A Universe in Words

Review: 'Little Red Death' by Alexandra (A.K.) Benedict

2026-09-16T14:20:55.775+01:00

Sometimes a book wants to do a lot and sometimes that works. Other times, it does not work and while the result does not have to be disastrous, it can be messy. For me, unfortunately, Little Red Death was a case of the latter. Thanks to Poisoned Pen Press and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 8 September 2026
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press

This is once upon a time, like you've never read it before
For twenty-five years, DI Lyla Rondell has lived with one unsolved case: her best friend's disappearance. The only clue—a poisoned apple—earned it the nickname "Snow White." It's haunted her ever since.
Now, when a woman is taken in a crime that has striking similarities to the story of Cinderella, Lyla is charged with investigating. And as more murders take place, each one based on a different classic fairytale, Lyla is determined to finally uncover the truth.
But these deaths are far from the stuff of bedtime stories. And worse, it becomes increasingly clear that these killings, and the messages left within them, are addressed directly to Lyla.
As the murders get more gruesome, Lyla becomes entangled in a web of crime and storytelling that goes far deeper than she ever could have imagined. Because someone out there is pulling her strings, and to turn the final page on the killings, Lyla will have to take a little creative license of her own.

Some things go together well, like horrors and thrillers, or horrors and meta-narratives, or thrillers and meta-narratives. Fairy tales also go very well with meta-play and horror. All of this should go well together and I still believe it can, but it doesn't fully in Little Red Death. I think what might have been necessary was to pick a main "mode", so to say, especially when it comes to tone and approach. I was never sure whether this book was an ode to fairy tales, a horror novel, a detective thriller, or a book about storytelling. Again, I think a book can combine all of this, but it needs to know where it is doing what, when which mode or genre or tone has precedence. In Little Red Death it felt like I was given all of my favourite foods but they had been blended and the smoothie was unappetising. In the end this book is a meta-narrative that never gets properly meta, a thriller that never really thrilled me, and a horror that never fully horrified me. I was open to this novel doing whatever it wanted to do, but it never seemed to pick a direction and follow it. Whether this is because it needed a tighter round of developmental edits, because the tone didn't quite land for me, or because the author lost slight control of the scope, I don't know. It ended up being something of a disappointing read in the end.

Little Red Death begins with the kidnapping of Katie, who is a thriller/crime writer. Her captor, who wears a wolf mask, wants her to write him fairy tale-inspired murders, which he will then enact. She decides to play along in the hopes to find a way to escape and to make sure he leaves traces behind for the police. Hot on his trails is DI Lyla Rondell, who begins to connect the dots in the killings perpetrated by the man now known as the Grimm Ripper. It's not just these crimes that have Lyla on edge, however, but also their seeming connection to the disappearance of her childhood friend Alison. That is already a lot to have going on, but for me the book became more intriguing once its meta aspect was revealed and the question becomes what is real and what is being written for everyone to act out. As I wrote above, this is where things got messy for me. It is one thing to write a typical detective figure and then say, "look at what I did here", and another for that to really work. I have to admit that it seems incredibly difficult to me to pull that off properly, but it didn't entirely come together in Little Red Death for me. If I'm questioning what is real then I also do need to really care about these characters, I need to feel that something would be genuinely lost if it turned out to be fake or imagined. I was not that invested, unfortunately.

I have not read anything by Alexandra Benedict before and in a weird way Little Red Death has me both eager and hesitant to try out more. On the one hand I applaud her immensely for doing something so complex and there where moments, scenes, and characters that I did really like. On the other, weightier, hand, though, I felt there was a lack of control. I can appreciate that in part the shifting tone and potential inconsistencies or oddities are to do with the meta-narrative, but I prefer when this is done more consciously. It's been a while since I've written a more negative review when it was disappointment rather than irritation at the root of it all. I really wanted so much of this book to work and while I could expend the mental energy to make it work for me, I wanted the book to do more of that. Everything felt at once too complex and too simple, which in and of itself is an accomplishment. But I do see the intent and planning behind it, so, while Little Red Death did not work for me, I will probably have another go at a book by Benedict when the blurb catches me and feels focused. Also, the ARC I received is technically for the deluxe edition of the book but I didn't see anything special in the e-book itself, so I assume this refers to aspects of the printed book.

I give this novel...

2 Universes!

I wavered quite a bit on this rating and I probably could switch up to 3 if I was feeling generous, but in the end I feel that this novel failed to do what it set out to do, rather than failing my expectations.

Review: 'Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance' by Henry A. Giroux

2026-09-03T15:15:47.756+01:00

I really should have read this book when it first came out because now, four years later, education and academia are even more under threat and Trump is back. That's on me though, and Giroux's book is an excellent call to action for everyone. Thanks to Bloomsbury Academic and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. My sincere apologies for the delay in reviewing.

Pub. Date: 21 April 2022
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Henry A. Giroux argues that education holds a crucial role in shaping politics at a time when ignorance, lies and fake news have empowered right-wing groups and created deep divisions in society. Education, with its increasingly corporate and conservative-based technologies, is partly responsible for creating these division. It contributes to the pitting of people against each other through the lens of class, race, and any other differences that don't embrace White nationalism. Giroux's analysis ranges from the pandemic and the inequality it has revealed, to the rise of Trumpism and its afterlife, and to the work of Paulo Freire and how his book Pedagogy of Hope can guide us in these dark times and help us produce critical and informed citizens. He argues that underlying the current climate of inequity, isolation, and social atomization (all exacerbated by the pandemic) is a crisis of education. Out of this comes the need for a pedagogy of resistance that is accessible to everyone, built around a vision of hope for an alternative society rooted in the ideals of justice, equality, and freedom.

I work in academia, which means that education is a big part, if not the biggest part, of my job. With everything happening in the world, I think it is more important than ever that as many people as possible have access to a rigorous education which fosters both critical thinking and an active engagement with the world around us. I myself benefitted immensely from teachers and educational systems that forced me to confront difficult things, to try and think beyond what was currently established, and to always connect what I was learning to my own lived experience.. I try to do this for my students as well, although I'll let them be the judge of how well it works. Academia currently is under attack, especially in the US but also in the UK and parts of Europe. These attacks are not just matters of policy but can become deeply personal and dangerous, as the recent sad events around Prof. Dr. Arday in the UK showed us. Universities have to be independent from political pressure in order to provide a space for students to express their thoughts freely and develop their own philosophies of knowledge. For me, Pedagogy of Resistance was a very useful book to think with, weighing up my own experiences of education with my own current role in it and my hopes for how it might develop in the future.

Giroux's Pedagogy of Resistance is split into three parts. The first, 'The Crisis of Democracy and the Deep Roots of Racial Terror' dives deeply into the state the United States found itself in 2021 and 2022. This part is deeply marked by the Covid-19 pandemic and, of course, by the first presidency of Donald J. Trump. What I wouldn't give to hear Giroux's thoughts on the second term we're currently finding ourselves in! The second part, 'The Crisis of Pedagogy' focuses on the attacks aimed against educational institutions in the US, for example political attacks against Critical Race Theory and a desire for a patriotic education. He terms this "apartheid pedagogy", which is focused on maintaining and strengthening current power structures while ignoring the urgency of issues around race/ethnicity, class, gender, climate change, and more. In the final part, 'From Hope to Resistance in the Age of Plagues', Giroux explores Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of Hope and I really liked this emphasis on the need for hope in the face of neoliberalism's and capitalism's doom narrative. I will say the book is entirely focused on the US and its cultural narratives, which means that not all of its points or lessons will be equally applicable to the rest of the world. However, its main argument, that education has always been political and takes place outside of the classroom too, is evergreen and urgently needed.

I give this book...

4 Universes!

Pedagogy of Resistance is a useful read for anyone involved in education in some way, which is probably most of us. Despite its US-focus, the book gave me a lot to think about which I will definitely take into my further work.

Review: 'Tailwind' (The Dragon Rush Series #1) by Olivia Hayward

2026-09-03T09:13:02.790+01:00

Sometimes a book hits you with all the things you enjoy, all at once, and the experience is an utter pleasure. That was Tailwind for me, which gave me not just dragons and dragon riders, but dragon racing! And then Olivia Hayward added more and made sure I had a great time. Thanks to Michael Joseph, Penguin, and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 3 September 2026
Publisher: Penguin; Michael Joseph

There has never been a female dragon rider in the Volitant Dragon Races. Until now.

Once, Lena’s flying talent promised a future for women in this thrilling, dangerous sport. But after a betrayal ended her chance for a racing career, Lena now works as a dragon keeper for the washed-up racing tyrant Thorne. Cherishing the close bond she has forged with Gottyk, Thorne’s racing dragon, Lena still yearns to fly - to race.

But when an accident takes Thorne out of action minutes from a race beginning, Lena sees a sudden, secret opportunity.

Put on Thorne's racing helmet, and take his place in Volitant.

A chance for her, and women riders everywhere, to seize their victory from the skies . . .

Everything is a series these days, or a trilogy at the very least. While I love being able to stay in a world for multiple books, the questions that do frequently arise are: 1), is it that serious? and 2), are we still telling complete stories? I do feel that often stories are stretched beyond what they can carry, leading to repetition, added misunderstandings which frustrate rather than titillate, and a pace so slow universes have collapsed by the time we reach the conclusion. I knew Tailwind was the first in a series and so I was slightly worried going in, but Olivia Hayward is a champion. What you see in the blurb is merely the first part of the book and I am very confident that other authors would have split Tailwind itself into three books already. By not doing so, Hayward lets us really spend time with the characters for a good while but also keeps the pace high and the plot going. She also throws everything at this story and, for me at least, pretty much everything sticks. We have dragon racing, we have training montages, we have fisticuffs, we have glow-ups and media shenanigans, we're putting misogynists in their place and we're learning to express our feelings, we have found family and friendship, we have a slowly developing potential romance (which is pretty much a sub-plot here so get lost with the romantasy-label!) which I know will give us some excellent yearning in the future.

Lena has always wanted to race dragons and this is not a far-flung dream. She was astounding in the junior leagues, but as a woman in a male-dominated sport there have been countless hurdles in her way. Add to that a betrayal from a childhood friend, and now Lena is a keeper, raising her beloved dragon Gottyk from hatchling for another racer, Thorne, who happens to be a misogynistic ass. When the opportunity arises to take his place, Lena joins the Volitant in disguise and races. But how long can she keep up the ruse? I thought this would be the book but, reader, it is merely Part I! We have so much more! I don't really want to discuss any of it because as we moved into Part II and then Part III I just enjoyed going with the flow. I like Lena as a main character a lot. She is stubborn but deeply loyal, a bit of a brawler and definitely emotionally constipated. She knows her own skills and her own value, but with all the pushback she gets as a woman, her struggle to fully believe it felt realistic. I also loved Josie, a fellow keeper who becomes a friend and partner-in-crime; Cam, Lena's sister; Theo, the childhood traitor and current race competitor; as well as (most of) the other dragon racers. It felt like a broad cast of characters in which each had their own personality without overwriting it. The back-and-forth between Lena and Josie was really fun to read and the developing relationship between Lena and Theo was satisfying while leaving plenty of room for drama in the following books. I also adored the dragons, because of course I did.

From what I can tell, this is a debut novel and I can only give Olivia Hayward major props. Like I said, I enjoyed the characterisation, but the world-building also felt solid for a first book. We get enough background to understand the world we're moving in, with hints at more to come, from Lena's family history to background on the dragons. What I really appreciated, though, is the clear way in which Olivia Hayward highlighted the experience of women in male-dominated fields. Lena has to deal with a broad spectrum of disrespect, from Thorne who is a consistently threatening presence, to casual asides of "pretty good for a girl" to active attempts to keep her in her place. It makes her struggle feel more realistic, but Hayward also makes sure to not make Lena the Special One, the singular girl who can take on the men. Instead, she surrounds Lena with other female characters who experience the same, who recognise the struggle and want to help, and with male characters who are willing to recognise their own part in some of this and do better. For some these themes may feel too on the nose, but I think that unfortunately we're in a time where we once again have to make it clear that this nonsense is sexist. I'm so glad Lena is the kind of character who will punch a problem, rather than appease it. Was Tailwind absolutely perfect? No, sometimes the transitions between scenes felt a bit rough and here and there some world-building info was repeated, but hopefully this was resolved in a final round of editing. Sometimes the tone also veered slightly into YA, but I had so much fun with this! I will wait patiently, but longingly, for the next book because I adore my dragons and can't wait to see what Hayward does next!

I give this book...

5 Universes!

Tailwind was exactly what I needed at this point, at once earnest about its message and a whole lot of fun! The characters are loveable, the world is fun, and the pace is more than solid. Come for the dragon racing and stay for the dragon racing and female empowerment!

Review: 'The Siren's Lament' by Jun'Ichirō Tanizaki (谷崎潤一郎), trans. by Bryan Karetnyk

2026-09-01T13:32:49.058+01:00

I've been working my way through a whole range of Pushkin Press books, exploring differen, predominantly Japanese, authors. With The Siren's Lament I found myself intrigued but also had the slight sense of being oversold on something. This might be lack of insight on my part, though. Thanks to Pushkin Press and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. My sincere apologies for the long delay in reviewing.

Pub. Date: 26 September 2023
Publisher: Pushkin Press

Featuring “The Qilin,” “The Siren’s Lament,” and the novella Killing O-Tsuya, this gorgeous new edition of 3 classic works translated by Bryan Karetnyk distills the essence of Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's shorter fiction: the co-mingling of Japanese and Chinese mythologies, the chillingly dark side of desire, and the paper-thin line between the sublime and the depraved.
“The Qilin”: The sage Confucius travels to a kingdom ruled by a struggling duke, whose pursuit of virtue is threatened by his consort's obsession desire for pleasure.
Killing O-Tsuya: A naïve servant elopes with his master's daughter, only to be plunged headlong into a world of murder and corruption.
“The Siren’s Lament”: Exhausted by a lifestyle of never-ending debauchery, a young prince finds himself in possession of a dazzling, beguiling mermaid.
The essential short works of one of the most important and widely-read figured in modern Japanese literature, author of hugely popular works including In Praise of Shadows, The Makioka Sisters, and Naomi; renowned for his investigations of family dynamics, eroticism, and cultural identity.

