Review copy provided by publisher. Also I have known the author since Officially Forever, On Here.
I have rarely read a book with such a clearly defined audience! This is for people who love Yoon’s debut trilogy (the Machineries of Empire trilogy, the one with Jedao in it) and have or enjoy a strong fanfic impulse.
What do I mean by “strong fanfic impulse”: the range of tone in this material is very, very large, and how much it has traditional story structure varies extremely. The central novella that constitutes the bulk of this volume does indeed have a fairly traditional story nature, and so do a couple of the short stories, but others are of structures like “what if favorite character went home for a holiday” structures that are more like “outtakes” and other structures that fanfic explores more thoroughly.
So if you have that kind of impulse to see more range of structure and tone, this is definitely for you. I put off reading this volume, honestly, because I was not sure that I could deal with the levels of complexity, intensity, and darkness that Yoon sometimes brings to his fiction with the other things that were going on in my life at the time. And those are sometimes present, not going to lie about that. But the middle of the volume is definitely in the fluffier end of the range–there is no coffeeshop AU, but there is a lot more of the “this is a lighter moment” end of things, brief touches, small illuminations of a larger world.
I would not recommend starting this series in this point–it does rely fairly heavily on you having some notion of the characters and the setting. But for those who are invested, there is a range and a depth here that will likely be appealing.