Michelle Dsouza
No One Is Talking About This was my first fragmented novel, and for the opening stretch I was sure the failure was mine. I never read blurbs before starting a book, so I arrived with no warning: no conventional chapters, no orientation, only a stream of post-sized paragraphs from the mind of an unnamed woman who went viral once and now lives half her life inside a place called the portal. I felt locked out, and I kept asking why anyone would write a book this way.
The answer arrived once I stopped fighting the form. The fragments mimic the scroll. Reading them recreates the exact texture of an hour online, attention ricocheting between the absurd and the sincere, and Lockwood controls the ricochet with unnerving precision. The first half is funny in a way few literary novels manage. I laughed out loud repeatedly, and one four-word fragment, "Can a dog be twins?", has taken up permanent residence in my head. Lockwood is a poet before she is a novelist, and the poetry lives in the rhythm of her sentences and in the way a single line, sitting alone on the page, detonates.
At the midpoint the novel pivots. Real life breaks through the screen, a family tragedy takes over, and I will say nothing more specific, because arriving at the second half unprepared is part of what makes it devastating. The back half engaged me more deeply than the front. It becomes a reflection on grief, illness, and what the portal is worth when measured against a real and finite life. The narrator has spent years performing a self online, and the book quietly asks what the performance cost her. The critique of the internet is sharp without once tipping into cliché, and the structure is right as it stands. The first half must be as long as it is for the second half to land as hard as it does.
A format note. I read the physical while listening to the audio, narrated by Kristen Sieh, and the tandem smoothed the fragmentation considerably. If the form intimidates you, this is the way in.
This is autofiction, a little over 200 pages, and it left my head aching in a way I enjoyed. My one reservation is the entry. The book locks you out until you find the key, and some readers will put it down before they do. 4.5 stars, and my introduction to Patricia Lockwood will not be my last encounter with her.
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.
No One Is Talking About This was my first fragmented novel, and for the opening stretch I was sure the failure was mine. I never read blurbs before starting a book, so I arrived with no warning: no conventional chapters, no orientation, only a stream of post-sized paragraphs from the mind of an unnamed woman who went viral once and now lives half her life inside a place called the portal. I felt locked out, and I kept asking why anyone would write a book this way.
The answer arrived once I stopped fighting the form. The fragments mimic the scroll. Reading them recreates the exact texture of an hour online, attention ricocheting between the absurd and the sincere, and Lockwood controls the ricochet with unnerving precision. The first half is funny in a way few literary novels manage. I laughed out loud repeatedly, and one four-word fragment, "Can a dog be twins?", has taken up permanent residence in my head. Lockwood is a poet before she is a novelist, and the poetry lives in the rhythm of her sentences and in the way a single line, sitting alone on the page, detonates.
At the midpoint the novel pivots. Real life breaks through the screen, a family tragedy takes over, and I will say nothing more specific, because arriving at the second half unprepared is part of what makes it devastating. The back half engaged me more deeply than the front. It becomes a reflection on grief, illness, and what the portal is worth when measured against a real and finite life. The narrator has spent years performing a self online, and the book quietly asks what the performance cost her. The critique of the internet is sharp without once tipping into cliché, and the structure is right as it stands. The first half must be as long as it is for the second half to land as hard as it does.
A format note. I read the physical while listening to the audio, narrated by Kristen Sieh, and the tandem smoothed the fragmentation considerably. If the form intimidates you, this is the way in.
This is autofiction, a little over 200 pages, and it left my head aching in a way I enjoyed. My one reservation is the entry. The book locks you out until you find the key, and some readers will put it down before they do. 4.5 stars, and my introduction to Patricia Lockwood will not be my last encounter with her.
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.
The Namesake follows Gogol Ganguli, born in America to Bengali parents and named after a Russian writer because of a train accident his father barely survived. Across twelve chapters and thirty years, Lahiri traces what a name carries, what a family carries, and what survives when a culture crosses an ocean.
I want to start with the structure, because it nearly lost me. Twelve chapters, each of them long, written in long paragraphs of short declarative sentences. The first chapter is slow, and the early sections seem crowded with detail that goes nowhere. Hairstyles. Wall paint colours. Side stories about people who never return. By chapter five I understood what Lahiri was doing. Identity does not live in plot points. It lives in small things, and the accumulation of those small things is the entire method of this book. Once I read it on those terms, the writing opened up completely. I still wonder whether Lahiri would structure it the same way if she wrote it today, and I mean this as curiosity rather than complaint.
This is not a plot-driven novel. There are stretches that feel directionless, and the momentum comes almost entirely from the characters. But what characters. By chapter ten I was so invested in Gogol that a late betrayal, which I will not name, made me genuinely angry on his behalf. When a reader wants to guard a fictional man's heart, the author has done something right.