The Siren's Lament features two short stories and one novella. The first story, 'The Qilin', takes its inspiration from Chinese mythology and history, focusing on the travels of the sage Confucius. He encounters a duke who has been tricked into lasciviousness by his evil wife, Nanzi. Through Confucius' teachings, he becomes a good and just ruler, until the wife gets involved and reveals a fantasy of perverse and titillating cruelty. Can the duke resists? (You get exactly one guess.) Next comes the novella, 'Killing O-Tsuya'. Although its title might be considered a spoiler, this is a story of a young man, Shinsuke, and woman, O-Tsuya, who decide to elope, becoming ever more corrupted in the process. Set in Edo (now Tokyo), this story plays with the imagery of geishas, warlords, gambling, and murder and it is very evocative in places. The collection closes with 'The Siren's Lament', a story about an extravagant prince whom nothing can please until a Dutch sailor sells him a mermaid. This too is a story of debauchery and desire, but with its more fairytale-like atmosphere it also carries something of a moral.

In the introduction to these stories, we are told that Jun'Ichirō Tanizaki pushes the boundaries of what is polite, exploring the depths of humanity's depravity and sensual longings, and so when I got started on the stories I was somewhat preparing myself to be disturbed. Instead, I read three stories about women, the damned creatures, being the downfall of men who might otherwise have been good and pure. That's not really exploring anything, that's placing blame. I do appreciate that this was more in vogue around the time he initially wrote these stories, i.e. between 1910 and 1920. It is undeniable, however, that Jun'Ichirō Tanizaki had an absolute knack for atmosphere and imagery. Whether it is Nanzi's vision of pleasure reminiscent of Hellraiser, Shinsuke's seeming descent into madness, or the mermaid in The Siren's Lament, the writing is so precise that I could picture exactly what Jun'Ichirō wanted me to. For that, I am definitely on board to read more by him, in the hopes he moved beyond "woman is a demon" in his later writing years.

I give this collection...

3 Universes!

The Siren's Lament is a small collection, but it picks some intriguing works from Jun'Ichirō Tanizaki's early writing career. I think it makes for a good introduction to his writing style, which is stunning.

Review: 'This Party's Dead: Grief, Joy and Spilled Rum at the World's Death Festivals' by Erica Buist

2026-09-01T10:30:31.039+01:00

What do we do when someone dies? What shape does our grief take and how do we maintain our connection to both the living and those who have passed on? In This Party's Dead (an excellent title), Erica Buist explores death festivals across the world to find out whether death must always be grim. Thanks to Unbound and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. My sincere apologies for the delay in reviewing!

Pub. Date: 10/08/2021
Publisher: Unbound

What if we responded to death... by throwing a party?

By the time Erica Buist’s father-in-law Chris was discovered, upstairs in his bed, his book resting on his chest, he had been dead for over a week. She searched for answers (the artery-clogging cheeses in his fridge?) and tried to reason with herself (does daughter-in-law even feature in the grief hierarchy?) and eventually landed on an inevitable, uncomfortable truth: everybody dies.
While her husband maintained a semblance of grace and poise, Erica found herself consumed by her grief, descending into a bout of pyjama-clad agoraphobia, stalking friends online to ascertain whether any of them had also dropped dead without warning, unable to extract herself from the spiral of death anxiety… until one day she decided to reclaim control.
With Mexico’s Day of the Dead festivities as a starting point, Erica decided to confront death head-on by visiting seven death festivals around the world – one for every day they didn’t find Chris. From Mexico to Nepal, Sicily, Thailand, Madagascar, Japan, and finally Indonesia – with a stopover in New Orleans, where the dead outnumber the living ten to one – Erica searched for the answers to both fundamental and unexpected questions around death anxiety.

Death is both the most unavoidable part of being alive and the thing we try to avoid most. I here use 'we' as a general us, because I personally cannot wait for the sweet release of death. As some of you may know, part of my research has to do with the history of emotions, with how humans express, conceptualise, hide, write about, place their emotions. One thing that became clear the moment I began engaging with the field is that our emotions are, in many ways, socially and culturally conditioned. While an argument can be made for certain universal emotions, how we express these, and when, depends on our time and place. Growing up in Europe, I have been taught certain ways of expressing how I feel and these ways in return also shape how my emotions emerge. I have unfortunately lost a number of loved family members over the years and each time I experience not just the fresh grief, but also the old one, anew. My grief is mostly a quiet thing, although, thankfully, my family leavens its weight with humour. Thinking about this while reading Erica Buist's This Party's Dead, I found her openness about her own emotions, her struggle to know what she can or is allowed to express, and her desire to understand the absence of the fear of death in others, very touching.

Erica Buist has lost her (soon to be) father-in-law, but can a not even really yet daughter-in-law fall apart over that loss? Unsure, Erica instead falls apart generally, developing a sense of agoraphobia and intense anxiety around her loved ones' wellbeing. That is her life, until she stumbles across a death festival online and discovers that not every country or culture is quite as terrified of death as England. So Erica sets off to visit these festivals, from Mexico's Día de los Muertos to the Gai Jatra festival in Nepal, the Ognissanti in Sicily and Famadihana in Madagascar, the delight that is New Orleans and Cheng Meng in Thailand, the Obon festival in Japan, and Indonesia's Tana Toraja. Alongside these travels, which span years, Buist also explores the movement of transhumanists, which think they should never die, explores the rising cult of Santa Muerte, talks to experts in various death-related fields, and touches on personal, human stories about loss and death. I liked getting to hear about all these different festivals and how they worked. What I really appreciated here is how much space on the page Buist gives her various guides, making sure that these festivals are not presented to us only through her own point of view. Seeing how Buist deals with her own grief but also her own unconscious biases is really intriguing, but I also loved the care with which the guides explain their own thoughts and culture. The book really shines there.

Erica Buist is a journalist and from her writing in This Party's Dead you can really tell that she has experience weaving together fact-based information with personal insights for a broad audience. Whether you're intrigued by death tourism, are curious about how other countries celebrate or mourn their dead, or if you've recently lost someone and are unsure how to cope, this book is addressed to you. There is a real skill in that and Buist's writing is incredibly open, personable, and approachable. She is very honest about her own spiralling thoughts or her own almost-disgust at the mere idea of corpses and traces this back pretty clearly to her own culture and upbringing. She is also very funny, which means that despite the topic of the book and the many discussions of death, bodily fluids, corpses, ghosts, and grief, there are plenty of moments where I did have to laugh. I also really appreciated that Buist doesn't present her traveling as a kind of 'Eat, Pray, Love'-esque trip of self-discovery, where everything that is not Europe becomes a place of healing for Europeans who never have to really think about themselves. Buist is skeptical and unsure and doesn't hide the moments where she makes mistakes or is unsure. I also liked the other research she brings into the book and how the whole becomes a real meditation on grief and death without providing a template of "this is what you should do". I'm going to keep my eye out for more writing by Buist!

I give this book...

4 Universes!

This Party's Dead is an very well-written insight into the turmoil of death and grief and of finding a way into celebration and joy. It is also an excellent reminder that the world is made up of all kinds of places, cultures, and people and how much value there is in our diverse way of thinking about life and death.

Review: 'The Mother-in-Law' by Karen King

2026-08-25T11:50:08.023+01:00

You meet the love of your life and everything is suddenly perfect, except, well, he lives with his parents and his mother is maybe a little bit obsessed with him. Now what? Well, if you're Dara, you'll tough this out till you get your man. If you're me, you'll sigh but stay onboard to seew here this journey ends. Thanks to Bookouture and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. My sincere apologies for the long delay in reviewing.

Pub. Date: 29/07/2022
Publisher: Bookouture

Today is my wedding day. And I don’t know if I’ll make it out alive…
As I put my beautiful white wedding dress on, I try not to ignore my fears. I look in the mirror and feel more beautiful than I ever have before. I know marrying Sam is the right choice. He’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.
I reach for my bright yellow roses, and I force myself to be as cheerful and sunny as those flowers. I won’t dwell on everything that’s happened recently – ever since we agreed to stay with his parents for the weeks ahead of the wedding.
Glancing down at my sparkling engagement ring, I pretend to myself I can forget about the ‘accidents’ I keep having, that I can’t believe are coincidental. Or about his mother’s barbed comments, and the dark looks she gives me.
And, just for today, while I walk down the aisle towards the man of my dreams, while I say ‘I do’, I’ll try to put the secret I know about the family I am marrying into right out of my mind.
Even though that’s one secret that – if I was my soon-to-be mother-in-law – I might just kill to keep…

Evil mothers-in-law were a hot topic in domestic thrillers for quite a while. Much like the evil step-mother, the figure of the mother-in-law unites a lot of elements and occurs at exciting moments. She is a new woman who enters our protagonist's life at a crucial moment and is usually the mother of the soon-to-be husband who can throw up major hurdles to blissful wedded life. She is also not just a mother, a figure already imbued with all kinds of potential, but also a woman in her own right who has a whole history the protagonist is unfamiliar with. She is also a stereotype, which means that novels can play with the reader's expectations. Perhaps the mother-in-law isn't as bad as we feared, or perhaps she is much, much worse. And then there are weddings, events for which expectations are sky-high and where everything can go wrong. So it's no surprise that mothers-in-law featured in so many thrillers during the 2010s and early 2020s. However, I do find myself being slightly tired of her and this didn't help my reading of The Mother-in-Law. While Karen King does try to play with the type and maybe misdirect us, it didn't come together for me.

Dara meets Sam and they fall in love, a tale as old as time. Theirs is a whirlwind romance, which means Dara overlooks some of the red flags, such as Sam still living with his parents in his late thirties, the presence of his glamorous childhood-friend Tamara, and his somewhat controlling mother, Evelyn. Within months she finds herself walking down the aisle, but those months are filled with accidents both small and large, which have her questioning what kind of family she is marrying into. The Mother-in-Law technically has a lot of fun elements to it, which could have worked really well, but it is let down by its writing style a bit. A lot of this book is us being told things, rather than shown them, and time flies by. This became a major issue for me when I realised I was not buying into Dara and Sam's love at all. Within 5 pages they are in love and we are told they talk a lot and have beautiful moments together, but I never really got to see any of these. If I don't get their love I also don't get why Dara would stick through all the weirdness happening. I appreciate that King maybe wanted to highlight the whirlwind-aspect of the romance by having time flying by, but it meant that I was largely left cold by things. On top of that, some of the writing was very repetitive and Dara would consistently have the same kind of thoughts about things. I appreciate we need to build up tension and cannot immediately accuse a future mother-in-law of sabotage, but do we have to go back and forth on it quite so often? The characters also never fully came alive for me, even as they were given background.

I unfortunately did not have a good time with Karen King's writing, but I can appreciate that maybe some of that is a me-thing. I usually enjoy how much of a thriller depends on characters making silly choices, but I've come to realise that that enjoyment depends on certain elements of writing. I just couldn't buy into any aspect of The Mother-in-Law. The love didn't feel real, the thrills were minimal, Dara is so uncertain it's hard to know what she thinks or wants, Sam is a non-entity, and Evelyn has so much potential but never lives up to it. As the accidents Dara experiences ramp up, I would expect the tension to go along with it, but instead I felt like I read the same thing over and over again. Perhaps this is also because it was written in first-person and I therefore expected more actual insight or turmoil. I did want to know how Karen King was going to tie this all together and so I did have a fun afternoon racing through this book, but the fun mainly lay in getting to the ending, not in the journey itself. A whole lot happens in the last quarter or so, some of which is cleverly set up by a prologue of the wedding day, but by the time it all happened I was unaffected. I'm finding it hard to nail down why I didn't care, but I truly didn't. Long story short, this really wasn't for me, but that doesn't mean it can't be for someone else.

I give this novel...

2 Universes!

My rating might feel harsh because I did have fun with The Mother-In-Law, but I feel that this fun was in large part despite the book, rather than because of it.

Review: 'The Red Sacrament' by Sara Hinkley

2026-08-21T13:09:43.401+01:00

Look at that cover, just look at it. It drew me in immediately and the book matches its hypnotic quality perfectly. The Red Sacrament by Sara Hinkley is a rich book, full of detail, and yet I feel like it flew by. I am enormously impressed by it and it's probably going to be one of my favourite books this year. Thanks to Titan Books and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 07/07/2026
Publisher: Titan Books

Paris, 1869. The Théâtre Saint-Siméon is the place to be, if you can get in. The black slips of paper that guarantee entry are rare and highly desired, and given only to certain persons. The actors on stage are magnetic and ageless, performing only at midnight and never seen during the day…

Arnault and his clan of vampires have survived for as long as they have by observing a rigid set of rules. At night, they perform on stage at the Théâtre Saint-Siméon, picking off just enough people in the audience to survive. But they understand the city, and how to live in it without being noticed.

Their peace is shattered first with a visit from Béatrice, a witch who forms a strange connection to Arnault; then with the arrival of Victor de Rouvray and his sister Françoise, vampires from a very different world. And, as Arnault grows closer and closer to the beautiful, enigmatic Victor, he risks becoming distracted from the constant bickering of his immortal friends, from the daily running of the theatre, and worse, from the premonitions of blood, death and starvation that he receives at night.

For a terrible change is on the horizon, revolt and revolution are brewing in the streets and soon, the city, and Arnault will never be the same again.

So what happens to me often happened to me with The Red Sacrament. I saw it on NetGalley, loved the blurb, requested it, got it, and then forgot what it was about immediately until I finally sat down to read it. I don't actually mind this process because it means that I go into books almost completely blind but with the knowledge that I liked the sound of it. Not knowing something can sometimes help. This was doubly true with The Red Sacrament because after finishing it I saw some people write about its similarity to Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, specifically her character of Armand and his theatre. Now, while I eagerly follow the TV show through what people say about it on Tumblr, I haven't actually read Anne Rice's books. I have seen the Tom Cruise film and retain vague memories of it, but none of that was enough to trigger an "oh wait, this is exactly like..."-moment for me with Sara Hinkley's book. I can't really speak to the similarities, therefore, but I found Johnny Dangerously's review on Goodreads really useful in thinking about this. He argues that even though Anne Rice and Sara Hinkley's books share a starting point, they are drastically different in what they focus on, what their themes are, etc. and this rang true for me as well. To me, The Red Sacrament really feels like its own thing, but for readers more deeply familiar with Rice's work this may differ.

Arnault is in charge of his clan of vampires and the theatre they call home. They have their rules about who to eat when, just like they have their rules about who gets to perform what. Their careful life is thrown into disarray when a number of things seem to quickly change: a set of vampire twins arrives, both glamorous and somewhat odd, weird murders start to haunt Paris, and war is on the horizon. Add to that a scary visit from a witch which somehow won't let Arnault go and we have a situation ripe for drama. I really liked the characters and how heavy of a presence time becomes. Arnault is hundreds of years old and he brings all kinds of experience to the table, but he is never just one thing; he is clever and experienced, but at other times he is rash, unthinking, even forgetful. The vampires around him in his troupe are equally marked by their own pasts, their pride, vanity, kindness, or fear, but also by their long experience. Since they are actors, it is all drama and yet it is also the comfort of familiar moves, similar arguments, eventual reconciliations. More than any other vampire book I've read, The Red Sacrament emphasises the heavy weight of time, of long life. It's not just that they have a lot of memories overlapping one another, but there is also the contrast between those who are two hundred years old and those who are merely five years into vampirehood. All of that comes together to draw a really intriguing image. Add to that my perhaps favourite character, the witch Béatrice, the bustling of Paris, the never not revolutionary character of the French, the effects of the Industrial Revolution, and war, and you have a novel that is just thick, in the best ways.

