Kissing the Bee, and D.A.

I'm not sure why Kathe Koja is so underrated. I read Kissing the Bee in one sitting tonight (not difficult, because it's such a short book) and was very taken with it. I liked Talk just as much. Kissing the Bee, in particular, had a precision of language rarely seen outside a Cynthia Voigt novel, which was well suited to Dana, the main character. Koja has the gift of knowing when to stop - a lesser author might have stretched this book for another 50 pages, but the length (it was almost a novella) was just right.
Talking of novellas I've enjoyed, I read Connie Willis's D.A. this week. It was almost too slight in retrospect, but at the time, I really liked it. It wasn't Bellwether (easily my favorite Willis novel, more even than To Say Nothing of the Dog), but it had some similarities.