Michelle Dsouza

Our Perfect Storm is precisely the book it tells you it will be. This is a rarer achievement than it sounds, and also a ceiling.

Frankie and George have been best friends since they were eight years old. He shows up as her best man on the eve of her wedding. The fiancé leaves the next morning with nothing but a note. Frankie and George end up on what was supposed to be her honeymoon: one week in paradise, seven days for two people who have been circling something for decades to either finally say it or lose it entirely. The trajectory is clear from the first chapter. This is not a problem in a rom-com. The genre contract is a happy ending, not a surprise. The pleasure is in the distance between where two people start and where you already know they are going.

Fortune writes with ease and competence. The prose does not reach for things it does not need. The banter between Frankie and George carries the specific warmth of two people who know each other's rhythms well enough to shorthand everything and still mean it. George, in particular, is the best-friend-to-lovers archetype constructed at its most complete: present, attentive, patient, quietly carrying something he will not say until the moment he does. He is generous and warm and the kind of literary creation this genre exists to produce.

Frankie is a self-sabotage machine with a good heart, which is the correct configuration for this kind of story. Her avoidance is frustrating in the way the genre needs it to be. You see the ending from page thirty. This is fine. The point is the navigation, not the destination.

The problem is sweetness without friction. Fortune has calibrated this book very precisely toward warmth and the calibration does not miss. The setting is beautiful. The romance is tender. Every obstacle resolves. Every warm moment lands as intended. But there is no scene here that genuinely costs something, no moment where the outcome is uncertain enough to make your chest tighten. A rom-com without real friction is still a rom-com. It simply leaves less behind than one with a single scene where the resolution was not guaranteed.

What this book is genuinely good for: it is a palette cleanser, and a good one. Between a fantasy with a body count and a historical fiction with moral weight, this is a cold drink on a warm afternoon. It goes down easily, delivers what it promises, and you are grateful for it in the moment. The gratitude does not need to outlast the afternoon. For books in this genre, that is honest, not a criticism.

Fortune is a reliable writer of exactly this kind of book. If you want what she is selling, she sells it well and consistently. These are three stars from someone who wanted more friction and is honest enough to know the friction she wanted was never on offer here.

Every time I had to put this book down, I was a little annoyed. I wanted to keep going. Three days, a hundred pages at a time, and life kept getting in the way shaking me out the escape that this book was!

Chloe is burnt out. Invisible to her boss, overworked, underappreciated, and I didn't find it sad so much as infuriating, because I've let jobs do this to me more times than I want to admit. She was a mirror, and not always a comfortable one. She books a wellness retreat at a sun-drenched Ibizan villa and gets chaos instead of calm. Feral goats, beach raves, skinny-dipping, wedding-crashing, and Ben, who runs the place, looks like Pedro Pascal, cooks like a dream, and is visibly a bit out of his depth. He's on a sabbatical from his London restaurant, trying to turn his late uncle's rundown villa into something functional. Neither of them planned on the other.

The romance is sweet, but it's not the reason to read this. The women are. Chloe, Jess, and Zara are at completely different stages of their lives, and they still find this deep, easy belonging in each other. That friendship is the warmest thing in the book. It's three women rediscovering themselves and their own bodies, holding space for each other while they do it, and Bailey writes it with a lot of care. It made me want to call my own people. Women need to do this more, reach out to their inner circles, protect the time they spend with the women they actually love being around. Chloe specifically is every woman who overthinks everything, puts her career before herself, runs on imposter syndrome, and never once shoots her shot. Relatable to the point of slight discomfort.

Ben is the heart of it. Bailey writes him as thoughtful, not just handsome, someone who notices the women around him battling new roles and changing bodies and meets them with kindness. But the thing I loved most was the banter between Ben and Miguel. It's warm and silly and feels like an actual friendship, and it quietly carries the weight of the relationship Ben had with his late uncle Lorenzo. I'd read a whole book of those two just talking.

If I had one note, it's the spice. The characters are written with so much thought that the language in the intimate scenes felt a little at odds with the rest, slightly cruder than the care everywhere else would suggest, and the first scene between Chloe and Ben arrived a bit suddenly. To be clear, the spice itself is mild compared to a lot of what I've read. It's more that the wording occasionally didn't match how tenderly these characters were drawn.

The ending is what you'd expect from a rom-com, a little predictable, but it works, and I was relieved it didn't take the cheap dramatic turn it flirted with near the end. There's a message too, spelled out in the author's note: women and mothers deserve love, deserve to feel appreciated, deserve time that's purely their own. Book the holiday. Wear the bikini. Eat what you want. You are important. For all the women out there, give yourself a break. Away from it all. Annually.

Warm, funny, full of heart, and a lot of soul underneath.

This was my first Greek mythology retelling, and I went in knowing Medusa only the way most people do, through pop culture. The snakes. The stone gaze. The monster. What I didn't know was the circumstance that made her. That part of the story is unbearable, and it stayed with me. The book itself I'm more conflicted about.

Medusa retells the myth from Medusa's own perspective, reclaiming her as a wronged woman rather than a monster. I rooted for her, though the myth hands you most of that sympathy before Hewlett does anything with it. Her death moved me to tears, but I have to be honest about why. The circumstance is unbearable on its own. Medusa's story is a few thousand years old and devastating regardless of who tells it. The tears were the myth's doing, not the book's, and once I separated the two, I could see how much the telling worked against the material rather than for it.

