REVIEW: This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews (4-Stars)

 

I’m not a romantasy reader — I’m a sci‑fi reader who noticed this book when it was on NetGalley because the premise had promise. And it turns out the book isn’t romantasy at all. It’s a competence fantasy wrapped in ancient technology and identity reconstruction.

- or - 

A story about competence, arrested development, and the long road back to choosing yourself.

I didn’t expect This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me to be a book about identity reconstruction, but that’s exactly what it is. Maggie isn’t a chosen one; she’s a woman whose life stalled at sixteen after a catastrophic breakup, who spent the next nine years drifting through the gig economy, undervaluing herself, and quietly shrinking from her own potential. When she’s dropped into Rellas, she doesn’t suddenly become magical — she becomes competent, and the world responds to that competence like it’s a superpower.

That’s the real magic of Book 1.

Maggie negotiates with mercenaries, frees enslaved children, recruits one of the deadliest knights in the kingdom, and disposes of bodies in what might be a river monster or might be a piece of ancient biological waste‑processing tech. She thwarts a serial killer. She dies — repeatedly — and is resurrected by whatever ancient system is still running under the skin of this world, a “magic” that feels more like automated repair protocols than divine intervention. She builds a household from nothing. She makes allies. She makes enemies. She survives. And she does all of this while still thinking of herself as “average,” “plain,” “middling.” She hasn’t caught up to the fact that she’s the protagonist of her own life.

And in the middle of all this, the book keeps dropping in these fabulous square pastries — flaky, sweet, portable — and Maggie, being from Austin, immediately recognizes the vibe. They’re kolaches by another name. It’s a tiny detail, but it’s doing real work: it grounds her, reminds her (and us) that she had a life before Rellas, and that she’s carrying pieces of that life with her even as she’s forced to reinvent herself. It’s one of the few sensory bridges between the world she left and the world she’s trying to survive.

The book knows this. The world knows this. Maggie doesn’t — not yet.

And that’s where the men come in.

Because yes, the men are absurdly good‑looking. Comically good‑looking. Ramond, Reynald, Solentine, Severin — every one of them is described with the kind of detail usually reserved for the cover model of a romantasy paperback. Meanwhile, the women are framed entirely differently — not as objects of desire, but as fully realized adults with mastery. Clover is tall and “average,” sure, but she’s also an elite lady’s maid, costurier, hair and makeup artist, etiquette encyclopedia, and household COO rolled into one. Shana is a former knight who can swing a mace, command a kitchen, and produce pastries that could probably start a small religion. These women aren’t decorative; they’re the backbone of the world. They’re what competence looks like when it’s lived, not fantasized.

This isn’t male gaze. It’s a narrative trick.

The men aren’t romantic prizes. They’re archetypes — masks, roles, life paths. They’re the versions of adulthood Maggie never chose for herself. Each one represents a different future she could have had if she’d ever believed she deserved one. The fact that they’re beautiful is almost beside the point; it’s shorthand for “this is a fantasy of possibility,” not “this is a fantasy of romance.”

And the masks matter. Book 1 ends with a cascade of unmaskings: Ramond revealing his intentions, Reynald revealing his emotional investment, Solentine revealing his lineage and long game, Severin revealing his leverage and ruthlessness. Everyone has been pretending to be someone else. Everyone except Maggie, who still hasn’t learned how to pretend — or how to choose.

Her kidnapping at the end isn’t a romantic twist; it’s the culmination of her reactive nature. She still sacrifices herself for others. She still doesn’t see her own value. She still hasn’t claimed her agency. Book 2 is going to force that reckoning.

And then there’s the magic — or rather, the “magic.”

Rellas is a four‑millennia‑old society sitting on top of ancient systems it no longer understands. The Eight Families’ powers behave like genetic access keys. The Strelka behaves like a biotech guardian. The river creature that eats bodies behaves like a maintenance system. The mage blasting a meteorite with a laser is not fantasy; it’s physics. The world is running on decayed infrastructure, and the people inside it have mythologized the user interface.

