Jerry Cooke

4.75⭐️ - A sweet witchy treat, with a rock solid found family!

Annie is a swan, with the beauty on the surface hiding the chaos beneath as she tries to be everything to everyone in her life. Perfect for her friends, selfless at work, and totally incapable of saying no for fear of letting people down, she's between a rock and a hard place when the head of her coven hands her guardianship of a 15-year-old witch who is struggling to deal with her powerful magic. As they find companionship in their quiet woodland environs (quiet if you exclude the surprising amount of animals, of course), they can't expect all that will come their way.

This was such a lovely story, the perfect lovely autumn treat, and deals really well with the need to allow yourself rest and peace after decades of giving all of yourself to other people. The found family vibes are excellent, with a cosy country cottage, and the perfect witchy meadow. Feline familiars join many other adorable animal companions and as Annie finds herself relaxing into her new role, it's so affirming seeing her prioritising herself.

4.75⭐️ - A moving and affirming story, revealing the difficult choices one must make when in a position of expectation.

When Danni Blythe starts as a scholarship student a the prestigious all-girls boarding school that's filled with the daughters of some of the most powerful people in Henland, all she hopes for is that she'll be able to leave her years of being bullied behind. Despite feeling as if she's on the lowest rung of the social ladder, she finds herself quickly included. When she literally falls another girls arms, the fact that it turns out to be those of the Crown Princess leads to a romance that's as complicated as it is heart warming.

I loved this story rather a lot and despite thinking from the first twenty pages or so that it might be a feel-good and possibly cheesy Princess Diaries kind of tale, it had a real depth of emotional feeling. In particular, the arcs of Rose's journey of dealing with grief and Danni's fear of being perceived were really transformative to read through. A thoroughly rich story and one that I'd definitely recommend.

I was kindly gifted a hardcover edition of this book by the publisher for review.

Nelly's life at school is tough and isn't much better at home. Her mother heaps love and attention on her twin brother Ludo, whose group of friends tease her constantly. Her only solace comes from music, her rocker aunt Jan, and best friend Kit. When Ludo starts decides to start a band, the whole dynamic is shaken up and a roller coaster of emotions occurs.

This was a true celebration of the power of music and interwove facts about artists as well as song lyrics with the narrative. Lippett's wonderful illustrations bring the music to life and very intentional use of colour gives vibrant contrast to the pages. It deals compassionately with the subject of bullying, highlights queer relationships naturally, and the way in which complicated relationships can get in the way of potential at times.

It was a really beautiful graphic novel and I'm very thankful to have had a chance to give it a read prior to publication, so thank you to Sally, Sarah, and Ziggy!

A sweet road trip with a group of super close friends, leading to a place where Amelia realises what's right in front of her.

Amelia has been obsessed with YouTuber Walter Holland for a long time and so when he does his first solo meet and greet event within the same state, she knows she has to go. If it just so happens to coincide by her best friend suffering a prom brake-up, well, all the better! On the journey, she finds that her friend group gets shaken up in ways she couldn't have expected and realises what's most important to her has been right there all along.

I loved Imogen, Obviously so I had a fair idea that I would love this. Stepping back into that world has been super cute and it was adorable seeing Imogen's sister getting some limelight too and great to get a sizeable Imogen and Tessa cameo! While the first book dealt with a lot of these of queer awakening and self-doubt, this one focusses more on the bi-sexual experience and features a friend group that is almost entirely queer (yay!).

I really enjoyed this and I hope that Becky Albertalli writes more in this world! ^-^

4.5⭐️ - Beautiful and devastating with absolutely phenomenal world building and poetic writing!

One of my favourite books of all time is The Night Circus and I'd thoroughly recommend this book to any fan of that! The way magic is weaved into the world with a mix of different sources of lore is truly wonderful. I was utterly pulled along in the stream of the story and captivated by the writing style. Lawrence combines human history from the real world with imaginary works to in doing so creates a world and larger universe where there are infinite connections and possibilities.

