Michelle Dsouza

I came into When the Light Returns without reading Book 1, which turns out to be both fine and dangerous. Fine, because Meyer constructs the sequel with enough context that you stay oriented. Dangerous, because finishing it sent me straight to While the Dark Remains.

Ballast Vallin is a deposed king bearing the cost of his father's cruelty. Brynja is his father's former captive, the woman Ballast loves, and the person who stripped him of his crown. The book opens with that rupture and keeps them separated for most of its pages, working against forces larger than either of them. Brynja ends up in Iljaria, at the mercy of Queen Valrún, whose ambitions extend to seizing power the gods were meant to hold. The stakes are clear from the first chapters and only compound from there.

What Meyer does that most fantasy romance writers don't is refuse to manufacture emotional distance between the leads. Ballast and Brynja are certain of each other. The obstacles are political, structural, and external, not manufactured doubt or miscommunication dressed up as tension. That decision changes the entire emotional register of the book. You spend your time watching two people fight their way back to each other rather than waiting for them to stop being in their own way.

Ballast works as an MMC because Meyer gives him specificity. He has one eye, and she uses that detail with precision rather than treating it as background tragedy. The moment where Brynja's gaze catches on it mid-scene and Ballast clocks it lands as humour inside genuine tension, and that tonal control carries through the entire book. Climax scenes deliver with unexpected wit. "Ballast, that was supposed to be a secret!" only works when the surrounding architecture is solid enough to hold the levity, and here it is.

The prose is efficient. Meyer gives you exactly what you need and moves on. The multiple POVs and timelines add structural weight that I noticed more acutely as someone coming in without Book 1. A returning reader will likely carry this differently. It's my only real friction with the book.

Two lines stayed with me after I finished. "I am pulled to pieces and sewn back together. I am shattered and remade. I am erased and redrawn, over and over again." That's Brynja entire. And the quieter devastation of "Because it is we who have done this. It is me." Meyer earns both. They don't arrive out of nowhere.

This closes the duology in a place that satisfies and stings simultaneously. My complaint is that I wanted one more book. That's probably the best complaint a duology can generate.

I picked this up because the premise genuinely interested me. Two influencers. A suspiciously generous all-expenses-paid trip. A desert mansion that turns sinister. The setup has real potential and for the first quarter of the novella, it delivers on that.

Then the format took over.

I understand novellas are supposed to be short. But this particular story needed space that a hundred pages does not provide. The premise Rosi is working with, characters you fear for, escalating dread, a payoff that actually lands, requires room to build. It never gets that room. The result is a book that moves through the motions of a much more effective story without having time to become one. The format robbed a genuinely good premise.

The writing is functional. Not bad, but not descriptive or creative either. It moves you from one scene to the next without doing much else. You will not stop to notice a sentence. You will not feel the heat of the desert or the specific chill of a situation closing in around you. It tells you what is happening without making you feel like you are there.

Debbie and Amelia are underdeveloped, which is at least partly the format's problem. You need to know someone before you fear for them. Rosi does not have the pages to build that knowledge and it shows. The characters feel rushed and incomplete, and the darkness that follows lands on people you never fully meet.

The setting is a separate issue. The book places its events in a vaguely defined Middle East desert without naming a country, a city, or engaging with any specific cultural detail. In 2025, using the Middle East as atmospheric backdrop without any actual engagement with the region is a lazy choice. It is a mood, not a place.

The book is marketed as a novella that will "shock and terrify." I was not shocked. I was not terrified. What the characters experience is objectively disturbing, but the writing never puts you inside it enough to feel the weight of it. For something to genuinely shock and terrify you, you need to be in the story. I was watching from a distance the entire time.

I finished it in one evening. Afterward I did not feel particularly excited to have read it. That is the most honest summary I have.

The premise deserved a full novel. This is not that book.

Thank you to Zoe Rosi, Xpresso Book Tours, Lighthouse Books, and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I went in with high expectations and came out having wasted seventeen hours.

The history this book draws from is real and extraordinary. The women who ran escape lines through Nazi-occupied France, who moved Allied airmen across the Pyrenees at enormous personal risk, who were arrested and sent to camps and sometimes did not return, were women of documented, specific, extraordinary courage. A novel choosing to tell their story owed them the gravity they earned. This one assembled the clichés instead. There are so many genuinely great books written about this period that the laziness here is its own offense. Hannah did not try. She took every available shortcut and called it historical fiction.

The central absurdity of the premise: your city is invaded by Nazis and your first instinct is to cry about some man that you loved you didn't love you back and abandoned you? That is the book. That is the whole book. The occupation of France is not the subject. It is the mood board.

The writing is mediocre and the inconsistencies are not subtle. Isabelle distributes Resistance leaflets and steals a bicycle in knee-deep snow. Knee-deep snow leaves tracks. Tracks lead soldiers directly back to the people she is supposedly protecting. This is not a small oversight. It is the kind of basic logical gap that a careful writer, or a careful editor, closes before publication. This book has several of them and each one confirms that the research never went deeper than the surface.