It feels almost illegal that The Red Sacrament is a debut novel. The only way to describe The Red Sacrament is sumptuous. Sara Hinkley is a costume designer and you can really tell she has an incredibly eye for detail, colour, texture, light, even taste and smell. I really felt like all my senses were in play during the reading of this book and I think that has a lot to do with how obsessed I got with this book. There is also a solid control to the book, though, despite its size and expansiveness. I never felt as if Hinkley didn't know exactly what she was doing, even when we took little detours into plot lines or extensive descriptions that are perhaps, technically, not entirely necessary. If you like your prose purple, and don't think of the label "purple prose" as a negative, then The Red Sacrament is probably for you. If you like witches and vampires that are both the stuff of legends but also, somehow, still deeply humna, then The Red Sacrament is probably for you. If you, like me, often have 'À la volonté du peuple' stuck in your head, you'll probably enjoy the revolutionary drama of The Red Sacrament. If you like stories about the burden of time, the joys of art and theatre, the yearning for understanding, adn the meandering of the mind, then The Red Sacrament is definitely the book for you. I can't wait to see what Sara Hinkley writes next.

I give this book...

5 Universes!

The Red Sacrament was, in many ways, perfect to me. It was sumptuous, it was messy, it had witches but also French revolutions, and I loved its pondering about time. I think that anyone who enjoys reading about vampires and/or loves novels that are really detailed and perhaps a little purple-prosey should get to this one ASAP.

Review: 'The Everlasting' by Alix E. Harrow

2026-08-19T13:35:09.558+01:00

I finally got around to reading The Everlasting and then immediately pressed it into someone else's hands all like "read this now!". It's therefore fair to say I absolutely adored this book and it will undoubtedly be amongst my favourite reads of the year. Thanks to my dad who bought me this book for Christmas last year in exchange for eternal gratitude and devotion (jk!).

Pub. Date: October 2025
Publisher: Tor Books

Sir Una Everlasting was Dominion’s greatest hero: the orphaned girl who became a knight, who died for queen and country. Her legend lives on in songs and stories, in children’s books and recruiting posters―but her life as it truly happened has been forgotten.

Centuries later, Owen Mallory―failed soldier, struggling scholar―falls in love with the tale of Una Everlasting. Her story takes him to war, to the archives―and then into the past itself. Una and Owen are tangled together in time, bound to retell the same story over and over again, no matter what it costs.

But that story always ends the same way. If they want to rewrite Una’s legend―if they want to tell a different story--they’ll have to rewrite history itself.

I am a medievalist, specifically I am someone who works with medieval literature and that means I am deeply attuned to how stories from the past impact the present. Many medieval works were foundational to the period of nation-building during the 19th and 20th centuries, as countries started looking for their "own" history and identity. To do so, they reached back to the Middle Ages, be it Das Nibelungenlied for Germany, El Cid for Spain, Le Chanson de Roland for France, or Beowulf for England. Of course there are other texts as well, but what all these texts share is a hero, a fighter, a warrior or knight, whose bravery and heroism comes to stand in for the spirit of a nation. We saw the horrible consequences this can have in how the Nibelungen material and associated Old Norse mythology was used by the Third Reich during World War II. It can also be beautiful, however, this reaching back and connecting to something older, creating a continuity between yourself and what has come before, thereby preparing the ground for what is to come. I bring all of that to reading The Everlasting and therefore I am quite comfortable in saying I might be its ideal reader. Give me a tragic knight, especially if that knight is a woman, give me legends and tales, give me historians and literary scholars tracing stories, and give me a love that will make me choke up.

Owen Mallory is a scholar who has the best day and the worst day of his life when a mysterious book is delivered to him which seems to be a legitimate contemporary telling of Sir Una Everlasting's life and death, centuries ago. Sir Una is foundational to the country of Dominion and Owen has spent his life dedicated to her, following propaganda posters of her into war before ending up studying her stories at university. Getting the book should be the best thing ever, except it is not just a book and Owen finds himself in the past, following Sir Una as she follows the path laid out for her. As the blurb reveals, Owen and Una will walk this path again and again, her story will be told and retold, and as Alix E. Harrow weaves this web, we will not only come to understand who Una and Owen really are, but also what the power of storytelling is. I adored Una, who I fully imagined as Gwendoline Christie as Brienne of Tarth, and while I miss reading about her I am also very pleased for her that her story is her own now. I initially needed some time to get onboard with Owen. Perhaps, as an academic, I felt called out, who knows. (Harrow used to be an academic as well I believe, so maybe that's why it hits home.) As we revisit their story, however, I became very fond of them both and evermore intrigued by the world they were building. While most of The Everlasting, I would say, is told through Owen's perspective, Una also gets to tell the story and I loved how they seemed to communicate with one another through their stories. (Perhaps I should finally read This Is How You Lose the Time War...)

I heard about this book from Cari Can Read on YouTube, who had read Harrow's short story 'The Six Deaths of the Saint' and then dove into The Everlasting. While not the same, from what I can tell, the short story and novel share a similar impulse and I can imagine that in its brevity, the short story packs a different kind of punch than the novel. I haven't read the short story (yet) but I do wholeheartedly love this book. It is my literal job to compare narratives, track patterns of scattered details across stories, and trace the influence of legends through centuries, so of course I was going to enjoy this in my spare time as well. For some readers it might need some getting used to to revisit the same storyline multiple times, but the beauty really is in the details, in the things that change and stay the same. The Everlasting's approach to time travel also worked for me. With Owen going back centuries to literally write the story of what happened, these small changes have a big impact and continuity and time become suspect in and of themselves. Time travel cannot be neat, in my opinion, it is too complex of a thought to make complete sense and books that attempt to make it all fit often don't work for me. By using that complexity for her story, I think Harrow finds a good way through the timey-wimey-ness of it all. This was my first time actually reading Alix E. Harrow, but since I also have The Once and Future Witches waiting on my literal bookshelf, I will be reading more of her very soon.

I give this novel...

5 Universes!

The Everlasting is a beautiful book about the power of stories and the power of love duking it out. Una Everlasting is my favourite knight, Owen is an academic truly going above and beyond for the research, and I am a devoted new fan of Alix E. Harrow.

Review: 'Dragon Palace' by Hiromi Kawakami (川上弘美 ), trans. by Ted Goossen

2026-08-19T12:52:01.223+01:00

Look at that cover, at how unsettling that pale octopus feels against the darkness of the background. Consider how somehow the lack of capitals makes the title feel like an unfinished thought, something still becoming. All those weird feelings are embodied by the stories collected in Dragon Palace. While I still feel unsure about exactly how I feel, I do know I am very intrigued by Kawakami. Thanks to Stone Bridge Press and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I apologise sincerely for the long delay!

Pub. Date: 29/09/2023
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press; MONKEY

Stories from a Japanese master of transformative fiction, where reality, myth, and human foibles meet shifting dimensions of gender, biology, and destiny.
From the bestselling author of Strange Weather in Tokyo comes this otherworldly collection of eight stories, each a masterpiece of transformation, infused with humor, sex, and the universal search for love and beauty—in a world where the laws of time and space, and even species boundaries, don’t apply. Meet a shape-shifting con man, a goddess who uses sex to control her followers, an elderly man possessed by a fox spirit, a woman who falls in love with her 400-year-old ancestor, a kitchen god with three faces in a weasel-infested apartment block, moles who provide underground sanctuary for humans who have lost the will to live, a man nurtured through life by his seven extraordinary sisters, and a woman who is handed from husband to husband until she is finally able to return to the sea.

Dragon Palace contains eight stories, each of which is odder than the other and yet they all come together quite nicely as well. In 'Hokusai', a disaffected young man meets a strange guy who swears he used to be an octopus. As they move from bar to bar, he narrates his strange life. In 'Dragon Palace' we meet a woman who is being visited by her diminutive great-grandmother, who was once the prophet or god of a cult and has some utterly strange stories to tell. 'Fox's Den' is about a middle-aged woman who develops an odd kind of relationship with the elderly man she cares for, which may or may not involve conversations about feces and transformations. 'Mole' was one of my favourite stories about a couple who may or may not be anthropomorphised moles (?) who pick up the tired and weary in the city and take them underground, where they either recover ... or not. 'The Kitchen God' is also very intriguing to me, about a woman who eats the plaster in her kitchen and prays to its god, while having strained relationships with those around her. 'The Roar' is something straight out of a fairy or folklore tale about a boy who, as he grows up, moves into the care of his different sisters, who are also his teachers and lovers. Deeply weird but gorgeous imagery. In 'Shimazaki' we live in a world where some people live for centuries and so a woman finds herself in something of a relationship with an ancestor of hers. The collection's last story, 'Sea Horse' is about a woman who once was a sea horse and has been passed along by various men for years and is now confronted with the fact that her own daughter is distinctly "of the sea".

I am new to Hiromi Kawakami's writing, but I found s.penkevich's review on Goodreads really useful to get an overview of her oeuvre and writing style. I fully agree with him that there is a quietness to her writing which sneaks up on you. It is all so matter-of-fact and straightforward and then suddenly something hooks you, or at least it did for me. He also notes how many of the stories in Dragon Palace veer into the taboo, especially when it comes to matters of sex and love. Sex is a palpable presence in almost all of the stories, often as something that is desirable but also identity-shifting, forceful, shocking. Sex becomes the way in which characters encounter a fuller truth of themselves and one another, where the line between the human and the animal blurs. There is also a difference whether the protagonist is male or female, although for all love seems of secondary, if any, importance. I think it is only 'Mole' where there is no overt focus on sexuality and this is one of the tenderest stories, in many ways, while also featuring a protagonist who is more solidly on the animal side of the equation. As a woman, I found my own reaction to these stories really interesting. In some, like 'The Roar', the fantastical/folklore-esque nature of the story made it easier to put the violence of sex aside, whereas I found this harder to do with others, like the 'Sea Horse'. I'm really intrigued to read more by Hiromi Kawakami, perhaps also by different translators, although from what I can tell Ted Goossen did an excellent job at capturing the slightly distanced tone of the stories.

I give this collection...

4 Universes!

Although the stories in Dragon Palace are deeply strange and also off-putting at times, I have been thinking about them frequently since reading them. That kind of staying power speaks of its own kind of quality, so everyone who is into weird fiction should give these a go.

Review: 'The Intrigue' by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

2026-08-17T14:24:20.802+01:00

I love reading books about questionable people, people whose motives deserve a solid side-eye, especially when those characters are written by someone who can handle them. Silvia Moreno-Garcia absolutely can and The Intrigue is a sweltering, slippery, delightful read for it. Thanks to Del Rey and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 14/07/2026
Publisher: Del Rey

Handsome con artist Ulises has long charmed lonely women via letters in order to steal their money, but money is hard to come by in 1940s Mexico. Ulises knows his looks won’t last forever, and he’s desperate to get his hands on a real fortune.

He thinks he’s found it when he captivates his newest correspondent, Perla, the owner of a small-town boardinghouse in picturesque Veracruz. But when he meets her, he finds something he didn’t expect. The woman has a niece, Inés, who is as observant as she is desperate to escape her aunt’s household.

When Inés discovers Ulises’s true intentions, she wants in on the scheme. They’ll convince her aunt that Ulises is a great catch, Perla will marry him, and her money will vanish. Easy, fast, and clean. But Perla is not the desperate, silly spinster Ulises imagines. She harbors secrets. And although Ulises does not believe in true romance, Inés is more alluring than he bargained for. Suddenly, a simple plan may become perilously complicated.

Venture into the streets of a small town where a patina of convention and good manners conceals a cauldron of avarice and lust.

All kinds of influences come together in The Intrigue in a way that makes it both very rich but also still its own thing. It is a kind of noir novel, full of cigarette smoke and sips of brandy. It is also deeply influenced by novels known as novelas costumbristas, as Silvia Moreno-Garcia explains in the Notes at the end of the book. These are novels which depict, but crucially also question and analyse, the customs or traditions of a society. In The Intrigue, Moreno-Garcia takes a very sharp scalpel to the mores and oddities of Puerco Ahogado, an imagined town in Veracruz. Add to that a love for telenovelas and we get a delightfully sticky tale of all kinds of things gone rotten. Moreno-Garcia has emphasised that this should not be tagged as Gothic on Goodreads, since it is not technically a Gothic novel. No supernatural elements here, as we might expect from her other books. And yet... I feel some Gothic vibes, specifically elements of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë which, despite its lack of ghosts, is distinctly Gothic in nature. While many think of the Gothic as definitively paranormal, the genre is just as marked by its engagement with and haunting by the past itself. If ever there were characters who are burdened by the past, tied down by ancestral and familial dictums, chained to a piece of land they'd rather leave behind, then it is the people in The Intrigue. So, to honour Moreno-Garcia's request, I'm not going to tag this as Gothic, but I would recommend lovers of the Gothic to give it a try.

Ulises is running out of money, and probably goodwill, so he singles out his next con target: Perla. Ulises hops on a train and makes his way to her village, where she runs a boardinghouse from her family's old ancestral mansion. But not all is as it seemed in Perla's letters. She is not easily fooled by romantic gestures and on top of that she has a niece, Inés, who catches on to him pretty quickly. But it turns out Inés also has her issues and perhaps, in joining forces with Ulises, she too can gain what she wants most. Told through the perspectives of Ulises, Inés, and Perla, The Intrigue weaves a web of lust and vice, long-harboured secrets and hidden shame, power and vulnerability. We spend a lot of time with Ulises initially, as he is our introduction to Perla and Inés, before we then get to hear from the women as well. I adored Inés pretty much straightaway and even Ulises is charming in how lost he is, even though he scams women. Perla is a tough nut to crack but what I really like is that Moreno-Garcia manages to strike that difficult balance of letting her be cruel but also letting us see the woman behind that. As we see Perla's memories, we come to understand why she is how she is, but we also get to see that she has no interest in being any other way. She could be better, kinder, less of a hypocrite, but she chooses not to. It is a difficult kind of character to nail, just as it is difficult to make me like a man who scams women, but if anyone could have done it, it was apparently Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a stunning writer, whether it's her imagery, the character work she does, setting, atmosphere, I just feel like she nails it consistently. Pretty much every book I've read by her I've enjoyed immensely and the same is true for The Intrigue. Like I mentioned up above, I'm amazed she had me as invested in Ulises and as understanding for Perla as I was in the end. I loved Inés from the start though, our caged bird who longs to be free, and I would still say that although The Intrigue begins with Ulises, the book is really about her. What I also liked a lot about this novel was its questionable morality. Now, important critical reading reminder: an author is not their character, is not their narrator, is not their novel. None of this is to do with Moreno-Garcia, except that she has the craft to depict it. But what I loved about The Intrigue was that it gave us a world that is cruel and capricious, in which people take advantage of and hurt one another, but it is also a world full of small kindnesses, if you know where to look. It is also a world in which victory looks like trying to get away with murder or robbing a spinster. I do feel like our fiction is too clean sometimes, with "villains" who literally wouldn't hurt a fly and would never even consider a true crime or misdeed. Give me characters and stories where people do have to look themselves in the mirror and admit they would go very far indeed to get what they want, even if they'll feel bad about to begin with. For those reasons alone, The Intrigue was great. That it is gorgeously written and great fun is why it is also superb.