A big theme is expectation, for yourself, for your future, for the people you meet and this is expressed in a way that surprises and confuses at times, but it makes the whole journey that much more exciting. Truly a wonderful piece of literature and I'm so excited to read the next book to see how the story of the library progresses!

4.25⭐️ - A comic book romance with a sharp turn into darkness.

Jubilee (appropriately comic named) is a higher achiever who has lost her spark recently, with the pressure to perform at her upcoming cello audition mounting up as she pins her hopes on what it could mean. When she attends a major comic convention with her step-mother (the owner of the eponymous Verona Comics) and her best friend, she has a mission to let go and to find a con crush.

Ridley is horribly anxious and hates working conventions for his father's massive comic corporation. The one that has put so many indie stores out of business and is widely panned by true comic lovers. He's temped to blow off the last night prom and when a girl dressed as his favourite comic book character appears rushing into the elevator, his stress anxiety doubles.

This book is in equal parts sweet and painful. Dealing with topics of expectation, pressure, and depression. Ridley's relationship with his parents is stranded and his former depressive periods don't help, and Jubilee finds it so hard to balance her life. Alongside these important mental health topics, there's also decision of not being queer enough, with the characters being pan and bi respectively, but in this straight passing relationship.

It's Dugan in top form, a devastating story balanced out with love and hope.

You can call it Fourth Wing with dire wolves, but you’d be underselling it by a large amount!

Meryn has a mother who is plagued by visions and is not herself most of the time, and distracts herself by making money on the side by entering the fighting pit. Her main focus is taking care of her younger sister, and trying to make a better life for her so when her sister is kidnapped by the ‘Nabbers’ who are suspected to be enemy forces, she pledges to bring her back no matter the cost.

This was an absolutely phenomenal read and a total wild ride that had me on the edge of my seat towards the end and totally gripped. I didn’t find it at all, predictable, though I did have my suspicions and bad feelings along the way. Meryn is a really powerful protagonist, but also very quick to anger and slow to trust at times.

I am so impatient for the next book in this series now, because it was just THAT good.

A phenomenal journey into a world with complex magic and subterfuge aplenty!

I can't believe I put this off for so long, because it's absolutely as fantastic as I've heard!

Brynn as a protagonist is multilayered, self-assured, and powerful. Her push back and determination is the perfect foil to Acker's cockiness and it makes the banter all that more satisfying. With a vicious animal companion, mysterious magic powers, and a suspicious dagger with a deep history. she's all you could hope for in a protagonist.

The world building is fantastic and I particularly love the concept of a banished-to-sea people who make a home amongst a grove of trees that grow in the water. The description of strings of lights and colours immediately had me feeling love of the locations.

I'm intensely impatient for the next book now!

3⭐️ - A promising premise, let down by characters choices.

I enjoyed Legendborn and I was excited to see where the story went with this, but I spent most of this book questioning why Bree just made everything worse all the time. In the first book, it was understandable at times due to her age and inexperience, but in this book she's given so many opportunities, so much advice, and yet always seems to do the one thing that will cause everything to fall apart. By the time I go to the end of the book, I found myself really not caring all that much about what happened to everyone because I was so frustrated with it all.

I'm afraid to say I won't be reading the next one, because I've lost all my investment.

That said, the focus on history and legend is still present and it's not a bad book, just not one that I enjoyed.

3.25⭐️ - Playing for keeps, but falling a little short of home plate.

June is the lone woman on her premiere baseball team and after her mother died, she internalised all the expectations and hopes for sporting success and will let nothing stand in the way. Ivy dreams of being an NFL referee and so when she's put forward to umpire the fall baseball season she grumbles, until her boss points out how good it'll look on her resume.

When the June, who has been constantly talking back to her and being unsportsmanlike, shows up in the officials only changing room after the game, Ivy is ready to kick her out, until she realises how much pain she is experiencing.

