one involved even manages to care about without outside agents acting full-on deus ex machina to prompt investigation. There's even a moment with Bryce addresses the lack of Endgame, but it settles with a deeply unsatisfying conclusion of 'search for truth, for sake of truth'. 
          And the secrets that get 'revealed' are painfully dull. I seriously didn't realize that the 'secrets' had been revealed when I read them. I honestly thought it was a bit of framing as a reminder for the current status quo that could he altered in a paradigm shift of wow, that's unexpected and dramatic... and instead we just got, yeah, that's the status quo as it currently exists... No life-altering hidden truth. Just the curtain coming back on the obvious machinations of the current world, most of which could be guessed at by even a half-savvy reader with a few poli-sci or electrical engineering podcasts under their belt. I did like the lure bit of the secret reveal, but it's like showing up to a birthday party for the cake and just being given a particularly neatly shaped bit of a flower made of icing.
      Beyond all that? The whole army from hell thing? And the super-badass female who doesn't want the responsibility of rule but somehow earns the devotions of an abused super-powerful, military famous and respected male? With a cabal of super gorgeous, super powerful, politically significant friends? With a random bad-ass maybe-dragon?
       WE HAVE SEEN THIS STORY BEFORE.... AND I'M GETTING BORED WITH IT.
       Fortunately, there's nothing in this that I'm actively angry about (though, I'll admit, my threshold for what counts as angry is way higher for this author's work than for that of any other, so I probably should be angry about some things, but I'm sticking to my guns and letting it go unless it's actively harmful to real people (like the vile nonsense of A Court of Silver Flames).
      (Okay, that's a lie. I AM actively angry about the way Male and Female are the exclusive references to both gender presentation and biological sex. Like my Trans and Fluid friends are still people, yo.... And no one should simply BE their gender or their biology, personhood is significant without a shred of reproductive potential... But I've decided to pick battles I feel actively endanger safety and while casual erasure is damaging on some level, the mishandling of PTSD in Silver Flames WILL cause some dumbass reader to trigger some unfortunate soul into self-harm, possibly suicide).
        SO.
        I do NOT recommend it. 
        I WILL actively warn my clients against it. 
      And I CANNOT whip up any BS about it as a decent showing that I can ignore while reserving judgement on the whole series. 
       This series is crap. End of story.
       It's sloppy and insulting and pathetic; and it treats the reader like a pitiable, ignorant, idiotic little child.

     I will probably read the 3rd one, when it eventually comes out, simply because I can't reasonably hate on a book I haven't read and still look like a genuine authority, but I likely won't make it a priority read.