I give this novel...

5 Universes!

I had a great time with The Intrigue, which is beautiful and dirty at the same time. I have enjoyed Moreno-Garcia's more paranormal novels, but I love how she leaves the paranormal behind here and creates a very specific image of humanity itself at its best and worst.

Review: '(Mostly) Human Resources' (Entity Case Files #1) by Grace Viall

2026-08-15T14:55:48.655+01:00

HR is HR, whether you're managing your regular, average desk worker or whether your team is made up of monster hunters. Actually, no, managing monster hunters brings unique chalenges, as Alexys quickly finds out in (Mostly) Human Resources. Thanks to Crooked Lane Books, Alcove Press, and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 04/08/2025
Publisher: Crooked Lane Books; Alcove Press

Working in human resources was not what Alexys had in mind when she joined Entity, the private company that categorizes and manages the world’s cryptids. But after her dad was killed on the job as a Warden in the Appalachian Mountains, she was filled with noble ideas of carrying on his legacy . . . from the safety of a desk. Alexys dreams of climbing the corporate ladder while managing the Appalachian Wardens and sparring with Nic, the frustrating (and annoyingly attractive) Director of Research and Cataloging.

When one of Alexys’s new Wardens goes missing after inquiring about a mysterious and highly dangerous monster, her chances of promotion disappear along with him. Determined to save her career—and to shield the Warden’s family from the trauma she experienced after losing her father on the job—she marches off into the monster-infested wilderness to find him herself.

Meanwhile, Nic, with ambitions of becoming the youngest Entity employee to discover a new monster, follows Alexys on her hunt. But the work nemeses are about to discover why the Appalachian Mountains are the last place you want to find yourself after dark. Among mountains older than bones, the jackalopes and ghouls are the least of their worries . . .

I love the ideas Grace Viall is working with in (Mostly) Human Resources. Alexys works for Entity, which is charged with categorising and managing the cryptids of the world. This means chasing down the mentions of Black Dogs, but also dealing with endless amounts of emails about conspiracy theories. I loved all the hints we got about the potential for broader worldbuilding though. There is the suggestion that cryptids drastically increased some time ago, which leads to the question why? There is also the creeping suspicion that Entity is shifting its own approach, maybe hiding how much it knows about things like magic, which makes you wonder. These hints are dropped in dialogue, in the thoughts of our narrators, and through the Entity Handbook quotes that begin each chapter. I really enjoyed picking up on these and spinning them into broader questions, even if I accepted that (Mostly) Human Resources would probably not answer them all. But guess what, this is a series! Did I know that this was the first book in a series when I started? No. Did I know it was a first book in a series by the time we got halfway through? No, but I did think it would be fun to read more set in this world and with these characters. Did I only properly realise this was the first book in a series when I turned the final page and thought oh? Yup. Now, I am really excited to dive into this world more and I hope Viall addresses the above themes in further novels. I will definitely be sat for sequels, even if not everything about (Mostly) Human Resources fully came together for me.

Alexys is having a horrible time in her HR job. It's not even that she doesn't like her job, because she does enjoy sending out her Wardens to investigate cryptids for Entity. She enjoys chatting to her friend and co-worker Natalie or sharing cookies with her boss and even finds a grim satisfaction in her slow-burning rivalry with the director of Research and Cataloging, Nic. Most importantly, she likes feeling connected to her dad, who also worked at Entity. If only her nights could stop being plagued by nightmares that seem oddly supernatural in their own right, and things could be good! But then she finds out this year's evaluation of the Wardens must take place in the field and when she arrives in the middle of nowhere, her Warden has gone majorly MIA. Off Alexys goes into the Appalachian Mountains, famed for being deeply off and creepily ancient. (Did you know the Appalachian Mountains are older than trees?!) But she's not alone because Nic is hot on her heels in the hopes of finding out more about a mysterious creature that is rarely seen. I had a good old romp with (Mostly) Human Resources, which finds a delightful balance between being a workplace comedy, a horror novel, and a romance.

This is Grace Viall's debut novel and while it holds great promise, it is definitely still a little rough around the edges. The good news is, that those are all things that experience and a good editor will take care of quickly! Most of (Mostly) Human Resources is told from Alexys' POV, but at about a quarter in we start getting chapters from Nic's perspective as well. I did like Alexys, with her weird nightmares, hero-worship of her dad, and dreadful fear of being a burden or disappointing anyone. This characterisation could have been fleshed out a bit more, or have been given more time to fully develop, as sometimes Alexys does clumsily crash from one thought or feeling into another, but there was enough there for me to get the idea of her character. Similarly, Nic has enough of a background and personality that he is more than a hot nerd for Alexys to develop a crush on. Grace Viall absolutely shines when it comes to the descriptions of the cryptids, creating gorgeously creepy imagery and drawing expertly on Appalachian folklore. For this I will keep coming back to this series! However, there is a rushed quality to parts of the book and things that never get fully worked out. In part that is due this being a part of the series and I fully get wanting to set up a next book, but I still think the main story should be fully told within the one book. So I do have some issues with (Mostly) Human Resources, but these are all things that I think Grace Viall will master as she continues writing.

I give this novel...

4 Universes!

What stays with me most from this book is the intrigue of the world itself, the potential for where it could go, and the fun I had with it. It is especially the fun which ended up swaying me in the rating. So, if you like your cryptids, don't mind a little "will they, won't they", and know the pain of an endless inbox, then give (Mostly) Human Resources a go!

Review: 'Cross My Heart, I Hope You Die' by Mallory Arnold

2026-08-13T10:09:16.895+01:00

*Stefan from SNL-voice* This book has everything! Cabins in the woods, abandoned mountains, A CULT, weird villagers, a horrible boyfriend, female friendship and female betrayal, slasher films, and so much snow. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that I had great fun with Mallory Arnold's Cross My Heart, I Hope You Die. Thanks to Poisoned Pen Press and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 14/07/2026
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press

One isolated cabin. One cheating boyfriend. One plan to get even.
When Nora, Ruby, and Cham discover that they've each been dating the same man, what starts as outrage quickly spirals into a plot for revenge. Together they hatch a plan to lure their boyfriend to a romantic getaway in a secluded cabin at the top of a snow-covered mountain.
Only what was meant to be harmless payback soon takes a chilling turn when their not-so-adoring boyfriend is found dead in the cabin.
Stranded and snowed in, the women begin to look at each other with increasing suspicion. And as tensions rise, hidden motives come to light. To survive, each woman must confront her own demons as they fight to uncover if one of them is the killer, or if something else lurks in the freezing wilderness, waiting to pick them off one by one.

I had to put the book aside after chapter 1 because we start Cross My Heart with a horrible boyfriend who is scamming his girlfriends out of significant amounts of the money. The reason I had to put it aside was because I wanted to strangle him and yell at our girls for not trusting their instincts and refusing. However, once I got past that and returned to the book, I had a great old time with it. As mentioned above, this book truly has almost everything that you might encounter in a thriller. Considering just how much is going on, I was impressed that Mallory Arnold manages to keep it all pretty cohesive and tightly plotted. I think the novel probably also could have worked if we removed certain elements, but with everything that is going on the novel gives you a really nice "oh my God now what" feeling that keeps you engaged.

Nora, Ruby, and Cham share the misfortune of one POS boyfriend shared between them. When they realise what is going on, they confront him and he disappears, but that is very much not the end of it. With the police utterly useless, they come up with a plot to scare him into confessing which involves an abandoned cabin in the snowy woods on an isolated mountain. That's already quite a plan, but obviously it all goes awry. We are clued in to the fact that everything goes wrong by the fact that Cross My Heart actually starts at the end, with a police interrogation. The novel switches back and forth between this interrogation and the happenings themselves, building up a nice kind of tension as reveals in one timeline influence the other. I also liked that the interrogation was written up as a report, so that we got to play with some different mediums as well. Nora, Ruby, and Cham each get their own POVs which aren't necessarily differentiated by voice but each has her own clear identity and her own issues to deal with. It means that the reader is not just wondering what is going to happen but also how these women will work together, if there is betrayal in the air, and if certain secrets will be revealed. This allows for some nice red herrings but also a real sense of women supporting women's rights and women's wrongs.

I read Mallory Arnold's How To Survive a Horror Story last year and really enjoyed it. At the time I especially liked Arnold's inventiveness and eye for great imagery, but felt that we could do a bit more with characterisation and also just tightening up how we plot. With Cross My Heart I can definitely see how Arnold's control over her craft has developed. Our three protagonists feel like their own kind of characters, even if their voices aren't super differentiated, and there is a clear propulsive thrust to the plot. One thing that both Cross My Heart and How To Survive share, however, is that Arnold can tell a really fun story. While of course there is the horror and the terror of it all, there is also a real sense of enjoyment to her writing. I'm not sure how to best describe this, actually, because we have creepy cults, deaths, buckets of blood, all kinds of gross stuff that Arnold definitely manages to make creepy, but throughout it all I also just had a lot of fun with it. It's basically the kind of joy you get out of watching a slasher film where you know it's all too absurd to really happen, and I mean that as a compliment because I love that. It does mean that perhaps readers who are looking for an all-out horror may feel differently about the book. Or maybe it means I've read too many of these books and my scary-levels are way off. I am really enjoying Arnold's books, however, and look forward to what she cooks up next!

I give this novel...

4 Universes!

Cross My Heart, I Hope You Die is a little bit of a bonkers, everything but the kitchen sink, kind of thriller and I had a great time with it. Tightly-plotted and well told, Mallory Arnold presents a really fun story that shows her development as an author as well. Come for the cabin in the woods and stay for the girl power!

Review: 'Home Sick' by Rhiannon Grist

2026-08-13T09:44:30.743+01:00

I saw quite a bit of hype for this book after I requested a review copy of it and that made me nervous. If you've read reviews of mine before, you know that I tend to avoid books at the height of their hype because I want to make up my own mind. But then I gave in and started Home Sick and basically didn't put it down until I was done with it! I had a great, but difficult time, which is, I think, the point. Thanks to Solaris and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 14/07/2026
Publisher: Solaris

“The symmetry should have tipped me off.”

After a violent incident at work, Tamsin goes looking for a fresh start in a remote cottage far away from her old life. Here she could make real friends, find a job she loves, become a whole new person, even.

But the solitary cottage is actually a semi-detached, with only a thin wall separating her from a total stranger. Her neighbour is an enigma. Dowdy one moment, vivacious the next, but always wearing an unnerving smile. Tamsin can’t shake the feeling that there’s something wrong with her, especially when she starts experiencing disturbances in her own home.

As the locals share strange stories about her house, and her barely contained paranoia spirals out of control, Tamsin begins to suspect that the past she was so desperate to escape might never let her go.

What first drew me to Home Sick was its tag line: 'This house isn't haunted. She is.' While the house in Home Sick definitely has haunted vibes, it is truly its protagonist, Tamsin, who is haunted by her own past. Rhiannon Grist draws on various genres and histories to create the kind of environment in which a katabasis can take place. Katabasis is not just the title of a R.F. Kuang book, it is a Greek word that means a descent, often into Hell (hence why Kuang named her book thusly), but also, within literature, into the earth or the subconscious. In Home Sick, Rhiannon Grist tells of a katabasis into the self, perhaps the most difficult one around. Tamsin has to face not just her past, but also her own perception of it and herself and in some ways this is quite difficult to read. Although I don't have the same experiences as Tamsin, I do have ones that fall into similar categories and so there was something difficult but also cathartic (look, another Greek word!) about following Tamsin into the dark.

Tamsin arrives at the house she bought on something of a panicked whim when she had to leave her life behind. Now here she is, in the countryside, and it turns out that it's actually a semi-detached and she has a weird neighbour. But Tamsin needs to get away, start fresh, and so she tries, she really does. She talks to her neighbour, she goes into the village, she buys a rug, but nothing is quite right. Her neighbour makes weird noises at night, the villagers are odd, and the rug is too small. This is only the start of her problems though and it becomes clear that she needs to not jsut face her past but, most importantly, herself. We spend almost all of Home Sick inside Tamsin's slowly spiralling thoughts and as the reader you pick up on the fact that something is actually, supernaturally wrong much quicker than she does. This could, with a different author perhaps, have led to me disliking Tamsin and sometimes I did want to shake her, but there is an immense amount of care in her characterisation. I also liked the surrounding characters, especially how my thoughts about them changed as Tamsin's did.

With Home Sick Rhiannon Grist crafts a delightfully uncomfortable reading experience. We are presented a protagonist who is evasive about her past, angry but also so scared, judgemental and confused, in short, deeply unreliable. I found myself really caring for her, though, and thus getting really involved in her story. Home Sick draws on aspects of the Gothic, a genre that is deeply focused on the past as a source of torment, a place that needs to be confronted in order to move on. Grist similarly uses folklore as a way of laying out Tamsin's journey and I loved those elements as well. Both come together in the idea of the doppelganger, a mirror that reflects your best or your worst qualities and makes you question who you really are. These existential questions about whether you actually exist, if it even matters, and who you even are, make up the heart of the novel and I really enjoyed that. There are definitely scenes in Home Sick that play with horror and terror and they also worked very well for me, although I wouldn't say Home Sick is actively scary. The terror is a part of the experience, rather than the focus, if that makes sense. The novel also presents an interesting meditation on violence and anger, on how our emotions are useful and important but can also overrun us. Most of Home Sick was great but sometimes it felt a little too neat, considering the messiness it deals with. I very much look forward to reading more by Rhiannon Grist in the future!