I've loved all of Jennifer Dugan's books and I really wanted to love this one too, but I found it difficult reading about two characters who lack so much emotional intelligence. I made allowances in my head for the fact that they'd both experienced significant trauma in their lives and hadn't had many relationships due to their obsessive sports schedules, but it was still hard to read at times.

June is obsessive to the point of self destruction and Ivy is self-sacrificing. In the end, both of them miss out on an opportunity because of it.

4.25⭐️ - A magical Arthurian legend retelling that deals with intense grief, ancestral trauma, and the feeling of being an ethnic minority amidst the prejudices in secret societies.

Bree longs to get out of her small town and is excited when she gets offered a place at an early admission residential program at a prestigious college in North Carolina. Soon after she gives the news to her, a car crash takes her mother away from her and throws her internal world in to turmoil. Struggling at first to settle in to the college life and with clues to what happened to her mother leading her in their direction, she negotiates her way into a secret society. What she finds in her time there completely throws into question what she thought she knew about her self and her family.

This is a fascinating take on Arthurian lore and mixes the traditional historical stories with the history of colonialism and slavery in the US. Bree's ancestral connections and the midden magic tied up in this, as well as the erasure and persecution of these natural magic users, talks a lot to the treatment of minorities in the US. A lot of plot is given to the discussion of that experience, of how it feels to be in traditionally low-diversity spaces, and how it takes an immense amount of will to beat down the prejudices you face.

This was a really well done story and I'm looking forward to reading the next two!

4.5⭐️ - Double the paladin, double the plot!

When Margarette comes under attack from the secret network that she originally worked for, she must seek support from the Temple of the White Rat and their cadre of former Saint of Steel paladins in order to avert a major crisis. The Bishop is more than happy to lend her a couple, considering the circumstances, and so she sets off to engage in some court intrigue with the stoic Shane and the bold Wren.

This is another fantastic entry into the World of the White Rat universe and it continues to build in the larger mysteries present in the previous books. We get less gnoll content this time and it's overall a less murder mystery, more political machinations compared to the other two, but it's just as much of a fun ride that leaves you with more questions about the larger world that I'm excited to explore when the next book comes!

5⭐️ and I'd rate it higher if I could!

Lily is going to die. She's not happy about it (in fact, she's incandescently angry at the medical insurance industry that caused her to be in this situation), but with her body wasting away, she's ready for the pain to be over. When she arrives in the afterlife, it becomes clear that the strict christian upbringing she escaped was dead wrong about everything.

Struggling to settle in to this new reality, and with no small amount of spite towards all the people in her adolescence who warned her this would happen, she decides to visit Hell. She finds that demons are just as respectful as they are terrifying and that souls sent for punishment are the very worst customers!

Having spent her mortal life battling many proverbial Karens and searching for purpose, she offers to lend a hand dealing with the worst of the complainants. As she meets deities, denizens, and one particularly adorable lost child, she begins to find that the family you can find in the afterlife can give you all that you wanted in life and more.

This is a beautiful work of fiction that covers trauma with tenderness, demonstrates the very greenest of green flag relationships, and deals so much humour and nerdiness. This is easily one of my favourite books of 2025 and I lost count of the number of times it brought me to tears (C18!) and had me laughing out loud.

I'll add an admission that I'm biased positively towards this book, because I adore Jaysea's TikTok series that this is a prequel to. However, while the nostalgia factor and joy of seeing Lily's entry to the afterlife contributed to the enjoyment - this book fully stands on its own merits as a fantastic work of fantasy romance!

4.5⭐️ - A swashbuckling fantasy romp in Exandria, filled with familiar locations, a subtle D&D flair, and plenty of tusk love!

When Guinevere is set upon by mercenaries seeking to take the last treasures of her family, she thinks all is lost until a strapping half-orc fighter enters the fray on her behalf. With half the forrest aflame, the pair enter an uneasy travelling agreement, at a time when there is a distinct lack of beds available!

It was a lot of fun seeing what was just a recurring gag in Critical Role: Campaign Two turned into a legitimate story. Part of me almost expected it to be a farce, so I was thrilled to discover that this is a genuinely exciting and moving romantasy, with good character development and exploration of locations in the world of the campaign.