The authenticity is what sets the book apart. I am a child of displaced Indian heritage. My father grew up in India and was of Portuguese descent, my mother grew up in Sri Lanka and is of Dutch descent, and the culture Gogol inherits in fragments is the same culture that reached me in fragments. Lahiri gets every fragment right. The tea sellers running alongside train windows with aluminium kettles, still true in 2026. The four locks on the front door in a country with nothing to fear. The folklore, including the legend of the Taj Mahal masons losing their thumbs so they could never build anything more beautiful. My father told me that story in 1996. He died three years ago, and he lives on in the stories I catch myself retelling. Meeting one of them inside this novel is a reading experience I will not forget.
More than anything, this book understands the children of first-generation immigrants, raised in a country their parents were not, for whom building traditions of their own feels like a quiet betrayal of everything their parents sacrificed. Lahiri wrote this in 2003. It was ahead of its time then and it is accurate now.
A note on the audiobook, since I listened while reading the physical. Sarita Choudhury was a puzzling choice of narrator. Words this book depends on are mispronounced throughout. Desh and desi lose their correct sounds, and Gogol himself is read as Gaw-gawl rather than Go-gol, a strange fate for the name the entire novel is about. This did not affect my rating of the book, but choose the page over the audio if you can.
4.5 stars. Outstanding, with one reservation about the wandering middle, and prose I would follow anywhere.
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.
The Namesake follows Gogol Ganguli, born in America to Bengali parents and named after a Russian writer because of a train accident his father barely survived. Across twelve chapters and thirty years, Lahiri traces what a name carries, what a family carries, and what survives when a culture crosses an ocean.
I want to start with the structure, because it nearly lost me. Twelve chapters, each of them long, written in long paragraphs of short declarative sentences. The first chapter is slow, and the early sections seem crowded with detail that goes nowhere. Hairstyles. Wall paint colours. Side stories about people who never return. By chapter five I understood what Lahiri was doing. Identity does not live in plot points. It lives in small things, and the accumulation of those small things is the entire method of this book. Once I read it on those terms, the writing opened up completely. I still wonder whether Lahiri would structure it the same way if she wrote it today, and I mean this as curiosity rather than complaint.
This is not a plot-driven novel. There are stretches that feel directionless, and the momentum comes almost entirely from the characters. But what characters. By chapter ten I was so invested in Gogol that a late betrayal, which I will not name, made me genuinely angry on his behalf. When a reader wants to guard a fictional man's heart, the author has done something right.
The authenticity is what sets the book apart. I am a child of displaced Indian heritage. My father grew up in India and was of Portuguese descent, my mother grew up in Sri Lanka and is of Dutch descent, and the culture Gogol inherits in fragments is the same culture that reached me in fragments. Lahiri gets every fragment right. The tea sellers running alongside train windows with aluminium kettles, still true in 2026. The four locks on the front door in a country with nothing to fear. The folklore, including the legend of the Taj Mahal masons losing their thumbs so they could never build anything more beautiful. My father told me that story in 1996. He died three years ago, and he lives on in the stories I catch myself retelling. Meeting one of them inside this novel is a reading experience I will not forget.
More than anything, this book understands the children of first-generation immigrants, raised in a country their parents were not, for whom building traditions of their own feels like a quiet betrayal of everything their parents sacrificed. Lahiri wrote this in 2003. It was ahead of its time then and it is accurate now.
A note on the audiobook, since I listened while reading the physical. Sarita Choudhury was a puzzling choice of narrator. Words this book depends on are mispronounced throughout. Desh and desi lose their correct sounds, and Gogol himself is read as Gaw-gawl rather than Go-gol, a strange fate for the name the entire novel is about. This did not affect my rating of the book, but choose the page over the audio if you can.
4.5 stars. Outstanding, with one reservation about the wandering middle, and prose I would follow anywhere.
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.
I sat on this book for months and I have no defence. Murder mystery, thriller, romance, humour, banter with teeth. I read it in four days and immediately developed a grudge against every bookshop in Bahrain for not stocking the sequel.
Weaver pulls off something strange here: she writes serial killers you end up cheering for. On a technical level, Harper and Nolan are not the strongest leads I have read this year. The depth is not fully there, and I noticed. What saves them is chemistry. The slow build between them earns every page it takes, and as unhinged as it feels to admit, I wanted these two murderers to get their happy ending. Rarely have two people been so precisely made for each other.