I give this novel...

4 Universes!

Home Sick definitely lived up to the hype for me! For me, it struck the perfect balance between being delightfully creepy and being insightful, creating beautiful imagery and making a point.

Review: 'House of Margins' by Tlotlo Tsamaase

2026-08-13T09:04:40.894+01:00

I love a good book about books, a book that deals with the intricacies of not just writing but also publishing, for whom we're writing, what kind of stories we can or should tell, and more. In House of Margins Tlotlo Tsamaase does exactly that while also engaging with the haunted house, racism, colonialism, loss, sisterhood, faith, and more. While not all of it worked entirely for me, this was a very interesting and good read. Thanks to Erewhon Books and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 26/05/2026
Publisher: Erewhon Books

Anaya Sebeya is missing.

Before her disappearance, Anaya was a brilliant writer: a rising star. Invited to a prestigious writing residency at Günter Huis, an eerie colonial mansion on the slopes of Devil’s Peak, Anaya was supposed to craft the next great African literary masterpiece—and so were four other young, emerging writers, all competing for the grand prize. But Anaya never made it home.

When a sensationalized true crime podcast about Anaya emerges, claiming to reveal everything that happened at Günter Huis, her sister Ranewa is both skeptical and furious. But with each surreal episode, Ranewa begins to piece together a truth worse than she ever could have imagined…

At Günter Huis, Anaya’s nightmares consume her. Time slips away from her. Günter Huis inflicts distorted visions and terrible supernatural visitations, pushing Anaya to tell a story no one dares. But exorcising the house’s endless cycle of evil requires a sacrifice that neither Anaya nor her fellows are ready to make.

A novel that is, in large part, a critique of not just racism but specifically also racism within the publishing industry, which asks African authors to adjust their writing, efface themselves and their languages, remove uncomfortable topics, etc. can be a little difficult to critique or review. I've been thinking of how to write this review because, in a way, House of Margins itself preempts or addresses what could be potential points of criticism from readers like myself (white, anglophone/European). The feedback Anaya gets, for example, to remove the Motswana from her writing because international readers won't understand it, is something I could mention in this review, since I don't speak Motswana and therefore also didn't understand the phrases Tsamaase uses throughout. I did enjoy the Motswana, however, and I also did enjoy how Tsamaase moves in this meta-fictional book. One of the reasons that I enjoy writing book reviews is that it encourages me to read beyond my own comfort zone and House of Margins is, in many ways, outside of my comfort zone. Despite being half-Dutch, I'm not as informed on Dutch colonialism and imperialism in Africa as I should be. Despite reading a lot and engaging with the publishing industry in various ways, I don't necessarily have the insight I should when it comes to the barriers thrown up for non-white authors. In this book, Tlotlo Tamaase made me confront these aspects, as well as what I expect of a narrative. I don't know if House of Margins will work for everyone and I don't even know if all of it worked for me, but I did find it very intriguing and informative, as well as gripping.

House of Margins is the story of two sisters, Anaya and Ranewa, but it is also the story of the suffering of African women and the story of the impenetrability of the publishing industry. Told through different mediums and in a style that borrows from surrealism and magical realism, it is no straightforward read. Anaya went missing a year ago on the evening of the the winner announcement of the Günther Huis writing competition. Now, a year later, one of the other competitors, the only white woman there, is releasing a podcast about it all which seems to appropriate Anaya's voice, while her sister, Ranewa, is still deeply impacted by her loss. When Anaya's phone suddenly appears to Ranewa, containing not just the podcast but also seemingly lost episodes by Anaya herself, Ranewa decides to try and find her sister, come what may. What unfolds is a story about writing and art, about publishing, about appropriating voices, about the horrors of slavery and imperialism, and about sisterhood. I recently ranted (a little) about a different book where I felt that the violence and horror served no clear purpose. That is not the case with House of Margins. While there is violence and horror that is difficult to face, these things are there for clear narrative and thematic reasons.

I read a part of Tlotlo Tsamaase's previous book, Womb City, and while I really enjoyed much of it, there was a point about halfway through where I had to put it down. I haven't come back to it since, but reading House of Margins has encouraged me to go back to it. There is something confronting about Tsamaase's writing. It's not that the tone is confrontational or that the stories are too out there, or anything like that, but as I mentioned at the top, reading Tsamaase's work really reminds me how much of my reading is still very white and Europe-focused. I have the same experience when reading, for example, Korean or Japanese literature, which makes me realise how much my expectations of what a book is like and how it might tell a story is shaped by Western literary expectations. In reading House of Margins I really liked how Tsamaase crafted her story, how her sentences were balanced between short and punchy on the one hand, and magical and surreal on the other. I also like how she builds the thoughts of her characters and unravels, slowly but surely, the complexities of their lived realities. The mix of media, from podcast episodes to different kinds of writing, was really interesting although I can imagine that perhaps it won't work for all readers. Overall, I had a really good time reading House of Margins and walked away with a lot to think about and a desire to both go back to Womb City and read more by Tsamaase in the future!

I give this novel...

4 Universes!

If my rating scale was different I'd probably give this 4,5 because I really like what Tsamaase does in House of Margins. It is a difficult and painful story she is telling, but she does it in a way that is not just necessary and important but also interesting from a literary craft perspective.

Review: 'Carrion Crow' by Heather Parry

2026-07-07T12:34:53.379+01:00

Getting ready for married life can be quite a challenge, although few women would likely find themselves in the same position as Marguerite, who has been locked into the attic by her mother. Much of Carrion Crow is intriguing, but unfortunately I had some real issues with it as well. Thanks to Steerforth & Pushkin and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 30/06/2026
Publisher: Steerforth & Pushkin; Pushkin Press

Marguerite Périgord is locked in the attic of her family home, a towering Chelsea house overlooking the stinking Thames.

For company she has a sewing machine, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, and a carrion crow who has come to nest in the rafters. Restless, she spends her waning energies on the fascinations of her own body, memorising Mrs. Beeton’s advice and longing for life outside.

Cécile Périgord has confined her daughter Marguerite for her own good.

Cécile is concerned that Marguerite’s engagement to a much older, near-penniless solicitor, will drag the family name – her husband’s name, that is – into disrepute. And for Cécile, who has worked hard at her own betterment, this simply won’t do. Cécile’s life has taught her that no matter how high a woman climbs she can just as readily fall.

Of course, both have their secrets, intentions and histories to hide. As Marguerite’s patience turns into rage, the boundaries of her mind and body start to fray.

And neither woman can recognise what the other is becoming.

Fusing grisly body horror with raw and evocative prose, this unforgettably haunting gothic novel from award-winning author Heather Parry is a story of mothers and daughters, and the dual capacity for both great kindness and unfathomable cruelty.

I was really intrigued by much of Carrion Crow but there is one thing that has sort of stuck in my craw and which I want to address first. I'm not quite sure when I first heard of Blanche Monnier, whether it was in a book, a podcast, or somewhere online, but I have known about her for years. Blanche was born in 1849 in Poitiers, France, to a noble family and when she was twenty-seven, her mother and brother locked her in the attic because she wanted to marry an older lawyer. She was found there twenty-five years later, covered in filth and emaciated, after an anonymous tip to the police. This case is well-known and most reviews I've scrolled through of Carrion Crow on Goodreads reference it. And yet, there is no direct, explicit reference to Blanche in the book itself, or at least in my advanced reading copy. In a foreword/preamble to the book, Heather Parry refers to hearing about 'some woman' (literal quote) and then goes on to speak about her personal connection to Mrs. Beeton's advice book. In an interview with the Glasgow Review of Books, however, Parry states that Blanche's story provided the 'focus to what [she] was trying to do' (Source) with the book. Why, then, if we are so interested in the violence being perpetrated against women, want to draw real truths out of fiction, and want to give voice to things hardly discussed, are we not mentioning Blanche's name in our fore- or afterword?! I appreciate this might feel like a petty point, but Carrion Crow is so visceral, so explicit about the deprivation and pain Marguerite experiences, building off of the real horror Blanche experienced, that I just don't know why you would call the latter 'some woman' and not at the very least honour her by telling us her name. It feels counter to the themes the novel aims to address, which means I also find the horror of the story more difficult to swallow. (Again, perhaps this is amended in the published book, in which case all of this is about my experience rather than the finished product itself.)

Carrion Crow is about Marguerite, who has been looked into the attic by her mother Cécile. Marguerite had a plan, which was to marry a boring lawyer so that she could escape her childhood home, live an independent life, and be with the woman she really loves. Cécile told her, however, that in order to be ready for marriage, she needs to prepare, so up to the attic we go with a copy of Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management to learn from. The novel starts with Marguerite already up there, trying her very best to somehow figure out what exactly it is her mother wants her to learn. Time is a blurry concept in this book, passing in the blink of an eye, the span of a paragraph. Marguerite is not entirely alone in her isolation, as a crow nests in between the attic and roof, but this is a bleak replacement for any kind of love or interaction she might otherwise have. Marguerite's slow descent into madness is intersected with chapters about Cécile's own youth and marriage, tracing her working-class roots, her enchantment at marrying into nobility, and the harsh bargains she has to make to keep herself afloat in the end. Cécile works like a villain in Carrion Crow, although the chapters about her do give a certain insight into her. I found these conversations about violence and trauma between mothers and daughters intriguing, as there is a lot there to work with, but they don't quite make it to centre stage in the novel. What really stands out about Carrion Crow is the body horror of it all. This book is viscerally disgusting in many ways, tracing the collapse of Marguerite's body right alongside her mind. Now, there is nothing wrong with body horror in and of itself and in fact much can be said for the approach taken here, but it is nonetheless something you should be aware of going in.

I've laid out my main issue with Carrion Crow above, which is how I feel Heather Parry approaches her source material. Undeniably this novel is historical fiction, Parry's own creation and story, but it is, as she acknowledges herself, indebted to Blanche Monnier's life. That aside, I am very impressed with how the novel is written, even if it there were moments where I seriously considered taking a break because it was making me uneasy in my own body. The novel's main selling point and potentially its biggest drawback for many is the detail with which Parry writes. I could picture the attic, its every piece of furniture, the crow's nest, the cracked bathtub a floor lower, the streets of London, the nets in the aviary. Parry brings her London to life with these details and it makes for a vivid reading experience. Equally vivid, however, is the decay of Marguerite's body, which oozes, cracks, disintegrates, and expands in ways that are visceral. As I said above, I think there can be value to this kind of explicit, dark, upsetting writing. I have found other books very upsetting as well, while still seeing the point that was being made and understanding how my discomfort played into it. With Carrion Crow I ended up more conflicted though, in part because of Blanche, who maybe suffered these kinds of pains but does not get named. It added a sense of exploitation, without this necessarily being true or at all intended by Parry, but I couldn't shake it. Because of that, I doubted what all this explicit body horror was really for. What point is it really serving? What am I, as the reader, meant to take away from it? And if, after finishing the book, I can't say for sure that Parry had a point to make with it, I can't help but wonder why I was subjected to it. I don't have clear answers here, not even fully-formed opinions, only a sense of unease that hasn't gone away yet.

I give this novel...

3 Universes!

I think there is a lot in Carrion Crow that is interesting and well-thought out and Heather Parry's writing is undeniably powerful. Something about this novel isn't sitting right with me though, like I've eaten something my body is now rejecting, and I still can't tell if that is part of the point or not.

Review: 'The Housewife' by Natalie Barelli

2026-07-03T16:16:34.734+01:00

There is true joy to be found in perfectly folded laundry and stunningly prepared desserts. This joy can be ruined, however, by husbands who may have killed their first wives. In The Housewife, Jodie finds herself confronted with exactly that, except that even with her not all is as it seems. Thanks to Poisoned Pen Press and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 30/06/2026
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press

Jodie always dreamed of being a housewife. And after a whirlwind romance, she marries renowned psychologist Dr. Roy Davies and moves into his perfect Beverly Hills home. But the fairy tale fades fast. Roy is distant, his friends view her as a gold-digger, and the house still reveres his late wife, Deborah, whose presence still looms over everyone and everything.
When Jodie learns Deborah became a recluse before death, she begins to suspect Roy was behind it. And the deeper she digs, the darker Roy's past appears—obsessive, controlling, unfaithful. Increasingly convinced he had something to do with Deborah's death, Jodie knows she should go to the police, but that would require revealing her own secret. A secret that could destroy her.
But Jodie won't be silenced. Because the truth about Roy is worse than she imagined—and now, trapped in a house built on lies, she must find a way out before she becomes the next perfect wife to vanish.

Housewives are having a real cultural moment, if, admittedly, in a very weird way. On the one hand, the aesthetics of being a traditional, stay-at-home wife have never been more in your face. Social media is flooded with homemade jams, fresh bread, clean linens, and sedate, happy smiles. On the other hand, though, there is a very intense debate taking place culturally about where the line is between enjoying taking care of your space and those you love and putting yourself in potential danger. That sounds dramatic, but if you don't have a job, no independent income, no safety net, then you are in danger girl. Now, many of the "tradition" housewives online are no such thing, because they are earning income from their social media, but that doesn't mean women watching don't end up putting themselves at a disadvantage because of what they see. A number of books recently have picked up on this trend, especially its dark underbelly, from Saratoga Schaefer's Trad Wife to Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. Thrillers and suspense novels have of course always known about the danger inherent to the overly domestic, to restrictive gender roles, to playing a role perfectly. The Housewife by Natalie Barelli fits perfectly both into the recent trend in pop culture and the more established thriller tradition.

Jodie is recently married to the well-known psychologist Roy and everything is great, except that it isn't. People won't stop mentioning how perfect his first wife, Deborah, was and how much he loved her. But if she was so beloved and amazing, why did she kill herself? And did Roy have something to do with it? Jodie is also keeping secrets of her own, though, and it becomes something of a race against time as she tries to figure out what happened to Deborah before anything about her own past is revealed. I liked Jodie as a protagonist because she is very blunt and honest about herself, even about her obsession with cleaning and cooking or her lack of understanding when it comes to social niceties. There are genuinely funny moments when she tries to interact with others or has to go stare at her perfectly arranged towels to calm down. Roy is exactly what we need him to be for a thriller like this, but also nothing more. The book might suffer a little from the "rich white ladies are only ever the worst"-syndrome, but this is balanced out slliiightly by some of the other characters.