Book 1 only shows us six of the Eight Great Families. We get the warrior families — Arvel’s Enduring Flame, Everard’s Fatefire, Bors’ Rageglow, Savaric’s Exultant Call — and two non‑warrior families, Hreban’s Mirror Heart and Yolenta’s Gold Glean. The other two Great Families are conspicuously absent, and that absence is not an oversight. It’s a promise. Their magic is either subtle, dangerous, or plot‑critical, and the authors are saving them for when Maggie is ready to understand them.

Which brings me back to Maggie.

Book 1 isn’t about romance, or magic, or even politics. It’s about a woman who has been emotionally frozen for nearly a decade suddenly being forced into motion. It’s about competence rediscovered. It’s about the world responding to her as if she matters long before she believes she does. It’s about the slow, painful, necessary process of reimagining a self you abandoned years ago.

The men are beautiful. The magic is ancient tech. The pastries taste like home. The women are competence incarnate. The society is old and brittle. But the heart of the book is Maggie learning, step by step, that she is allowed to choose her own life.

Book 1 is survival. Book 2 will be agency.

And I’m here for that journey. REVIEW: This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews

RATING: 4-Stars

Personal Branding Without the Costume

 (Gender, public space, law enforcement, and why my cats have a better Instagram presence than I do)

Most conversations about “personal branding” still assume that identity is something you perform. A curated aesthetic. A polished narrative. A set of signals designed to make you legible to others. A lifestyle you’re supposed to package and distribute.

But some of us never opted into that contract.

I’ve spent my entire life being misread by people who rely on gender performance as their primary sorting mechanism. If you don’t present the way they expect, they fill in the blanks with whatever story makes them most comfortable. And they’ll defend that story even when the facts contradict it.

What’s interesting is how different the world looks when you stop treating gender as unpaid labor. When you stop decorating yourself to be “readable.” When you stop performing a role you never auditioned for.

The people who matter don’t need the costume

The people who actually see you — colleagues, friends, the ones who pay attention — don’t need the performance. My stepdad Tony had an entire online WebTV community in the 90s who knew him for his humor, curiosity, and generosity. None of them knew he used a wheelchair. They knew him, not the packaging. They knew his mind, not his body. They knew his presence, not his performance.

That’s the version of personal branding I believe in: competence, clarity, curiosity, and contribution. Not aesthetics. Not performance. Not compliance.

Gender policing doesn’t stop at gender — it bleeds into public space and law enforcement

One of the things people don’t talk about enough is how gender nonconformity affects your experience with the law — not just police, but the informal “law” of public space: who gets to stand where, who gets shoved aside, who gets interrogated, who gets treated as out of place. Geography doesn’t protect you from gender policing. Visibility doesn’t protect you. Neighborhood doesn’t protect you. Compliance — or perceived compliance — is the only thing that protects you, and even that is conditional.

A few years ago, I was out with two friends — Matt and Matthew — standing at the corner of 18th & Castro waiting to cross the street. Possibly the gayest intersection in America. I was right behind them, wearing textile motorcycle pants, a very dirty hi‑viz jacket, and carrying my helmet in a messenger bag slung over my shoulder.

There was zero space between me and the Matts. And yet a man — shorter than me, dressed in a Marlon Brando leather jacket and studded cap — started physically shoving me, trying to wedge himself into a space that did not exist. He told me I was taking up too much space (we were standing there first, he approached me). Then he escalated into yelling misogynistic slurs at me and trying to haul me off the curb to stand behind my friends.

To my right was a utility pole. There was nowhere to go. The light changed. We started crossing. He kept shoving and yelling.

And then something remarkable happened: Three guys in plaid madras shorts, boat shoes, and long-sleeve button-downs — very 80s preppy — stopped, turned in unison, and the one in the middle pointed and said, loudly and incredulously:

“IS SOMEONE GETTING QUEER-BASHED IN THE GAYEST INTERSECTION IN AMERICA?”

They started jeering at him, calling out his behavior, and he bolted.

Obliviousness is its own kind of privilege

What still stands out to me about that day isn’t just the man who shoved me and called me misogynistic slurs. It’s that the two people I was with — Matt and Matthew — were completely oblivious to what was happening inches behind them.

