Weirdly, the third book I've read this year that uses an AU of a historical figure/event as a launching point to... do entirely its own thing? (The other two were Natasha Pulley's The Bedlam Stacks, which did not need to be a fantasy AU of Clements Markham's 1860 cinchona-smuggling expedition to Peru, and When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O'Neill, whose question of "what if the French Revolution happened in 19th century Montreal and was about feminism?" probably also didn't need to be asked, but I'm so glad it was.)

This is such an odd subgenre. I wonder if it's a Thing.

One of my mom's ex-boyfriends is an architect who lived on Taliesin for awhile. It sounded like a weird combination of "kind of a cool commune full of smart people" and "absolutely a fucking cult," at least based on his description.