This is my first Natalie Barelli thriller and I had an excellent time with it. It was a perfect read for a Saturday afternoon while the world was melting outside. The Housewife moves at a pretty steady clip and chapters are never longer than they need to be. There are a couple of "twists", or rather, things that could have been twists if they had been kept from us, that get revealed in relevant and timely ways. This is a big plus for me! I am all for building suspense and sprinkling clues, but I'm not down for being kept in the dark just to get a twist ending. So I liked that Barelli gave us that info so that as the reader I felt in on it, even as I was still trying to figure things out. Unfortunately, I did not really like the main twist towards the end (I lowkey considered it early on but prayed it wouldn't happen and oh well), although I did enjoy the ending itself. I guess Barelli was trying to avoid the cliché answers but in doing so I felt she moved into another cliché that was perhaps a little bit damaging. However, overall, The Housewife was good fun and I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a nice and solid thriller.

I give this novel...

3 Universes!

The Housewife is good fun and well-paced. While I didn't love everything about it, I had a real weird kind of fondness for the main character that helped me move past that.

Review: 'Our Sister's Keeper' by Jasmine Holmes

2026-06-28T13:40:09.679+01:00

Sometimes you read a book that brings something you know theoretically into horrifying, intimate, nearly physical clarity. Our Sister's Keeper by Jasmine Holmes is that kind of book for me. Highlighting the immense burden on the shoulders of Black women, this novel is a story of anger, pain, and the endless hope for a better world. Thanks to Bindery Books and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 09/06/2026
Publisher: Bindery Books

Mississippi, 1927. The groanings are coming.
No town is perfect, but East Cobb comes close. It’s a wealthy all-Black Free Town—untouched by white oppression—where ambitious Thea Elliot and her husband plan to make good on their big dreams. Little do they know that the idyllic town teems with ghoulish, walking nightmares . . . that only the women can see.
Marah knows the groanings well. She is one of the carriers—women with the ability to pull traumatic memories from men. Populated by men entirely freed of their pain, East Cobb has flourished, even as the remnants of their memories haunt the town’s women. When an unexpected death drives Marah to discover more about her own power, Thea’s and Marah’s worlds collide. The sisters must confront the rotten core at the heart of East Cobb’s prosperity and choose what—and who—will survive the reckoning.
A gripping blend of historical fiction and Southern gothic psychological horror, Our Sister’s Keeper is a fierce exploration of Black sisterhood, rage, and resistance.

In her 1979 essay 'Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface', Audre Lorde asks 'why are Black women supposed to absorb that male rage in silence?' (p. 61, you can read it here). She continues, 'Black men's feelings of cancellation, their grievances, and their fear of vulnerability must be talked about, but not by Black women when it is at the expense of our own "curious rage"' (p. 61). The feminist movement has famously struggled, and still is struggling, to become truly intersectional and this is, in part, what Audre Lorde addressed. The other issue she highlighted, however, is that Black women were also carrying the burden of their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons' experiences. The struggle for freedom and equality was not just fought by Black people generally in America, but also by Black women within their own families and households. This is something I knew, having read Audre Lorde and other Black authors, but Our Sister's Keeper brought this to life in a way that was horrifying and somehow also beautiful. I will admit that I struggled a little, being a white, middle-class European woman, to figure out how to feel about the book. Or perhaps not how to feel, but how fully I could take on its message. Is it really my place to comment on the relationship between Black women and men? I don't know, but I am edging towards probably not. However, I do think it is my responsibility to know about the experiences of other women, to make room for these experiences and resulting feelings within feminist discourse, and to not look away from harm being inflicted. For this, Our Sister's Keeper is a very important book.

It is 1927, and Thea is moving to East Cobb with her husband. This is a town of free Black people, without oppression, a place where Black people can thrive. Except it becomes clear pretty quickly that the town expects Thea to put down her own ambition and be the perfect wife so that her husband can excel. We also get to see Marah's story, one of the "carriers" who keeps East Cobb so idyllic. She carries the memories of slavery, hurt, abuse, and racism for the men of East Cobb so that they can be free, even if it will kill her soon. It becomes clear that the Eden of East Cobb is built on the suffering of Black women, a suffering that manifests in the groanings that haunt the town. As the storylines of Thea and Marah come together, Our Sister's Keeper asks difficult questions about what we can sacrifice in the pursuit of freedom and happiness, whose suffering we are willing to accept, and whether it is ever morally acceptable to look away. The novel switches back and forth mostly between Thea and Marah, but there are also chapters dedicated to the lives of the other Black female characters. This not only makes for an interesting reading experiences but also allows Jasmine Holmes to depict the variety of Black female lived experience, the hopes and dreams they have, the challenges and complications, the perseverance and courage, but also the human pettiness and jealousy. While the novel absolutely celebrates the power of female rage, it does not paint Black women as perfect victims or innocent lambs led to slaughter. Instead, the novel tries to tell a complex story.

This is Jasmine Holmes fiction debut and I'm honestly blown away by it. She is a historian who has previously published on the topics that Our Sister's Keeper also works with. For a fiction debut, I think this novel is very tightly paced and thought-through. Holmes' historical knowledge absolutely shines through in the backstories she gives her characters, the settings, etc. but this never prevents her from also diving into the genre side of the book, specifically the Gothic horror elements. I imagine finding that balance was difficult, but it read very smoothly for me. I was also intrigued by how the stories of Thea and Marah are connected but start off in quite different places. Thea appears to walk into a Stepford Wives set-up, which is determined to grind the independence out of her, while Marah is stuck in a southern Gothic nightmare of pain and trauma. While this may feel discordant at first, I think these different approaches actually work quite well towards underlining the novel's main points: we don't all experience the world in the same way, your perfect life may be built on the suffering of others, you don't know what goes on when you look away. There are important messages in Our Sister's Keeper, but it is also an immensely readable and gripping book, without the one having to distract from the other. I would whole-heartedly recommend this to any and all readers, just go in prepared for depictions of violence and racism.

I give this novel...

5 Universes!

Our Sister's Keeper blew my expectations out of the water. I was expecting an interesting book but what I got was a visceral reading experience that educated me, shocked me, and inspired me all in one go.

Review: 'Molka' by Monika Kim

2026-06-28T13:02:52.120+01:00

I very much enjoy being a woman and yet it can be one of the worst things in the world because, unfortunately, the world is also populated by absolute creeps. In Molka, Monika Kim tackles one of the worst kinds of creeps, namely the kind of men who film women without their consent. It should go without saying that Molka is not an easy read. Thanks to Erewhon Books and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 28/04/2026
Publisher: Erewhon Books

Molka: an abbreviation of molrae-kamera, a “sneaky camera” hidden to capture covert images and videos for voyeurs.

In an unassuming Seoul workplace, IT technician Junyoung’s network reaches throughout the entire building. He sees every entrance. Every lobby. Every bathroom. The women in this building may be cold and dismissive, but he can always pull up his favorite images of them and remember who holds the real power. Until one, Dahye, sets herself apart from the rest.

Dahye, ever the romantic, yearns to be cherished after years of living in the shadow of her perfect older sister, who tragically drowned years ago. Only her boyfriend seems to appreciate Dahye. He’s rich, handsome, and generous—and she’d do anything to hold on to the happiness he brings her.

But when a hidden camera scandal rocks the city’s elites, Dahye’s dreams of a fairy-tale romance twist into a grotesque nightmare. Her boyfriend abandons her. Her parents reject her. Her grip on reality begins to shatter as visions of her dead sister suddenly appear. And as Junyoung’s interest in Dahye turns to obsession, and the truths of their troubled lives are revealed, Dahye must go to extreme lengths to bring the truth to light . . .

I read Molka back in April and yet I sat on this review for quite a while. Or rather, I sat on my thoughts for quite a while before I then sat down to write this review. As the title makes clear, this is a novel about the phenomenon of "molka" (Korean: 몰카), short for "molrae-kamera", a term which apparently originated in a prank show where people were filmed without their initial knowledge. Because of that origin, so Wikipedia, the term molka refers to prank and spy cameras at the same time. This straddling of two different things, one meant to be funny and the other horrifying, also shows itself somewhat in how people treat the very fact of such spy cameras. It is not taken as seriously as other forms of privacy invasion and violence. The placing of small cameras in bathrooms and other public places is a major issue in South Korea, although recent revelations in Europe and America regarding online rape networks and what happened to Gisèle Pelicot we really can't pretend this kind of invasion of female privacy and violence against women is only a Korean issue. I think it is incredibly important that topics such as these are discussed in literature, that authors like Monika Kim take them on and explore their various facets. This also means that the reading of books like Molka can be very difficult and every reader will have to judge for themselves how to best approach them.

Molka begins with Junyoung, who works as an IT specialist at a company, salivating over the invasive images he is capturing of his female coworkers in the bathrooms at work. I was grossed out immediately. He becomes fixated on Dahye, who also works at the company. Aside from Junyoung's POV, we also get Dahye's, and we find out that she is in a somewhat-hidden relationship with a rich man. While she dreams of a fairy-tale romance in which she is finally seen and loved for who she is, it becomes horrifyingly clear that he does not care about her. As Dahye spirals, also increasingly haunted by her sister's death years ago, Junyoung tries to transform his obsession into a white knight-effort to "save" her. In many ways Molka is a very brave book, not only because it tackles such a complicated topic but also because it includes the perspective of a perpetrator, Junyoung. I think it is important to at least consider how people (mostly men) get to such a place; not so we can pooh-pooh them, but because it might be one of the few ways of intervening early or locating them. However, I had a visceral negative reaction to the time I had to spend in his head. Kim also makes Dahye somewhat naive, which is fair, because she is a young woman, but it means you're also constantly wishing for her to be smarter, to be more cautious, less trusting, etc. This too, I think, has to be this way, even if it is uncomfortable, because we need to learn to not judge women who experience things like this. Molka takes on a slightly paranormal touch towards the end, hinting at the sweet release female rage might offer but not taking the easy way out.

I absolutely loved Monika Kim's The Eyes Are the Best Part; it was one of my favourite reads last year. I was very impressed by how she managed to balance writing a really fun and gripping suspense thriller with incisive commentary about the experiences of Asian-American women and complicated daughter-mother relationships against a migration background. For all these reasons, I jumped into Molka quite eagerly, despite knowing what it was about. I am still impressed by how Monika Kim picks up these themes and topics and shows so much nuance in her treatment of them. To be clear: there is no doubt in Molka that filming people without their consent is a disgusting practice and that the people who do so are pieces of sh*t. There is, however, as I tried to discuss above, a good attempt at considering the issue from various sides. With how disgusting the whole thing made me feel, I found myself slightly less capable of enjoying the suspense/thriller aspect of the novel. I liked how Dahye develops, how she becomes willing to go to extremes, and how the novel hints at a sense of female solidarity, but Monika Kim doesn't go for an easy ending. I felt a certain satisfaction at how the novel ended, the fact that it didn't sugarcoat anything while still reveling in female rage, but I was also stuck with this deep pit in my stomach. That pit is still there when I think about Molka but I would recommend this book to everyone. It is the kind of read that is meant to be difficult and confronting and it is the perfect example of why literature is so important as a cultural medium.

I give this novel...

5 Universes!

I did not always like reading Molka, but it was the kind of book I had to read. Monika Kim could have easily written a less socially aware, less incisive novel that would have been entertaining, but the empowerment behind it would have been empty. Instead, Molka is sticky and difficult, but also sharp and necessary.

Review: 'The Last Page' by Katie Holt

2026-06-28T12:33:09.755+01:00

What more could you ask for from a romance than being set in an indie bookstore? It is the best setting for someone like me, especially if we're dusting a bit of 'enemies to lovers'-dust over it. And while I did have a good time with The Last Page, it left me a little cold in the most important places. Thanks to Alcove Press and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 12/05/2026
Publisher: Alcove Press

Ella has grown up at The Last Page, a charming local bookstore in New York City where she now works. Her first kiss was in the women’s health section. A boyfriend dumped her in comedy. The owner is like a second father to her and has begun training her to take over the store. So when he unexpectedly dies and his estranged grandson is left everything in the will, Ella is devastated.

Henry doesn’t know the first thing about running a bookstore. With his aging mom back in Tennessee, he plans to stay in New York just long enough to ensure things are running smoothly and then head back home. What he never could have counted on was the beautiful, funny bookseller who loves The Last Page more than any place in the world—and who sees him as the villain who’s come to ruin her life.

But when it becomes evident that the store is in deep financial trouble and Henry and Ella are both at risk of losing everything, they have no choice but to put their differences aside and team up—despite the inconvenient chemistry blossoming between them.

I am somewhat of a newbie reader of Romance. I think the last vestiges of my internalised "I'm not like other girls"-misogyny are to blame, but perhaps that's letting myself off easy. It wasn't until a friend lent me an Ali Hazelwood book that I really understood the fun of the genre. I have since become a devoted Hazelwood-reader and have been working on branching out beyond her, in part because I'm curious to know whether I just like her writing or whether I like Romance in general. In the process I have come to realise just how complex and difficult a genre Romance is. In other genres, if something doesn't quite work or if characters do something or act in a way you don't fully like, that's not always a problem. In the case of thrillers, for example, characters being dumb (affectionate) is actually key. But in Romance there is less space for that. We need characters to be dumb (affectionate) of course, so that miscommunication and yearning and all that good stuff can take place, but there is a real danger of the dreaded Ick. If I dislike a thriller, I can usually still enjoy it because I still get to puzzle out the clues, even if I find them silly. But if something happens in a Romance that is counter to what I like, find romantic or endearing, etc. then I truly struggle to continue reading. It's almost as if that entirely ruins the reading experience for me because the feelings and immersion I was looking for are now cancelled out. This experience is never really the "fault" of the author, though. The human experience is broad, individual, and varied and something I find uncomfortable might be exactly the kind of thing someone else is looking for. No Romance author can cater to everyone's tastes. It does mean, however, that reading Romance is much more hit and miss for me than any other genre. (I have discovered that I enjoy Catherine Walsh almost as much as Ali Hazelwood!)

The Last Page is about the namesake indie bookstore in new York. Its beloved owner has recently died and now Ella, his trusted confidante and seeming heir, is on tenterhooks, waiting to hear from the lawyers. While waiting for their email, she runs into a handsome Southern man on the metro. The next day, the same man rocks up and reveals himself to not just be the previous owner's grandson but also the new owner of the bookstore. With his background in finance, Henry seems to have exactly zero appreciation for how an institution like 'The Last Page' should be run. Ella and Henry are therefore on opposing sides, setting up a solid enemies-to-lovers scenario, except that the fact that the bookstore is on the brink of foreclosure somewhat nips the enemies part in the bud straight away. I did like much of the first two-thirds of The Last Page. Ella is often delightful (even if she sometimes suffers from Quirky Girl-disease) and I liked how Katie Holt showed how her bubbly personality is in part a cover for how deeply she feels. Henry is mostly fun/somewhat beige, a real soft boy barely hiding behind a Finance Guy-front. The setting of the bookstore is fun and I really liked how every chapter started with a "Staff Recommendation". Speaking of, the staff of the bookstore is somewhat made up of what feels to me, as someone who has never been to New York and only knows it through "Friends" and "The Nanny", like New York cliches. They were funny, though, and did what they were there to do. I also really liked the surrounding family for both Ella and Henry, it fleshed the whole thing out a little more.