Later, when we discussed this incident, their response was the same one I’ve heard my entire life: “You must’ve done something.”

These are married gay men. They know what it’s like to be targeted. They know what it’s like to be shoved, insulted, or threatened for existing. But they were still so insulated by their own gender legibility — two men who look like men, performing masculinity in a way that reads as “normal” — that they couldn’t see misogyny even when it was happening in physical contact range.

They didn’t see the dynamic. They didn’t see the gender policing. They didn’t see the entitlement. They didn’t see the hostility directed at me for being:

• a woman not performing femininity

• a motorcyclist in gear

• taller than the man who targeted me

• not visually “readable” to him

To them, it was just “some guy being weird.” To me, it was a pattern I’ve lived with for decades.

This is the part people don’t understand: If you’ve never been targeted for your gender presentation, you don’t see it happening to others — even when it’s happening right next to you.

And when you don’t see it, you default to the easiest narrative: “You must’ve done something.”

People protect their worldview before they protect each other.

I’m not feminine or masculine. I’m not a brand archetype. I’m not a curated persona.

I’m just a person who likes building things, learning things, and giving people space to help. I don’t need to be pretty or attractive to be valuable. Not believing I’m attractive doesn’t mean I have a self‑esteem issue. It means my self‑esteem isn’t built on appearance.

People seem to have lost the ability to laugh at themselves. There’s so much cultural investment in “pretty/attractive = good” that any deviation from that script gets treated like a crisis. For me, it’s simple: I don’t need to be attractive to be valuable. And frankly, it’s none of my business what you think about my appearance. Just don’t let me walk around with food on my face.

Even on Instagram — the platform built around image — I don’t curate a lifestyle or present a polished version of myself. I mostly share my cats’ lives: their routines, their personalities, the small moments that make me laugh. It’s not a brand. It’s not an aesthetic. It’s not a performance. It’s just the part of my world that’s fun to document.

I don’t share my life. I share their lives. They’re the ones with the curated feed.

The unpaid labor of gender

I’ve had people my whole life try to conscript me into gender performance. Strangers commenting on my face when I was ten. Teenagers in the 80s who couldn’t handle a girl who didn’t do big hair and heavy makeup. A boyfriend’s mother who kept trying to “fix” me with skirts and ruffles. People who assume that if I’m not performing femininity, something must be wrong.

My trans women friends don’t do that. They understand something the others don’t: gender expression is personal, not compulsory. They know what it costs to perform gender. They know what it costs not to. They know what it means to choose.

Work is where this matters most

And for the record: if you hire me, I will happily wear any corporate‑identity polo shirt you hand me. I’ll show up, do the work, collaborate, build, troubleshoot, lead, and deliver.

But you cannot pay me enough to dress “girly” and also expect me to feel comfortable. And if I don’t feel comfortable, I don’t do my best work.

My work is the value. Not the costume. Not the performance. Not the aesthetic. Just the work.

Ultimately it comes down to "my gender is nobody's business." I refuse the unpaid labor of gender. I’m opting out of the job description. I’m rejecting the idea that I owe anyone a performance. I’m rejecting the idea that branding requires a costume. I’m rejecting the idea that identity must be decorative.

I’m just a person. And that’s enough.

REVIEW: My Dumpling, Your Dumpling by KE Bartlet (4-stars)

  A Distinctive Debut: Competence, Youth, and a New Lens on Military Fiction

I picked up My Dumpling, Your Dumpling because I wanted a challenge. I think it’s important to read outside my usual genre preferences — not for escapism, but because good fiction offers a particular worldview. When an author succeeds, you’re not just reading a story; you’re trying on a different cognitive framework. That’s the part I find interesting.

My academic background is in Spanish and Sociology, and most of my undergraduate literary training was in the Boom period — Cortázar, García Márquez, Borges, Vargas Llosa. Those writers taught me to treat fiction as a tool for exploring how minds work. Rayuela forces you to construct the narrative yourself. Cien años de soledad operates on cyclical time and mythic logic. Borges turns stories into philosophical puzzles. That training shaped how I read: I look for the worldview behind the text.