There's not much actual magic thrown around, with the combat staying mostly in the physical, but perhaps that makes a lot of sense given it's a book that's meant to exist in the D&D setting - after all, fantasy books within our world don't usually play by the same physical rules of ours, hehe.

2.75⭐️ - Twisted timelines and motives come together to create a fascinating concept, but a muddle of perspectives. I really wanted to love this book, but on the whole found it underwhelming.

At the core, it's a whodunit, a mystery of somebody shot dead in a room that is locked from the inside. Odette, a young graduate researcher finds the body and it leads her on a determined path to find out the who and the why of it all. It's also a story of mental health and the way it can be weaponised to keep people out of roles, as Ruby finds out as she begins to explore the history of her grandmother, Bee, who was one of the founding scientists who discovered time travel.

There's many threads, duplicities, and complex relationships here. With past and future selves, children older than their parents, etc. it can get confusing at times keeping track of which version of a character you're dealing with. This is by design and part of the nature of time travel, I guess. It's possible I wasn't in the right brain space for it, but it just left me a bit unfulfilled.

5⭐️ - Tomato-man and Bone-doctor can't smell!

The third entry to the Saint of Steel books and the first M/M one!

Of all of the Paladin's of the deceased Saint of Steel, Galen is among those most troubled by the memories of what followed the death of their god. Suffering from nightmares that leave him screaming and attacking anyone who tries to wake up, he's taken to sleeping alone to keep those around him safe. This is somewhat complicated when an investigation with Piper (the handsome coroner with the alabaster skin and skilled hands) at the behest of Earswipe the gnoll traps all three of them in a maze of deadly traps.

What I love about T. Kingfishers writing is that the angst and pathos of the paladins is so often counterbalanced by a “yes yes, you're very noble and guilty, but shut up and let me care for you” attitude from the love interests. Piper is the perfect foil to Galen, completely having his number and shutting him up when he tries the guilty “I shouldn't have kissed you” routine.

What I also love is how much these books continue to build on the lore. In particular, this book gives little hints and clues about The Ancients and has a lot more gnoll content. I love the gnolls in these books, especially the way in which Kingfisher has given them a delicately crafted society, caste based language (for example, they refer to themselves and each other as as “a gnoll” but their healer as “our gnoll” - designating their importance) and I hope we see more of them in the future!

4.5⭐️ - A satisfying conclusion to the Bright Falls series, but I'm so sad that this might be the last I see of Delilah, Clare, Astrid, and Iris

4.5⭐️ - The queer coven in Bright Falls continues to grow closer as a renovation of a local landmark calls on Astrid's skills as a designer. The pressure of a TV crew following the process isn't made any easier to deal with by the infuriating presence of Jordan Everwood, in charge of carpentry and also the granddaughter of the owner. As their adversarial relationship turns to something more supportive, they find that it's not just the designs that are getting a big reshuffle.

It was so lovely to see inside Astrid's head after seeing the relationship between her and her step-sider Delilah as a major side plot in the first book. Astrid's difficult feelings about her mother, the need for perfection she's always felt, and the desire to be the best all come unraveled over the course of this book and it's really enjoyable seeing all the characters from the first book again.

A sweet story, wonderful representation, and a small town found family I'd never want to lose.

A wonderful introduction to the town of Bright Falls, with lovable characters, strong relationships, and a heavy serving of spice.

After over a decade of being away from Bright Falls, Delilah Green really doesn't want to go back, but can't say no to the heavy amount of money her rich and entitled step-mother is paying her to photograph her estranged step-sister's wedding.

Claire's life has been up and down since having her daughter Ruby in her late teens, with an often absent co-parent who isn't much of a parent most of the time, she really needs to blow off steam. Little does she realise that the stranger she decided to hit on has a lot more history in the town than it seems.