As said above, Romance is difficult and I'm still a sensitive enough Romance-reader that small things kick me out of the fun. For much of The Last Page, Katie Holt had me. The back and forth between Ella and Henry is cute and their first couple of intimate moments were fun as well. Because the book is split into a dual POV between them, the reader can fully see what's going on with each of them while they keep dancing around it. However, I was left somewhat cold by the happy ending of it all, in part because some things happened that I would personally not love. None of it is bad, mind, it's not like Henry suddenly reveals himself to be a psycho or Ella goes off the deep end, it was just those tiny Ick-moments that are personal to me and took me out of it a little. In a way, reading Romance is giving me, a chronically single person, an insight into what I might like in a relationship, but it does suck to not get to fully enjoy the ending and the emotional pay-off associated with it. However, for those who like some yearning, a book store-setting, and supportive and loving families, The Last Page might be exactly the thing.

I give this novel...

3 Universes!

While The Last Page wasn't really for me, it definitely has many things others will love.

Review: 'The Frenzy: Stories' by Joyce Carol Oates

2026-06-28T11:16:17.620+01:00

I enjoy reading about people hitting their breaking point, really going through it and then, hopefully, finding some kind of resolution and freedom in the end, even if that end is grim. The Frenzy tested that enjoyment a little bit as Joyce Carol Oates explores the depths of the human mind and shows it in confronting detail. Thanks to Hogarth and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 16/06/2026
Publisher: Random House; Hogarth

Frenzy (noun): a temporary madness; a violent mental or emotional agitation; intense usually wild and often disorderly compulsive or agitated activity

Joyce Carol Oates is a master of the short story and one of the legends of the form. Her collections of short fiction have twice been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and have won numerous awards, including the O. Henry Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story. In The Frenzy: Stories, Oates plunges us into the lives of her characters at moments of crisis and confusion, when much of what they understand about themselves and those they love comes undone.

A young woman on a supposedly romantic weekend trip to Cape May, New Jersey, turns the tables on her older, married lover. A freak bicycle accident on a bridge haunts one family for decades. A girl jealous of her popular cousin discovers she is the lucky one. A widow waits at her riverside house for her dead husband's return. A young man hiking in the woods comes upon a couple in a heated, possibly violent argument—should he intervene?

Suspenseful and psychologically astute, Oates's short stories enthrall and captivate as they dissect her character's deepest fears—revealing our own in turn. "Literature is a texture of words," says Oates of her short fiction, "evoking life in the most vivid ways—psychologically, physically." These new stories blazingly evoke life at its most vivid and perilous, when fate and free will intersect, and one ominous encounter or bad choice can be the difference between an ordinary day and the point of no return.

In The Frenzy, Joyce Carol Oates brings together various stories that all show people experiencing some kind of temporary break, whether that is an actual break with reality or a break from normality, from the way they pretend to live their lives. The collection is split into three parts, each part containing three stories. In Part I, we find 'The Frenzy' about a middle-aged man and his affair with the daughter of a friend, 'The Fear', about two cousins who are so alike except life intervenes, and 'The Bicycle Accident', about how an accident on a fateful day changes the lives of a daughter and her mother. Part II contains 'The Call', about an adult daughter being called home (?) to her mother, 'The Return', about a woman visiting an old friend and the visit devolving into discussions about the friend's deceased husband, and 'The Redwoods', where a man sees a couple arguing in a potentially abusive way while out on a hike. Part III has 'Small Veins', about a woman visiting her oncologist, 'Refuge', in which a seemingly disappeared husband returns but maybe he should've stayed away, and finally 'Night Fishing at Antibes', about two elderly women connecting after their husbands' deaths. I have been trying to figure out whether the split into parts has to do with themes or characters, and in a way one can be found. Part I is about big events that drastically alter the main character's/protagonist's expectations of life. In Part II, the characters find themselves returning to previous events, reconsidering their own actions, how life could have gone if other choices had been made, and, in a sense, refusing to move on. Part III there is a question about the future, about how we move forward after moments of frenzy and big happenings, whether a sense of normality can ever be found.

I read The Frenzy quite a while ago and although at the time I didn't know how I felt about it, the ensuing weeks have had me reconsider some of my initial thoughts. At the time, parts of The Frenzy felt unrealistic or almost too simple, and yet it is some of those exact parts that have stayed with me most vividly since. I keep returning to certain scenarios and images, small details Oates included, and they are now seemingly embedded in my brain. I don't know if that makes me like the stories any more than I did before, but it does make me appreciate Oates' craft more. The seeming simpleness of her writing belies a deep insight into human behaviour and dynamics and there is this slowly developing realisation, across the collection, that we can never fully escape ourselves, our pasts, or our moments of madness. I had similarly conflicting feelings about The Doll Master and Other Stories I think, so perhaps this weird feeling of confusion, dissatisfaction, and obsession that somehow still scratches an itch is actually a hallmark of Oates' writing. There are no easy answers here and I think that if you read the stories too quickly, they might leave you unaffected. But if you sit with them a little bit, let them resonate, then they will stay with you. Beneath their odd mix of simplicity and drama, the stories in The Frenzy speak to some quite dark feelings that could probably do with some sunlight.

I give this collection....

4 Universes!

I wavered on my rating, mainly because I am still so in two minds about the collection. But the fact that I'm still thinking about The Frenzy, almost three months after first reading it, does speak to its insidious quality.

Review: 'She Walks at Night' (夜步く) (Kosuke Kindaichi #3) by Seishi Yokomizo (横溝正史), trans. by Jesse Kirkwood

2026-06-28T10:42:54.917+01:00

We're back with another Kosuke Kindaichi mysteryyy! One downside of jumping on each new translation is that I'm constantly waiting for the next one, but at least She Walks at Night gave me plenty to think about, from mysterious identities to family dramas and figuring out a killer. Thanks to Steerforth & Pushkin, Pushkin Vertigo, and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 02/06/2026
Publisher: Steerforth & Pushkin; Pushkin Vertigo

In this mind-bending new addition to Seishi Yokomizo’s bestselling Kosuke Kindaichi Mysteries—translated into English for the first time—scruffy sleuth Kindaichi is called to the home of the aristocratic Furugami family, where in the midst of the Musashino countryside and enclosed on all sides by a long earthen wall, a gruesome scandal is brewing.

At the centre of the estate is the family patriarch: the drunken, sword-wielding father Tetsunoshin. His mistress, the icy, alluring Lady Oryu, is also housed in the estate along with their illegitimate daughter Yachiyo —beautiful and unstable—and the drink-ravaged Furugami heir, Naoki Sengoku. With each family member holding onto their own dark secrets, tensions between them ride high.

But this family feud turns bloody when the mutilated, headless body of Yachiyo’s fiancé is discovered in the Furugami estate. To solve the case, Kindaichi will need to pick apart the threads of the family’s carefully-woven story. But can he find the killer before the family is torn apart by its own secrets?

Seishi Yokomizo's Kosuke Kindaichi series are only being translated into English now and I have been having a great time reading them. Yokomizo was excellent at proper locked-room mysteries, at enormous and bloody family drama, and at writing an actually nice detective figure, in Kosuke Kindaichi himself. As an European reader, I've found these books really interesting, both for the mystery of them but also for the insight they give into Japanese society and culture post-WWII. Of course no one book can reflect everything, but Yokomizo subtly addresses how Japanese society was shaken-up, how the class system became fragile, the poverty and destruction that existed, and more. But, since the books were written in the 1970s, they do also contain things we might not find quite as palatable or normal as we did almost sixty years ago. In She Walks at Night, for exmaple, a major plot point revolves around two characters who have Kyphosis, i.e., who have a curved or hunched spine. These characters are consistently referred to as "hunchbacks" in the book and their medical condition is also taken as an indicator for their personalities, which is consistently treated as a negative. This will strike most modern readers, European or otherwise, as wrong or offensive. While there is indeed a discomfort there, She Walks at Night, more than any Yokomizo book I have read so far, is about who gets to tell a story and what their story says about them. That is worth bearing in mind, as you dive into the book.

She Walks at Night begins in media res, with a conversation between Torata Yashiro and Naoki Sengoku. Torata is a writer of bad crime and thriller novels and Naoki is his somewhat-benefactor, except that he doesn't really seem to respect Torata at all. But Naoki is in a pickle, due to his family's complicated relationship with the Furugami family. He unloads the entire drama onto Torata and then demands that he accompanies him to the family estate where, naturally, they are just in time to be present for a murder. What is going on between these two families? What secrets mut be uncovered fort he truth to be found? And will Kosuke Kindaichi arrive on-scene in time to prevent further deaths? I'm keeping the plot as vague as possible, in part because even the set-up would take quite some time to explain but also because discovering the details for yourself is always part of the fun with Seishi Yokomizo's books. She Walks at Night felt a little different than the other Kindaichi books I have read so far. So far, if I recall correctly, these books have started off with a set-up of the family and then about halfway through Kosuke gets involved and we begin to follow him around a bit more. In She Walks at Night, Kosuke is of course present, but he is almost like a background figure while we remain with our protagonist and narrator, Torata. He is really our focus and because he is a writer himself, he knows how to write a story. It makes for a different kind of reading experience, however, so those who really love Kosuke will maybe be a little disappointed.

I had a good time with She Walks at Night, although the issue discussed above did sometimes throw me off a little. As a mystery, it has everything from entangled families, illicit lust, incestual longing, cursed swords, wealth, confused identities, and more. It also has a writer as a protagonist, which means that there are meta aspects to this novel, which is something I always enjoy. While many Japanese thrillers I have read so far have a very present narrator, who uses 'I' pronouns and interjects into the story (The Labyrinth Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji is a great example!), this is heightened a little bit in She Walks at Night. Saying anything more would threaten to spoil the novel and I will say that for this one, the twist is where much of the payoff lies. Because of that, I didn't enjoy this one quite as much as other installments in the series, like for example The Honjin Murders. As the reader, in part because of Kosuke Kindaichi's absence, you're not quite as involved in putting together the clues and are much more reliant on the protagonist's own insights. This is fun, but it removes some of the puzzling that gives so much of the joy in the other books. Because of this, some of the other issues with the series, largely due to the time period from which it comes, like the portrayal of women, comes to grate a little more. However, Jesse Kirkwood does an excellent job as a translator and She Walks at Night feels coherent with the other novels, translated by others like Louise Heal Kawai or Bryan Karetnyk. I remain really happy that Pushkin Vertigo is translating these novels because Kosuke Kindaichi remains my favourite detective and the stories and mysteries are really inventive and challenging.

I give this novel...

3 Universes!

While not my favourite Kosuke Kindaichi book so far, I did have a fun time with She Walks at Night! I gasped at the last few chapters and it really comes across how much Seishi Yokomizo knew about the mystery/detective/thriller genre and how much fun he had writing in it.

Review: 'Hunger and Thirst' by Claire Fuller

2026-05-27T10:33:22.208+01:00

Being a teenager is always messy. It is the best of times and the worst of times. It is especially bad, however, if you're not just haunted by childhood experiences but perhaps also by an active ghost. Hunger and Thirst is an intriguing exploration of art and female friendship that had me gripped. Thanks to Fig Tree and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 07/05/2026
Publisher: Penguin General; Fig Tree

1987: After a childhood trauma and years in and out of the care system, sixteen-year-old Ursula finds herself with a new job in the postroom of a local art school, a bed in a halfway house, and—delightfully— some new friends, including wild-child, Sue. When Ursula is invited to join a squat at The Underwood, a mysterious house whose owners met a terrible end, she can’t resist the promise of a readymade, hodgepodge family.

But as Sue’s behaviour and demands become more extreme, Ursula who has always been hungry—for food—and more importantly for love, acceptance and belonging, carries out her friend’s terrible dare. It's a decision that will haunt her for decades.

Thirty-six years later, Ursula is a renowned, reclusive sculptor living under a pseudonym in London when her identity is exposed by true-crime documentary-maker who is digging into an unsolved disappearance. But it is not only the filmmaker who has discovered Ursula’s whereabouts, and as her past catches up with her present, Ursula must work out whether the monsters are within her or without.

I have said it before and I will say it again: the Gothic is the best genre to explore trauma through. There is nothing like a crumbling house full of the ghost of the past to show that no man is an island and we all have a history. There is nothing like art created in a near fugue state to show the murky depths of a psyche. There is nothing like a doomed female friendship, forged through shared misery and betrayed secrets, to show how hungry we all truly are. Claire Fuller excels at all of this in Hunger and Thirst. I think the Gothic nature of the story is also enhanced by the back and forth between this murky, sticky past and the present, with its true crime journalists and cell phones. It is a somewhat jarring juxtaposition that speaks to how incoherent life can be, how the past and present can feel irreconcilable. The Gothic always requires you to eventually face this abyss, to look into it and allow it to look right back at you. I find this an incredibly rewarding reading experience, although I also appreciate that it might now be for everyone.

In Hunger and Thirst we follow Ursula both as a sixteen-year old and almost fourty years later, when the things that happened in her childhood come back to haunt her. We meet teen-Ursula as she moves into a halfway house and starts a new job in the post room of an art school. Ursula is drawn to the art being created there, but also to her coworker Sue, who seems so confident and strong. We also flash back and forth to the adult Ursula, now a reclusive but famous artist, who is being hounded by a reporter who made a documentary about what happened all those years ago. This forces adult-Ursula to confront some of the things that happened, to think again about the years since and about her own role in it all. I want to remain super-vague about what actually happens, because I immensely enjoyed the way it all unfolded. When Hunger and Thirst leans most fully into its Gothicness, it is stunning. I loved the way Fuller plays with all the various forms you can be haunted in your life, by the little pieces of other lives and people that cling to you as you move through life yourself.

I read Claire Fuller's Our Endless Numbered Days back in 2015 and adored it, yet I haven't read any of her novels since then until Hunger and Thirst. This is clearly something I need to rectify because I do really enjoy her writing. Claire Fuller is able to touch on those deeply painful, vulnerable parts of girl- and womanhood, the craving for love and connection, the almost literal hunger and thirst that accompanies persistent self-denial. Her language is also beautiful and she has a real control of her craft. Hunger and Thirst could easily slip into cliches or seem overly dramatic, which is always a danger with Gothic literature, but it never does. Fuller has the reader consistently hovering on the knife's edge between belief and disbelief, between wanting to externalise the trauma and the past in the forms of a ghost and accepting that the past is never gone and always a part of us. What I really liked about this novel is the role that Fuller gives art in understanding one's self. Sue is obsessed with film making, with capturing images and ideas, with visualising the building dread. Ursula also turns to art to express things she cannot fully verbalise, constantly returning to similar themes and motifs as she tries to understand herself. That is, in the end, what I think art is for; giving shape to things we cannot fully name, directly look at, or fully accept. Hunger and Thirst does this well and I can wholeheartedly recommend it.