Later, when I finally read Jane Austen and Edith Wharton, I was struck by their observational precision — the way they capture interior life, social nuance, and micro‑interactions with almost anthropological clarity. I spent years catching up on 19th‑ and early‑20th‑century English literature because it represented a completely different cognitive tradition. None of this is my entire reading history, of course, but it illustrates the pattern: I read fiction to understand how people think.

K.E. Bartlet’s debut fits into that pattern in a surprising way. My Dumpling, Your Dumpling presents a worldview shaped by military and intelligence environments: procedural, compartmentalized, time‑stamped, emotionally masked, and mission‑driven. Each chapter opens with a location/time/character header — essentially a SITREP. The action is often procedural and easy to miss if you don’t have that background. Operators will fill in the blanks; civilian readers may need a film adaptation to visualize certain sequences. That’s not a flaw — it’s a structural choice that protects both the reader and the author. It keeps the violence non‑graphic and keeps the operational details appropriately abstract.

What I appreciated most is how confidently Bartlet writes smart, competent young people, especially young women. There’s no gendered commentary, no harassment, no “woman in a man’s world” framing. It’s a parallel universe where women can operate at full capacity without misogyny as background radiation. That alone makes the book refreshing.

The interpersonal dynamics are subtle, especially the slow‑burn trust arc between Eliza and Melody. Bartlet writes emotional connection the way it forms in high‑risk environments: quietly, professionally, and under layers of structure. It’s not a romance that interrupts the plot; it’s a bond that grows inside it. Eliza’s pep talks and her ability to read her team under pressure show a level of empathy and leadership that makes her a compelling protagonist.

As a debut from a 28‑year‑old author, this is impressive work. The voice is distinctive, the worldbuilding is grounded in real strategic thinking, and the characters feel like people who could exist in the modern intelligence community. I’m curious to see how Bartlet’s craft evolves — and how these characters develop — in the rest of the series.

REVIEW: Sense and Respond by Jeff Gothelf (3-stars)

A Practical Book for Leaders Moving Beyond Industrial‑Age Thinking

Most business books either bury you in abstract frameworks or force you through a fictional executive’s personal life to make a point. Sense and Respond doesn’t do that. It stays grounded in real examples and focuses on the mechanics of modern work: feedback loops, adaptive planning, and the shift from industrial‑age certainty to software‑age change. That alone puts it ahead of a lot of what’s out there.

Industrial‑Age Planning vs. Software Reality

One of the strongest parts of the book is the way it explains why traditional planning models don’t translate into software. It’s not because industrial planning is outdated or wrong. It’s because it was built for a completely different category of problems.

If you’re building a bridge, you’re working with fixed materials, established safety requirements, and environmental conditions that are mostly knowable. The physics don’t change halfway through the project. You can plan that work with confidence because the domain is stable.

Software is the opposite. The problem space shifts while you’re working. User needs evolve. Market conditions change. Technology capabilities expand. You discover constraints as you go. The environment is fluid, and the cost of change is low enough that learning as you build isn’t just possible — it’s necessary.

That’s the core point the book gets right: industrial planning is built for certainty; software work happens inside uncertainty.

Experiments as a Normal Operating Rhythm

The book pushes hard on the idea that experimentation shouldn’t be a special event. It’s not a one‑off discovery sprint or a quarterly research push. It’s part of the regular operating rhythm. The author suggests talking to customers every six weeks. In 2026, that’s slow, but the principle holds: if you’re not in regular conversation with your users, you’re not building a product. You’re building a guess.

Small experiments, quick tests, and ongoing validation are still the most reliable way to reduce risk in software.

Parallel‑Track Agile That Actually Works

One of the most practical ideas in the book is the separation of discovery and delivery. Expecting a single team to “innovate” and hit delivery deadlines at the same time is unrealistic. A parallel‑track model — one track focused on figuring out how to solve the hard problems, the other focused on shipping — is cleaner and more humane. It reflects how real teams actually work when they’re not being forced into fantasy timelines.