The village of Carriveau is small and rural and somehow contains Nazis, SS officers, Gestapo, and a and entire networked train system that appears wherever the plot requires one. This is not world-building. This is a writer placing whatever she needs in whatever location the scene demands and hoping the reader does not notice.

Days after Vianne is assaulted, her husband conveniently returns home and she is now pregnant. The timing is so narratively convenient it borders on contemptuous toward the reader. If you want to write a love story, write a love story. Do not drag the trauma of war into it as a plot device and call it brave storytelling.

The prose itself does not compensate for any of this. It is functional at best, reaching for emotional weight through repetition and sentiment rather than through specificity or genuine observation. The dialogue is flat. There are no sentences here that stay with you. There is no moment of writing that earns its place through genuine skill.

The suggestion that what a woman needed to survive Nazi occupation was a beautiful face and a body men wanted is not historical looseness. It is offensive.

It is beyond comprehension that anyone has the nerve to romanticize war. The people who lived through Nazi occupation deserve to have their reality told with honesty, not dressed up in a love story because honest history is apparently less sellable.

The real women who inspired Isabelle earned legacies of genuine historical weight. This novel closes by reducing them to women in love. It is not a tribute. It is a reduction, and it is the most telling thing about what this book actually values.That this passed through an editorial process and was celebrated is its own conversation.

One star. Absolutely not.

I almost gave up on this in the first twenty pages. Not because it was bad, but because I had never read a memoir before and kept waiting for a plot that was never coming.

Then I looked up Dawn O'Porter and fell completely in love with her. After that, the book sailed.

Hungry Eyes follows the moments and meals that built Dawn into the person she is. Her beginnings are genuinely sad. She lost both parents young and was raised by her Aunty Jane in Guernsey, and you feel how much that shaped her on every single page. But this is not a sad book. It is the story of someone who came into herself with real honesty and humor and a lot of food, and watching that happen was, genuinely, an honor to read.

The writing is raw. Not raw in a performed, look-how-honest-I-am way. Actually raw. The kind where you laugh and then feel slightly guilty for laughing, and then Dawn makes the same joke a beat later and you realize you were supposed to laugh. I found myself giggling with her constantly, and I know I could listen to her tell her stories all day long.

The book is detailed enough that you feel like you lived inside the stories rather than just reading about them. Her writing is authentic enough that by the end you feel like you know who she is personally and who she loves deeply.

Aunty Jane is in a category of her own. The way Dawn writes about her is so pure it makes you want to call your own person, whoever that is for you.

There are recipes in this book. I made the Ultimate Mac N Cheese and the Panettone Bread Pudding within the same week. I am working out extra hard as a direct consequence and I have no one to blame but Dawn O'Porter and myself, in equal measure.

By the end I just wanted more. More stories, more meals, more Aunty Jane.

This was my first ever memoir and my first NetGalley ARC, and I did not expect to feel this way about either. Four stars and a growing suspicion I have been missing out on an entire genre.

Delilah Thomas has spent her whole life making herself easy to be around. She learned it young, inside a family she never belonged to, that the safest thing was to stay quiet and agree. By her late thirties she has turned it into a kind of art form. She teaches preschoolers, keeps a tight circle of five lifelong friends, and does not make waves.

Then Peach Pit moves into her small Southern town. A direct sales beauty company, it recruits women into its network with promises of beauty, income, and sisterhood. Her closest friend Betsy joins immediately. Something feels wrong to Delilah. She says nothing, because saying something has never been her first language.

Grace Helena Walz uses Peach Pit smartly. It doesn't function as a corporate villain. It functions as a social one, moving through the friend group the way these things actually move: through hope, not pressure. The promise of belonging and self-improvement attaches itself to insecurity and ambition, and the damage it causes is personal before it's physical. It tests who believes whom, who speaks up, and who defends something harmful because they need the dream to be real. That makes the conflict feel human rather than abstract.

The Fives are the emotional core of the book and Walz writes them with honesty. These are women with twenty years of shared history who are starting to be pulled in different directions by life, motherhood, money, and fear. The friendship is loving and not immune to silence, jealousy, or the slow discomfort of outgrowing old roles. That felt true to how long friendships actually work.

Mrs. Chopra is the standout of the supporting cast. She has the warmth and specificity of a character who exists fully beyond her plot function, and she carries much of the book's humor without tipping into caricature. Betsy is the complicated one. Her loyalty to Peach Pit is the place where love and denial meet, and it's uncomfortable in exactly the right way.

Delilah's growth is quiet and earns its place. She doesn't become suddenly fearless. She starts choosing honesty even when confrontation still frightens her, and Walz respects that timeline. By the time Delilah says what needs to be said, you've traveled the whole distance with her.

The weakness is that the premise promises more sharpness than the tone delivers. The book stays firmly in warm, wholesome Southern fiction territory throughout. For the kind of story this is, that is the right choice. For readers wanting something with more edge, it will feel like an opportunity not fully taken.

"Life might not always be pretty, but it sure is sweet." That closing line does the work.

3.5 stars.