I give this novel...

5 Universes!

Hunger and Thirst is a stunning Gothic novel about trauma and womanhood, the role of art, and facing your monsters. If you're into any of this, then it is a must-read. If you're hesitant about it, still give this book a go.

Review: 'Hollow Inside' by Asako Otani, trans. by Ginny Tapley Takemori

2026-05-27T10:04:36.690+01:00

If you enjoy reading about adults trying to figure out what to do with their lives in a way that may not be super-healthy but is the best they can do, then Hollow Inside is for you. It's a novella that raises a lot of questions without giving you answers, but that is in and of itself a valuable reading experience, even if it can also be frustrating. Thanks to Steerforth & Pushkin and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 05/05/2026
Publisher: Steerforth & Pushkin

A witty, deadpan novel about modern relationships, pets, and living as a single woman; for fans of Sayaka Murata, offbeat humor, and sharp social observation

In this skewed, mordantly funny Japanese novel, two women navigate aging and relationships in divergent ways.

Hirai, 38, has recently started living with her colleague Suganuma, 42. Both women are single and feel ambivalent at best about the prospect of marriage. Stuck in bland jobs that don’t pay enough for them to afford one-bedroom apartments in the city, they defy social expectation and create their own domestic routines, allowing space for Suganuma’s side-hustle—3D-printing figurines of beloved dead pets for their grieving owners.

Though initially united by their resistance to romantic love, the pair begin tentative forays toward partnership. Suganuma strikes up a secret affair, which shocks Hirai into action and back into the world of dating apps. As she drifts through painfully adequate dates and endures intrusive questions at office socials, Hirai frets over whether she really needs to freeze her eggs again. In a dating world sapped of genuine connection, where can she turn to feel less hollow?

The debut novel by a bright new voice in Japanese fiction, Hollow Inside won the prestigious Subaru Prize. With a dark, deadpan tone and sharply witty observation, Asako Otani satirizes the myths and pressures of contemporary romantic love, as Hirai and Suganuma try to chart their own paths in a precarious world.

Sometimes you read a story that leaves you unsure about many things. What is this story about? What am I meant to take away from it? Why are the lives shown here so empty? Is my own life empty? Can we find satisfaction and comfort in a world that is becoming ever emptier of meaning and true connection? As you can see, asking such questions quickly spirals into wondering about yourself and that is most likely the point of stories like Hollow Inside. While this is a Japanese novella and therefore reflects social and cultural attitudes towards single, middle-ages women there, it also speaks more widely to adult life globally, I feel. Our societies are becoming ever more commercial and capitalist, with the pursuit of happiness directly tied to how much you can buy and how much you can show off. This is linked, however, to an ever-increasing loneliness, exacerbated by rising costs and failing social safety nets. Do we take refuge in our favourite bands? Do we band together with our friends? Do we open up and accept less than we want, just to have something? These aren't necessarily fun things to think about, but it is probably good to sit down with these questions every once in a while.

Summarising Hollow Inside is tricky. The novella focuses on Hirai, who is in the last years of her thirties and has just moved in with a female friend and colleague, Suganuma. Neither of them has a relationship, neither of them has a whole lot to look forward to, but they find comfort and companionship in one another. When Suganuma re-enters the dating world, Hirai follows, but there is not a whole lot of excitement or joy to be found there either. The title most directly refers to Suganuma's side job, producing 3D-prints of deceased pets, which are hollow on the inside. It most importantly, however, also refers to the hollowness of Hirai's life, to the absence of something profound and touching that can give her life meaning. The tone of the novel echoes this hollowness in its direct, unflowery language. In part this feels typical of the style of Japanese fiction I have read so far, but there is an added lack of colour and life in Hollow Inside which is impressive. Ginny Tapley Takemori once again provides an excellent translation, from what I can tell. I appreciate that none of this sounds like I'm recommending this novella, and yet I think that I am. Not all reading experiences can or should be fun and I do think Asako Otani puts a feeling into words that is otherwise difficult to discuss and approach.

I give this novella...

3 Universes!

Hollow Inside sets you up for a complex reading experience, one which is at once empty and full of hidden meaning. If you are willing to meet the novel in that absence, to face your own hollowness, then it can be a very rich, if perhaps sad, encounter.

Review: 'One for Sorrow' (D.I. Callanach #7) by Helen Fields

2026-05-27T09:38:08.233+01:00

Cat-and-mouse games provide an excellent plot structure for thrillers and mysteries. Who is really chasing whom? As Ava and Luc run down the clock, you just know someone is going to get hurt in the process and it creates for excellent tension. And yet, something didn't entirely work for me here. Thanks to Avon Books and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for a honest review. My sincere apologies for the long delay in reviewing!

Pub. Date: 03/03/2022
Publisher: Avon Books

One for sorrow, two for joy
Edinburgh is gripped by the greatest terror it has ever known. A lone bomber is targeting victims across the city and no one is safe.

Three for a girl, four for a boy
DCI Ava Turner and DI Luc Callanach face death every day – and not just the deaths of the people being taken hostage by the killer.

Five for silver, six for gold
When it becomes clear that with every tip-off they are walking into a trap designed to kill them too, Ava and Luc know that finding the truth could mean paying the ultimate price.

Seven for a secret never to be told…
But with the threat – and body count – rising daily, and no clue as to who’s behind it, neither Ava nor Luc know whether they will live long enough to tell the tale…

Ava Turner and Luc Callanach are probably my favourite detective duo, just like Helen Fields is one of my favourite mystery/thriller writers. And yet it took me ages to get around to One for Sorrow and I left it not entirely sure how I feel about the series at this point. I did have a good time with One for Sorrow. And yet... I think maybe I'm not meant for these long detective series because although Fields does a good job at showing how both Ava and Luc are cracking under the pressure, I nonetheless don't understand how they are still standing with everything that has been going on. I think this is just a point where I cannot fully suspend my disbelief, since I have the same issue with detective shows or even superhero films where the hero gets up again even after the 50th punch straight to the head. So while I like both Ava and Luc as characters, I can no longer fully "believe" in them as real people. That doesn't entirely take the pleasure out of reading these books, but it does somewhat hamper my ability to fully connect. This is a personal thing, however, and so will not be the same for other readers.

One for Sorrow is grim, which becomes clear when it starts at a funeral of someone you'll care about if you've read other books in the series. There is a new threat in Edinburgh, a killer who is out for revenge. But who is the killer truly targeting? We get some clues through the story of Quinn, a young woman who finds herself targeted by an obsessive and abusive boyfriend. How her timeline and story align with that of Ava and Luc trying to deal with the increasingly violent crimes from their killer is not revealed until quite close to the end, although as an attentive reader you'll start putting those clues together. I was still on the wrong track with my predictions though and the eventual revelation was quite bitter sweet. I will say that Helen Fields takes it to a hundred in One for Sorrow. There is non-stop tension, the crimes are rough to read, the backstory is tragic, and there is literally only one tiny little ray of sunshine throughout the entire 400 pages of this book. Ava is on a downward spiral and there is a fatigue to her that is hard to read, especially considering that the punches keep coming regardless. One for Sorrow is not a good time, in that sense, although it is a tense and occasionally thrilling one!

I really enjoy Helen Fields' writing and have for a while. I like how she builds and maintains tension, the set pieces she sets up, and how she fleshes out her characters. There are certain scenes in this book which felt incredibly vivid, in good and bad ways, which meant I could see them in my mind. There are little ticks she gives her characters which make them intensely human and recognisable. I truly think that the D.I. Callanach series is an excellent one for anyone who loves tense thrillers and a solid, "found family"-esque team of detectives. With One for Sorrow however, I, as I mentioned above, hit the wall of "how much more are we going to make these people suffer". This is an issue, if you want to call it that, with the genre itself. If you're going to keep a series going, you have to up the stakes somehow. With all of that in mind, One for Sorrow is a dark and twisted read and maybe it's a good thing that the next book in the series hasn't come out yet. Perhaps if we give it some air, there will also be some light at the end of this harsh tunnel for Fields' main characters. This book did also introduce cognitive psychologist Connie Woolwine to me, who is the protagonist of a new (?) series Fields is writing, so perhaps I'll check that one out.

I give this novel...

3 Universes!

I did enjoy One for Sorrow but it left me feeling somewhat in the dumps after. This is not a flaw of Helen Fields' writing in any way, it is just a consequence of seven books' worth of trauma and ever-increasing stakes both for the main characters and the reader. So it's time for a little break for me, but the whole series is still one I'd recommend!

Review: 'Not Your Final Girl' by Mikayla Randolph

2026-05-13T13:16:52.987+01:00

A reunion of high school friends at a remote cabin is the perfect place for old feuds and buried memories to resurface, especially if they are all united by a dark deed. In Not Your Final Girl, we get to know a group of mostly deeply dislikeable characters and get to watch them be hunted down. The novel definitely has higher ambitions that being straightforward slasher-fun, but to what extent these ambitions actually work is probably up to the reader. Thanks to CLASH Books and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 05/05/2026
Publisher: CLASH Books

A feminist slasher novel fueled by female rage and haunted by gruesome murders, in this contemporary reimagining of Tess of the D’Urbervilles there can only be one Final Girl.
Darcy and her high school friends haven’t gathered together in seven years. After a tragic murder on prom night, the group graduated and never looked back. But when the lakeside cabin they spent their summers at is put up for sale, they reunite for one last hurrah.
Darcy hopes it will be an inspiring weekend that will help them all move on from their shared trauma. But Ashley, her biggest tormentor and the group’s manipulative self-appointed leader, is sure to stir up trouble. After a first day filled with jealousy, heartbreak, and unexpected guests, tensions are bursting, and the feud between Darcy and Ashley resurfaces.
The reunion takes a sinister turn when a masked killer slaughters one of their own. Cut off from the outside world with the death toll rising fast, the terrified friends turn on each other and uncover long buried secrets. Someone is seeking justice for their past betrayals and with friends like these no one is safe in this dark-femme slasher for fans of Maeve Fly by CJ Leede and The Indian Lake Trilogy by Stephen Graham Jones.

Can a slasher be feminist? Of course, everything can be feminist with the right kind of attention. But what is required of a slasher to earn the label "feminist"? The book does quote Carol Clover about the Final Girl at the front, a quote I recently used in an academic article as well, so that was fun for me but doth not, in and of itself, mark this as feminist. Feminism at its most basic is a political movement to win suffrage for women, to ensure that we are politically represented and equal in the eyes of the law. On a cultural level, feminism has sometimes been seen as making angels out of women who, in comparison to horrible men, can do no wrong. More recently, feminism has grown a little and emphasised that it is important that women are allowed to be loud and ugly, bad in different ways, not nice, not kind, not pretty, not, in short, perfect angels. I think that is the direction Not Your Final Girl goes into as well, wanting to show complex and complicated female characters and show how they deal with trauma and difficulty but in the context of a slasher. I've seen a number of people refer to this as a slasher-take on Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles in their reviews, which surely comes from a marketing angle. I can see it, roughlyyyy, with some goodwill, but admittedly it's been a while since I've read Tess. In this book Mikayla Randolph is definitely interested in trauma responses, in victim blaming, in internalised misogyny, and more. I don't know if the explorations of those themes go quite deep enough for me and, depending on your mileage, each reader will have a different experience with it.

Not Your Final Girl begins with a brief flash of the night where everything goes down, with two characters sprinting for their life and one being determined that they will be the final girl, not the other one. We then jump back a day or two to everyone arriving at the cabin. We have a whole set of characters: Darcy, the odd one out, Ashley, the high school bully, Su-Ah, Ashley's new girlfriend, Eliza, the younger sister of a previous friend, Kai, the novel's take on the jock, Lettie, who is now Insta-famous, Spencer, who has a crush on Lettie, and Nate, who used to date the previous friend and has now brought Eliza to this trip. They have come to the cabin, owned by Lettie's parents, because it will soon be sold, but what really unites them is what happened around prom in high school. There is an absence in their group, someone who is not there, and much of the novel's tension swirls around discovering what happened back then. As the tension rises, people begin to die in various interesting and gruesome ways as someone is clearly settling scores. But who? It did click for me in the end, mere seconds before the reveal, so I liked how Randolph set that up. In hindsight, there are clues, which is how it should be.

One thing I really enjoyed about Mikayla Randolph's writing is how she ratchets up the tension in the second half of the book. Some of the deaths and suspense scenes worked really well and felt chilling due to the small details Randolph introduced. In contrast, first half is very focused on setting up the various relationships between the characters based on their shared history and while this was interesting, it did also become a little bit of a slog. There is only so much high school drama you can read about before you wish these people would just grow up. A thing I wonder about is how the POVs were selected. We get chapters from Darcy, Ashley, Su-Ah, Eliza, and Kai. The latter feels mostly irrelevant to me, although the others do make some sense. Especially Su-Ah, as an outside perspective, was interesting and here the voice was also a little different in comparison to the others. Su-Ah reads and volunteers in a library (if I remember correctly) and so she frequently compares situations to stories. It was a nice way to individualise her chapters. I wonder why Lettie didn't qualify for a POV, though, and although I deeply disliked Nate, perhaps seeing events from his perspective would also have been interesting. Finally, I have one big issue with Not Your Final Girl which also feeds into my questioning the novel's feminist status. This isn't really a spoiler but skip to the next paragraph if you want to know nothing. It somehow stuck in my craw that the one character who was a bully, saw red, struggled with anger issues, and was presented as manipulative is Ashley, who is a Black woman. I fully see what Randolph was doing with her character and she builds in a little bit of awareness in there and the consequences of being Black in a slasher context, but it's not enough. I don't know if the character was always meant to be Black or if that was a decision later in the writing process, but especially since we get Ashley's POV, there should have been more discussion, or at least authorial awareness, of the impact of her ethnicity. Despite these issues, I was very intrigued by Not Your Final Girl and I'll keep an eye out for what Mikayla Randolph writes next.

I give this novel...

3 Universes!

Not Your Final Girl didn't hit me as quite as revolutionarily feminist as the marketing would like, but Randolph shows a good skill at writing suspense and at crafting unlikeable characters in difficult situations.

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