The comedy lands because everything pulls in the same direction: the narrative voice, the timing, the absurdity of Cape Carnage itself. Dual POV, and both voices hold up. The town does serious heavy lifting too. It leans all the way into its reputation for carnage, and its residents behave like any coastal community where privacy goes to die. The story is fuller for it.
Yes, the twists are visible from a distance. Weaver is not hiding them. The satisfaction lives in the delivery rather than the surprise, and that is a confident choice, not a failure.
The most grounded thread belongs to Arthur, Harper's ageing mentor, who is living with dementia. Weaver drew this from her own grandparents' experiences, works in neuroscience clinical research, and donates part of the trilogy's royalties to Alzheimer's charities. You feel it. That storyline holds a tenderness the rest of the book, deliberately, never reaches for.
My complaints are minor. The spice sometimes tips into dialogue cheesy enough to earn a full eye roll, and I am normally put off by this much open-door content, but here each scene feeds the next and the intent behind it is clear. The murder scenes themselves run a bit flat, which lovingly suggests Weaver lacks hands-on experience. And Harper's day job as a gardener solves a logistics problem this genre usually ignores. Inspired.
I will remember this one. Not because it sits heavy on the heart, but because it refuses to mistake gloom for atmosphere in a genre that so often does. I am borderline murderous for book 2.
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.
I sat on this book for months and I have no defence. Murder mystery, thriller, romance, humour, banter with teeth. I read it in four days and immediately developed a grudge against every bookshop in Bahrain for not stocking the sequel.
Weaver pulls off something strange here: she writes serial killers you end up cheering for. On a technical level, Harper and Nolan are not the strongest leads I have read this year. The depth is not fully there, and I noticed. What saves them is chemistry. The slow build between them earns every page it takes, and as unhinged as it feels to admit, I wanted these two murderers to get their happy ending. Rarely have two people been so precisely made for each other.
The comedy lands because everything pulls in the same direction: the narrative voice, the timing, the absurdity of Cape Carnage itself. Dual POV, and both voices hold up. The town does serious heavy lifting too. It leans all the way into its reputation for carnage, and its residents behave like any coastal community where privacy goes to die. The story is fuller for it.
Yes, the twists are visible from a distance. Weaver is not hiding them. The satisfaction lives in the delivery rather than the surprise, and that is a confident choice, not a failure.
The most grounded thread belongs to Arthur, Harper's ageing mentor, who is living with dementia. Weaver drew this from her own grandparents' experiences, works in neuroscience clinical research, and donates part of the trilogy's royalties to Alzheimer's charities. You feel it. That storyline holds a tenderness the rest of the book, deliberately, never reaches for.
My complaints are minor. The spice sometimes tips into dialogue cheesy enough to earn a full eye roll, and I am normally put off by this much open-door content, but here each scene feeds the next and the intent behind it is clear. The murder scenes themselves run a bit flat, which lovingly suggests Weaver lacks hands-on experience. And Harper's day job as a gardener solves a logistics problem this genre usually ignores. Inspired.
I will remember this one. Not because it sits heavy on the heart, but because it refuses to mistake gloom for atmosphere in a genre that so often does. I am borderline murderous for book 2.
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.
I went into this knowing absolutely nothing about Natalie Summers, and I came out already wanting the next book.
Tides Wait for No Witch is exactly the kind of cozy fantasy I love. It mixes magic, mystery, small-town charm, family drama, a sprinkle of romance, and just enough humor to keep everything feeling light without losing the emotional moments.
Sara was so easy to root for. One minute she's living her perfectly ordinary life, and the next she's discovering an entire magical family tree nobody thought to mention. Honestly, most people would need months to process that level of emotional whiplash. Sara gets approximately five minutes before another secret appears, another family member materializes, or someone casually hands her yet another magical problem to solve. The poor woman never stood a chance.
And then there's Ollie.
I don't think I've loved a talking sea otter this much in my life. Every time he wandered onto the page, I knew something entertaining was about to happen. He somehow managed to be equal parts comic relief, professional busybody, and accidental voice of reason. More than once I found myself thinking the humans should probably just ask Ollie what to do and save everyone the trouble.
The mystery itself kept me guessing for most of the book, although I wasn't completely sold on the final reveal. It wrapped up a little too conveniently for me, and I wasn't entirely convinced by how everything came together. The motive in particular felt thin for what the story had been building toward. That said, the ending immediately set up the next mystery, and now I need Book Two because that cliffhanger absolutely did its job.
One thing I really appreciated was how the story handled family. Beneath all the spells, suspicious deaths, magical lessons, and increasingly bizarre situations was a reminder that family isn't always the people you've known the longest. Sometimes it's the people who appear when your life completely unravels and decide they're staying anyway. That thread ended up meaning more to me than I expected.
