mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

I shared your sentiments about the tonal issues with the first story (there were a couple of cues that you mention in the story that I must have glossed over in my read, where I basically missed the contemporary setting entirely, caught it in the author's note, and then realized that it was supposed to be set in the present and not in some unspecified past. But the core of the plot wasn't jarring in the juxtaposition with a contemporary setting the way that the reincarnation soulmate uncle-murder story was, and the setting wasn't made very concrete/specific so it was much easier for me to just miss that this was shifted to present day).

I think the group's general feeling about the Crimson Cloak story was that we'd all prefer to have read a story about the magic ox, who was the most intriguing character in that story, and also that some of the more interesting potential themes of that story (e.g. difference in how time passes in the two realms, grief over the loss of the mortal spouse and loss of memory of the huge time span of an immortal life, friendship with the ox after the spouse's death) weren't developed as well as they could have been.

I don't remember a ton of the discussion about Eyes like Candlelight, but I remember some discussion of not being fans of the romance component of the story (a strange case since it is one of the traditional kitsune narratives, but also, lots of these stories were doing interesting inversions and reinventions, so it wasn't entirely locked in to that).

One of the bigger things that came out of the discussion of the final story was about the message that it is okay to quit trying something like calculus when it is hard or that calculus is pointless. Some of us hadn't had a negative reaction to that, while for others it had been a particularly sour note in the story. I think part of this had to do with people's views about the value and interestingness of calculus, but another part of it that came out in the discussion was a YA fic trope of acceptable flaws for protagonists, and particularly the gendered nature of these acceptable flaws. Examples of the acceptable flaws in YA for girl protagonists were clumsiness, short temper, or bad at math (and "short temper" was the clearcut example of one that is basically never used for male protagnists in YA). So, I think some folks were not happy about a YA-ish story (or at least a story in a YA-coded volume) embracing the "give up on math" messaging as the Carp's outcome (rather than, say, persisting at working at calculus being the Carp's success-by-persistence). Since that seemed to be complicating the point it seemed like the story was trying to make for some of us, I was curious whether changing the class to Organic Chem or something else that was more tightly linked to the pre-med requirements might help.

One thing that I really liked about the last story was that Ellen was aiming to stand up for the right to not know what she wanted to do yet. One thing that I thought was well done in terms of vividly painting the characters, but which rubbed me the wrong way in terms of the family dynamics was the bit where the dad was conspiring with Ellen on how to hide the cheese doodle consumption from the mom. I guess it is mostly harmless but I don't really like "well, there are rules, but wink wink I'll help you break the rules behind the other parent's back."

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on these stories! Not as good as hearing your thoughts at book club, but certainly a better option than not hearing them at all!