Little Valkyrie

That book did not need to be as long as it was, and I found it suffered not just from the detail, but also from a lot of very heavy-handed "I'm going to tell you exactly how this character thinks about this situation, so you can tell it's oppression going on"; it felt like the narrator had an absolutely perfect view into each character's psyche, which means there weren't many mysteries or ambiguities about motivation. I read it at about the same time as Miles Cameron's Cold Iron, where comparatively characters were more opaque, even to themselves, and the feeling of discovery/revelation was much stronger.

For the past several years, it's seemed like no one was editing Bendis at all, soo...

You'd have to ask Bendis, but apparently he hasn't/won't answer:

I don't mean this the wrong way, but you're trying to pull together a presentation in a month based on a wide body of reading that you don't have any recent familiarity with? I can see two approaches: figure out your question much more tightly and ask for good examples from there, or start reading somewhere and see what questions generate.

I mainly remember Ashok Banker from a subsequently-largely-deleted-so-don't-quote-me-on-this-I-could-be-misremembering fluffle over how his books were categorized and his refusal to footnote/explain/whatever his specifically Indian context and vocabulary for an international (i.e.) American audience. Is this a new foray into said audience, given the publisher?

Also, if you started like I did when the third book had just come out, there was a small but intense online community that worked on puzzling out the backstory and the hints, which was so much of the fun of reading it. Who killed Asmodean? What really happened in the past with Lews Therin? Is Moiraine dead? Those sorts of things really help generate a fandom and a following for the books, even when they fell into slog territory. The scale of the thing was beyond anything else at the time, and for all his faults he wasn't doing the Eddings five books/rework five books model. And yes, we now joke (and did then) about braid-pulling and all of that, but multiple powerful and interesting women were a significant appeal.

There are some similar concerns about representation/quality thereof, not falling into stereotypes, promoting diverse perspectives, etc. But I get the impression that YA is a particularly ferocious beast due to a number of factors. The networking is even more intense than sf/f, there are some clear trends with groups and leaders, early reviewers can be surprisingly influential, etc. On this last point, let me editorialize and emphasize this is my own reading, but: there's also a wobbly but present consensus that to be a good YA writer one has to be *responsible* because you are literally shaping impressionable minds, and there's accordingly a lot of discourse about harming readers and having to make sure that you don't do that. I don't see quite the same moral language in books for grownups, at least not as often, and I think it's a huge component of how the YA discussing community talks about itself. Personally, I think that tends to veer into the therapeutic fallacy and underrate what teenagers can deal with and the many ways people are able to read books to their own ends, but I think it's largely sincere.

With the obvious caveat that I haven't read any of the books myself (I don't go looking for YA ARCs, and they were withdrawn), I was a little...cautious about the Kosoko Jackson book to begin with, in part because something as complex as the Kosovo War seemed like a really ambitious and difficult background for a first-time author to be taking on as a YA novel that was, by his own admission, more fundamentally about the romance than necessarily the setting. [One of my best friends came to the US as a Bosnian refugee, and was a bit incredulous when I linked him to the annoyed review; he then approved of someone reccing the author "My Cat Yugoslavia" in a twitter thread.] Real world settings have, IMO, far more actual pitfalls to them than secondary world settings, even if you can see some of the obvious parallels or inspirations in the latter. That said, the pattern of people withdrawing books worries me. Some other people also pointed out the pitfalls of an overly American-centric perspective that were shown here. Zhao said she was writing in part out of her own cultural background but was openly lambasted for potentially hurting readers by not foregrounding a specifically American framing of slavery. Jackson bragged on twitter that he spent "three whole months" researching the topic, but felt comfortable wading in as an outsider, and apparently hadn't considered that his invocation of "stay in your own lane" might apply to HIM on this front. Ironies.

I didn't like Michael Cray but if there's a Zealot mini I'd be all over it like woah

New Wild Storm is probably mappable to a world on the giant Map of the Multiverse--there was a particular gimmick I did not like in the Michael Cray mini that reflected that--but I don't think it's heading for a mainline crossover any time soon, and Ellis is focusing on WS characters.

I agree that's cheating because IIRC, it doesn't give you any proper closure and I went onward and tried to keep going to get some of that and bounced off of it in total bewilderment. I've been told if you can power through it coalesces, but...YMMV. I still have those paperbacks, maybe it's time to give it another try. Carol Berg has a set of two duologies wherein you can read one and not the other, but if you put them together you get a fuller picture of both events: Flesh and Spirit/Breath and Bone, Dust and Light/Ash and Silver. I do recommend reading in that order, although it'd be interesting to do it the other way around.

I can see it for the first one, where the narrative conceit is very, very well-done, but three years in a row? It didn't fall apart at the end, which is very good etc., but I don't think the latter two books have the ingenuity and drive of the first one. I also came to a realization about the inspiration for the Guardians/orogene relationship that explains so, so much about it and shades it for me. (Think popular Bioware dark fantasy series, and you absolutely have it.)

The Red Knight was such a riff on Arthuriana (among other things) and accordingly heritage played a role for a number of characters--although not all the major players. The themes in Cold Iron are very deliberately timely, and one of the big ones is precisely that talent and will come from unexpected sources, hence the naive protagonist, who is a thoughtful creature to begin with but comes to know both himself and the world better as the book goes on. I found some of the tricks of limited POV well-done in the book, definitely more deft than your average YA.

This is largely how I felt--I was hoping for more twists than we got given some of the really weird places Braided Path ended up going (although it's been a long time since I read it, I remember some legitimately surprising deaths and other choices in there). My largest problem with the book, exacerbated by reading it right after Miles Cameron's Cold Iron, is just how much straightforward narrative "And this is what Cade thinks about his oppressors and their culture" the narrative indulged in, direct infodump about how WE do X but THEY do Y and THEY think we're primitive but WE are actually good. I don't think the cultural conflict narrative was worked with much delicacy, although okay, maybe it doesn't need to be. But there are some solid hooks in the metaplot that mean I'll probably pick up the next one to see what the driving force behind everything really is. I'm a sucker for that stuff.

Finished Miles Cameron's Cold Iron, started Wooding's Ember Blade. The latter I'm just 5% into, but it's very basic so far, heavy-handed on the portrayal of resentful young men versus culturally distinct and snobby oppressors. I remember Braided Path taking some very weird jogs and zigs, so I'm hoping for some of that, but right now it's a bit of a lecture. I feel like I need to do a re-read to really comment on it, but Cold Iron in contrast is a lot more subtle but also surprising me, struck me as absolutely and deeply topical/political for 2018, without drawing any crude or direct analogies like fantasy is often wont to do.