This was a really fun story and features a complex cast of characters with a lot of history to untangle. The relationship that blooms between Delilah and Claire is utterly adorable and fun, while the healing of the relationship with step-sister Astrid is really moving to follow.

I'm looking forward to reading more about these characters in the other two Bright Falls books ☺️

4.5⭐️ - CUTE CUTE CUTE!!

When a movie rolls into town, the last person Ramona Riley expects to see is the first girl she ever kissed. Worst of all, Dylan (the wild and wounded child star) seems completely oblivious of how she changed Ramona's life.

Dylan Monroe seems to mess up every relationship in her life and on the back of her latest breakup, she wants this movie to go well. Deciding to go as method as possible in her part of a small town girl working in a café, she's immediately taken by the waitress guiding her.

As their desires, fears, and pasts collide, neither is quite ready for where they end up.

This was an an adorable story and seeing the characters navigate a lot of complex situations was really interesting. I was rooting all through for them to find their way and I wasn't at all disappointed. I'm so excited to know that there's going to be a second book, focussing on Ramona's adorable best friend April ^-^

4.75⭐️ - T. Kingfisher on her best form her, with an amazing story that grips the heart and has you on the edge of the seat at times.

Isthvan is the consummate guilty paladin, much like Steven in the first one, who feels as if he can't get into a relationship because it would put her into danger, but if soon transpires that Clara can more than take care of herself. As they journey together, both their feelings about the chance of having a relationship change.

This was a super fun story, as I've come to expect, and I adored Clara as a FMC, she was strong and self assured and just as powerful as Isthvan, meaning that they both take care of each other. Brindle the Gnoll makes a welcome return, though maligning the lack of Ox, and a quest to spread oak seeds is a fun aside.

4⭐️ - A lot of steam in the kitchen with this one, a spicy dish that leaves you wanting more!

Amy's restaurant is on the down turn, with the popularity of her former TV contestant head chef Sophie slipping after she called off her engagement. As the two work together to try and avert potential closure, they're forced to confront not just their attraction towards each other, but also their fears and desires.

This is a sweet story, with Sophie being newly out as bi and Amy being the experiences lesbian who is afraid of serious commitment. It deals a lot with the issue of assuming what's best for somebody and shows healing and growth of past stuff that creates boundaries in communication.

It had as much spice as one of the raunchier Hazelwood books, with some wipe downs of kitchen surfaces definitely required!

4.25 ⭐️ - This was a really sweet story, with a lot of complex relationships and a focus on the way in which still being hung up on a person who broke your heart can stand in the way of fully committing to a new relationship.

Scottie has been off her game and her team has suffered since her ex-girlfriend moved to a rival school. When a fender bender puts her in close proximity to Irene, a girl who has been nothing but mean to her in the past, she find herself falling into a scheme that will improve the teams chances and take pressure off Irene.

This is your classic sports romance with a sapphic twist, a coming of age story about accepting yourself, not letting your worth be defined by people who don't love you enough, and how closeted bullies can be homophobic. It's got lovely family vibes and supportive team mates and is overall just a really fun read.

4.5⭐️ - Bridgerton meets Back to the Future, in a fascinating and queer take on time travel romance!

Audrey has lost her creative spark and with a looming deadline to submit an updated portfolio to RISD, she's in a spiral of panic and self doubt. When a magic coin sends her back into regency England, she must learn to navigate the confusing time period and complicated feelings.

A major focus of the story was the way in which a modern woman would be shocked by how restrictive it was in that time period and how, likewise, a woman from the 1800s would be fascinated by all the possibilities open to her in the future. The romance here is really slow burn and super cute and I adored seeing them learning about each other's worlds.

This was a super cute graphic novel, with adorable witchy vibes. A medium length, very accessible story of responsibility and first love.

Jo's mother has taken ill all of a sudden and the town is experiencing many small misfortunes, so she seeks out Orla - a hedge witch and granddaughter of the old town witch. It soon becomes clear that Orla and Jo are bound to each other (and to the town) in ways that neither of them could have expected.