Give Teams Problems, Not Requirements

Another point that still holds up: developers should be given problems to solve, not a list of requirements to execute. When you hand a team a pre‑defined set of tasks, you’re not using their expertise. You’re treating them like a feature factory. And you’re cutting them off from the feedback that tells them whether their work mattered. Teams need visibility into outcomes, not just velocity charts.

Who This Book Is Actually For

It’s also important to acknowledge the book’s age. Written in 2017, it predates a lot of what defines modern product work today. If you’ve spent years in Agile environments, worked on design systems, or led empathy‑first projects, much of the book will feel obvious. Not wrong — just foundational. And in 2026, with AI reshaping delivery and late‑stage consolidation changing how teams operate, the examples don’t fully match the complexity of what teams face now.

But that doesn’t make it irrelevant.

The book is genuinely useful for people who are early in their leadership journey or who are coming from traditional command‑and‑control environments. It gives them a clear contrast between two modes of working and concrete examples that make the shift understandable. It’s a better starting point than dropping someone straight into a stack of Marty Cagan books. It gives them anchor points before they dive into deeper product thinking.

The VUCA Reality (Even Though the Book Never Uses the Term)

The author never uses the term VUCA, but he describes it constantly. Software, marketing, and consumer‑product work all operate in environments that are volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. User behavior changes quickly. Competitors move fast. Information is incomplete. Signals are messy. You can’t manage that kind of work with planning models built for stable, predictable domains.

The book doesn’t name VUCA, but it circles the idea over and over: you need continuous sensing, iterative response, and teams empowered to solve problems because the environment demands it.

If You Want a Next Step

If you want to go deeper into why planning models must match the problem domain, How Big Things Get Done is a good follow‑on. It comes from a completely different world, but it helps clarify why software can’t be managed like the Golden Gate Bridge.

After that, Marty Cagan’s books are the natural extension. They go much further into empowered teams and outcome‑driven product leadership. But they can also feel impossible to implement in traditional command‑and‑control environments. For leaders who are still operating inside those structures, the gap between Cagan’s ideal state and their current reality can feel too wide to cross.

That’s where Turn This Ship Around fits in. It offers a clear, concrete example of how to shift from a culture of followers to a culture of leaders, and it does it in a way that’s easy to understand even without a military background. It shows what distributed authority looks like in practice and how to build competence and ownership at every level. For many leaders, it’s a more accessible bridge between industrial‑age habits and the kind of empowered teams Cagan describes. 

REVIEW: Sense and Respond by Jeff Gothelf

RATING: 3-stars

REVIEW: Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars (2006) by Patrick Lencioni (3-stars)

I’ll be honest: I’m not usually a fan of the “business fable” format, and this one has all the classic early‑2000s fable tropes. The personal‑life padding, the pregnancy storyline, the protagonist’s wife designing his logo — none of that adds anything. It feels dated and unnecessary, like the book is trying to make the protagonist “relatable” in a very specific, very last‑century way. But in 2006, people often needed these ideas wrapped in a story to actually absorb them. The fable structure made the message feel safe enough for leaders who would have tuned out a more direct approach.

And despite the saccharine framing, the book has a can‑do energy that, for a moment, made me wonder whether going freelance as a consultant was a viable option. It’s written to make you feel like you can walk into a messy organization, diagnose the dysfunction, and rally people around a shared purpose. That tone is part of why the book works, even if the personal‑life filler is something we could all do without.

The moment that actually matters: listening

The strongest part of the book isn’t the crisis or the characters or the manufactured drama. It’s the moment the protagonist realizes he actually has to listen to people. Not the performative “I hear you” version, but the real “tell me what you think the problem is” version. That’s the turning point. He stops trying to impose a solution and starts trying to understand the motivations, fears, and incentives of the people involved. Once he does that, he can help them find a common cause that isn’t just “stop being political” or “work better together.” People don’t align because someone tells them to. They align when they see themselves in the problem and the solution.

Workshops that actually work

Another part of the book that lands well is the use of workshops. Breaking people into groups, giving them space to talk, and letting them surface the real issues is simple but powerful. It reminded me immediately of how a group director organized our team at a large software company that was transitioning from traditional off‑the‑shelf products to cloud‑based SaaS. He didn’t lecture at us or hand down a vision from a podium. He put us into groups, gave us real problems to solve, and let us figure out the patterns ourselves. It worked. We saw real, recognized success because people were engaged, aligned, and actually talking to each other.