My central problem is the language. It's modern, consistently and throughout, and I couldn't make peace with it. It pulled me out of the world the book was trying to build. I understand the strategy. Modern language makes mythology accessible, and it's a genuinely effective way to get a new generation to pick up these stories and feel that they belong to them too. But there's a cost. The contemporary phrasing felt disrespectful to the genre and, more than that, to who Medusa was. It didn't read like the interior voice of a woman from this world. It read like a voice imported from ours.

That bleeds into my second issue. Hewlett's foreword is explicit about wanting women's voices heard, and the book carries a clear #MeToo current underneath it. The cause is valid and formidable, and I have no quarrel with it as a cause. But you can feel the agenda being pushed through the narrative, specifically in the way Medusa speaks and the things she says, which often didn't feel like how she would actually have thought. The message kept stepping in front of the character. A well told tale that could have been told better, because the telling was always slightly visible.

The thing I couldn't reconcile at all is Athena. The book has her wanting Medusa dead, seemingly as punishment for the rape rather than for the god who committed it. For a goddess, that's morally incoherent. Wouldn't a deity be beyond that kind of misdirected blame? And if she truly is a goddess, wouldn't she have been able to see what actually happened? The book never resolves this in a way that satisfied me, and it's the kind of gap that matters when the whole project is about justice and who deserves blame.

I wouldn't read this again. I'd reach for something more traditional. But as an entry point into a genre I'd never touched, it did enough to make me want more of it, just told differently.

Maeve Dunigan has spent a lifetime trying to seem effortlessly chill. This book is the evidence that it hasn't worked, and it is funnier for it.

Read This to Look Cool is a humor essay collection in the McSweeney's tradition: specific, self-aware, deadpan, and very online in its sensibility. The pieces are standalone, which means you can read one on a lunch break and put it down without losing a thread. That structural looseness is either a feature or a limitation depending on your patience for collections that don't build toward anything. I found it freeing.

The wit is consistent across the whole collection, which matters more than it sounds. Most humor essay collections peak in the first third and spend the rest coasting on goodwill. Dunigan doesn't let that happen. The register stays level: self-deprecating without being a performance of self-deprecation, absurdist without losing the emotional core underneath.

"Email Signatures in Ascending Order of How Nervous I Am to Be Emailing You" is the standout piece. It's a stream of consciousness that a lot of people have lived through and thought about writing down and never did. Dunigan wrote it down and made it funny without defusing it. You laugh because it's true.

She also hates tomatoes. She at least tried to like them, which puts her ahead of me.

Dunigan is likeable in a way that makes the humor land warmer than it might otherwise. She writes about belonging, self-performance, the anxiety of modern visibility, and the specific embarrassments that live rent-free in your head for years. She is not trying to be cool, which is the only way to write a book called Read This to Look Cool without it backfiring.

This is not my usual reading territory. Dunigan made it easy to be in anyway.

I distrust dual timelines. Too often they're a structural crutch, a way to manufacture tension by withholding information across two threads that don't actually need each other. The Sirens made me forget I distrust them at all. Emilia Hart moves between past and present so seamlessly that the transitions feel inevitable rather than engineered. Every time one timeline handed off to the other, it landed at exactly the right moment.

The book follows Lucy, who wakes from a sleepwalking episode with her hands around her ex's throat and flees to her estranged sister Jess's house on the coast, only to find Jess missing. Threaded through Lucy's present is the story of Mary and Eliza, sisters transported on a convict ship to Australia in 1800, and a deeper history of water, transformation, and a kind of feminine power that runs in the blood. The Mary and Eliza timeline is the one that gripped me hardest. Their chapters carry the emotional weight of the book, and Hart writes them with a clarity that never tips into melodrama despite everything they endure.

What I loved most is that Hart commits fully to both the mythic and the human. The magical elements aren't decoration. They drive the plot and deepen the themes rather than sitting on top of them. The water, the transformation, the inheritance of suffering and survival across generations of women, all of it works because Hart trusts it.

There's a moment with a lionfish that genuinely stopped me. Robert watches the siren in the cave, beautiful and vicious all at once, and sees a lionfish in her. When he tries to draw her, it feels like pinning a butterfly for study, taking something that flickers with life and killing it. He refuses to do that to her. So instead he draws a lionfish, secretly, as a way to hold onto her without trapping her. It's a small, tender act of restraint, and it captures something the whole book is reaching for: how do you love something wild without destroying the wildness that made you love it.

What stayed with me is the hope. The Sirens is a book full of trauma, but it refuses to end there. It insists that suffering can be turned into something, that survival is its own kind of power, that all is not always lost. After a run of books that confused sadness with depth, this one earns its darkness and then earns its way back out of it.

My one real frustration is the student/teacher subplot. It felt like it was there to serve the plot rather than because it deserved a place in the book, and Melody's story about Ryan Smith landed the same way: a detail the book didn't need. Both moments pulled me briefly out of a story that otherwise held me completely.

The pacing is the quiet hero here. I read this in 24 hours and didn't want to stop. Borrowed from the library and already planning to buy my own copy, which is the highest compliment I have.