I have so much to say about this little novella , because I wish this novella went on for more pages. T. Kingfisher is the humble owner of a vividly imaginative mind with sharp quips and astute social commentary blended into one. The resulting concoction is this flavourful soup of something unique that it is quite hard to categorise.

Why would you not like this book ? There is an awkwardly adorable, gross , grumpy rag-tag group of goblins. Funny, unapologetically themselves and yet so tender hearted and warm for each other. Nessilka is a great leader if you ask the Winin' niners, and Murrey is very smart , so smart in fact that he is a mechanic he cannot be an officer or a soldier. Sings-to-trees is the loner veterinary elf who loves animals even when they don't love him back , there isn't a creature he won't help — and if you ask the goblins,or the humans, or the elves, there are several versions of why the war is ongoing. However this is not a story about war it's a story of mischief, warm-hugs and moments crafted with care. Kingfisher never misses a quip , and never loses an opportunity to make you see exactly what societal hole she is asking you to see through. Magic in this world is random, wizards are essentially afflicted with a magical sort of psychosis at random and one has kindness and yet fear for the poor fellas and their mental health—these wizards however are very useful and have contributed greatly to all creature kind (yes magic is awarded to the neurodivergent people here , and they do cool stuff with it.) There is almost every sort of representation found and it feels so natural in all the mythical creatures written about. Lastly, this book has made me love Trolls !! Oh and it's absolutely possible to ride into battle with your emotional support toy !

death is everywhere around us. it is in our screens, dead pixels morphing to dead bodies. it is in our earth, and in our lungs, but—as of late—it escapes our language:

“They talk about how sickening I am, in a good way. How ill l am, in the best way. How I slay. How I kill it. How they're gagged. How I'm so great it makes them want to unalive themselves. All the slang that dances around the language of death, trying to control it.”

lior torenberg wants to talk about dying, and grief, but dell danvers—our protagonist—does not. her sister is in a coma, days away from having her plug pulled, but still: dell doesn’t talk about death. she becomes it. some people turn away from their grief to avoid it; dell digs so far in that she can no longer see the surface.

“I am deep, deep in my body, painfully present and way up in space at the same time. My consciousness is a bright ball of hurt below my rib cage, a spasm in my gut warning of impending doom.”

beneath its shriveled skin of habaneros and ghost peppers and carolina reapers and hot, hot, churning insides, just watch me is a book about pain and intimacy. its brain-curdling vulgarity and viscera set it apart from other meditations on grief; torenberg fearlessly interrogates how the internet age and a culture of voyeurism and vicarious living leaves our capacity for grief and connection more than frayed at the edges.

“I ate the hottest pepper in the world and I’m going to be okay.”

bold, brutal, and blistering in its heat, just watch me is a digital nightmare, offered up to the collective to squirm and share in. the comparisons to fleabag are earned, but don’t be fooled: this is a different beast entirely. lior torenberg’s voice is a hot flame in the belly of screen-encrusted society, and it is about to set us all on fire. get ready.

It was ok, and probably a good intro to the topic for people who have never thought about it before, but it left me wanting more. I was already well aware of the connections between US and Nazi racial and genocidal practices going into this, so I certainly thought it was a more narrow view of the topic than I was hoping for, but I thought it was an interesting investigation specifically from a legal point of view. With that in mind I get that it is out of the author's intended scope to go into more of the socioeconomic connections between the two countries, like what fascism actually is and how it's not a separate phenomenon from capitalism. Like other reviewers I thought he was overly apologetic to the American system (sure the US legal system was actually judged too harsh by the Nazis, but at least in theory we had these abstract egalitarian rights that judges had to think about for two seconds before ignoring, so actually the US was way better!), and I also thought he went to great pains to paint the horrors of the Nazi system as particularly German and not related to above-mentioned socioeconomic factors like capitalism or imperialism. I feel like he also had some blind spots; for one example, he talks about the eventual break in friendliness between the two countries but doesn't talk about the fact that it was less about ideological differences than it was about being dragged into inter-imperialist war against each other because of the existing web of alliances when Japan attacked, and that if circumstances were different the US probably would have been happy to see the Nazis head east and take out the Soviet Union as long as it's own toes weren't being stepped on. Not to mention that after the war the US put a lot of Nazis directly into positions of power domestically as well as in Europe and NATO. Again, I get that a lot of that is out of the scope of the author's narrow focus on jurisprudence, but it's still important for actually fully understanding the relationship between America and the Nazis.