And then the team was split up because the organization insisted on grouping people by role. Program managers with program managers, designers with designers. The exact opposite of what had been working. The book captures that dynamic perfectly. Cross‑functional collaboration works, but organizations keep reorganizing themselves away from it.

The environments that suffer most are the ones where people are just mean

One thing Lencioni does well is highlight how much damage people do when they rely on stereotypes, reductionist labels, or just plain meanness. The environments that suffer the most in the book aren’t the ones with the biggest strategic problems. They’re the ones where people stop seeing each other as human beings and start treating each other like caricatures. That part felt very real.

You can have the best strategy in the world, but if people are dismissive, snide, territorial, or operating from assumptions about “those people over in that department,” nothing moves. The fictional drama exaggerates it, but the underlying pattern is familiar to anyone who has worked in a large organization.

And this is where Sense and Respond quietly overlaps. Even though it’s a very different kind of book, the author stresses the importance of people getting along socially and actually connecting. Not in a forced team‑building way, but in the sense that teams who like and respect each other simply work better. They share information. They surface problems earlier. They don’t default to defensiveness. Both books, in their own ways, point to the same thing: the social fabric of an organization matters more than the process diagrams.

The part the book doesn’t say out loud: communication skills are the real issue

Here’s where I diverge from the book. The story resolves because the protagonist listens, empathizes, and helps people articulate their needs. But the book never names the actual skill set behind that shift. This is where Nonviolent Communication comes in.

If more people in corporate environments understood how to express their needs clearly, hear other people’s needs without defensiveness, separate observations from interpretations, and navigate conflict without escalation, a lot of the so‑called silos and politics would evaporate. Not all of it, because incentives and structures still matter, but the day‑to‑day friction would drop dramatically.

Most organizational gridlock isn’t caused by strategy. It’s caused by miscommunication, assumptions, and emotional reactivity that no one has the tools to name or address. The book hints at this through the story, but it never says it directly. The real lesson isn’t “create a rallying cry.” It’s “learn how to communicate like an adult.”

Why the book still works

Even with the storytelling format (which I still think is unnecessary), the book works because it taps into something real. People want to fix broken systems. They want to feel connected to a purpose bigger than their department. They want to contribute without getting caught in territorial nonsense. The book isn’t a manual for organizational design and it’s not a deep dive into incentives or systems thinking, but it is a reminder that people want to work in environments where they feel heard and aligned.

Sometimes a story is enough to get someone to see that.

Where to go next

If someone finishes this book and wants to go deeper into the part that actually matters -- the human part -- I’d point them toward Nonviolent Communication. Not the corporate‑sanitized version found in many books, but the real thing. It’s the best framework I’ve seen that gives people a usable way to express needs, hear other people’s needs without spiraling, and navigate conflict without turning it into a referendum on someone’s character.

Both Silos and Sense and Respond hint at this. They show the symptoms. NVC gives you the underlying mechanics. It’s the difference between “we need to break down silos” and “here’s how to talk to each other in a way that doesn’t create them in the first place.”

If more people in corporate environments had even a basic grounding in NVC, a lot of the friction, misinterpretation, and territorial behavior that slows organizations down would disappear. Not all of it — incentives and structures still matter — but enough that the work would move faster and the culture would feel less like a minefield.

It’s not a magic fix. It’s just the part we keep skipping. I also kept thinking about how many people insist on keeping their “work life” and “personal life” completely separate, as if those two selves don’t influence each other. If someone is rigidly compartmentalized in their own life, they will bring that same separation into the workplace. And I don’t need to know the details of someone’s cancer treatment or their partner’s high‑risk pregnancy to understand that people need space and time to handle the realities of their lives. The point isn’t the specifics. The point is recognizing that people are whole humans, and organizations function better when they acknowledge that instead of pretending everyone is a blank, interchangeable worker during business hours.

REVIEW: Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars (2006) by Patrick Lencioni

RATING: 3-stars