The dialogue was genuinely funny, the magical chaos never took itself too seriously, and the cast had that cozy mystery quality where everyone seems to know something but collectively agrees not to answer the one question the main character actually asked. Sara, of course, has exactly the kind of personality that hears "don't investigate" and immediately treats it like a personal challenge.
This was such a fun introduction to a new-to-me author. I'll definitely be picking up the next book because I'm far too invested in this wonderfully chaotic little island now.
I received this ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.
I went into this knowing absolutely nothing about Natalie Summers, and I came out already wanting the next book.
Tides Wait for No Witch is exactly the kind of cozy fantasy I love. It mixes magic, mystery, small-town charm, family drama, a sprinkle of romance, and just enough humor to keep everything feeling light without losing the emotional moments.
Sara was so easy to root for. One minute she's living her perfectly ordinary life, and the next she's discovering an entire magical family tree nobody thought to mention. Honestly, most people would need months to process that level of emotional whiplash. Sara gets approximately five minutes before another secret appears, another family member materializes, or someone casually hands her yet another magical problem to solve. The poor woman never stood a chance.
And then there's Ollie.
I don't think I've loved a talking sea otter this much in my life. Every time he wandered onto the page, I knew something entertaining was about to happen. He somehow managed to be equal parts comic relief, professional busybody, and accidental voice of reason. More than once I found myself thinking the humans should probably just ask Ollie what to do and save everyone the trouble.
The mystery itself kept me guessing for most of the book, although I wasn't completely sold on the final reveal. It wrapped up a little too conveniently for me, and I wasn't entirely convinced by how everything came together. The motive in particular felt thin for what the story had been building toward. That said, the ending immediately set up the next mystery, and now I need Book Two because that cliffhanger absolutely did its job.
One thing I really appreciated was how the story handled family. Beneath all the spells, suspicious deaths, magical lessons, and increasingly bizarre situations was a reminder that family isn't always the people you've known the longest. Sometimes it's the people who appear when your life completely unravels and decide they're staying anyway. That thread ended up meaning more to me than I expected.
The dialogue was genuinely funny, the magical chaos never took itself too seriously, and the cast had that cozy mystery quality where everyone seems to know something but collectively agrees not to answer the one question the main character actually asked. Sara, of course, has exactly the kind of personality that hears "don't investigate" and immediately treats it like a personal challenge.
This was such a fun introduction to a new-to-me author. I'll definitely be picking up the next book because I'm far too invested in this wonderfully chaotic little island now.
I received this ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.
This was my first Andrew Sean Greer book, and I will be back for more.
It took me a while to get into it, and I want to be honest about that. Part I is slow, and at the time I did not understand why. Looking back, the slowness is deliberate. Greer uses Part I to lay every thread he pays off later, so that by Part II the immersion feels earned rather than granted. The book asks for your patience up front and then rewards it.
Anyone who knows me knows I have a soft spot for senior characters, and Lisabetta, the ninety-two-year-old Baronessa known as Coco, had my heart from the start. Her stories, not all of them true, are entirely hers. She is "as uncontrollable and changeable as the wind, she is also contrarily constant." Greer builds her with such specificity that she stops reading like a character and starts reading like someone you met.
The book moves through many characters, and I understand how that could frustrate a reader trying to track them. The prose is what holds it together. The writing is slow, and the slowness is the point. Slow, cozy, and vivid. Reading Villa Coco feels like a Sunday afternoon in the cool autumn sunshine, warm hot chocolate in hand, at peace with everything around you, even though the story itself runs on chaos. Greer holds calm and chaos in the same hand, and that balance is the real achievement of the book.
The narrator goes by many names, never his own. That anonymity worked for me. By the time I was immersed, the names stopped mattering and who these people were took over. The first-person voice reads like a confidential memoir, which pulls you close and makes his coming-of-age feel like something you are inside of rather than watching.
This is not a book for everyone. It is slow, and it branches so many times it risks leaving you behind. That branching is what hooked me. All our lives are made of a thousand branches, each one shaping the life we end up living, and the book is built to mirror that. By Part II, I was fully immersed in this tiny Tuscan village, the sights, the smells, the imagery, all of it written well enough that I felt like a silent observer of these people's everyday lives. Some moments run over the top, but with a ninety-two-year-old self-proclaimed Baronessa at the center, you expect nothing less.
Do not come for a plot, because there is not one. Come for the verbal swordplay between the young narrator and Coco, and the anecdotes they trade, which show off Greer's sharp observational humor. This is a book about life. About the choices you make, the paths you take, and the people you love and live alongside.
"'Lisabetta knows the trick to life,' she said, 'is knowing what you want.'"
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.
This was my first Andrew Sean Greer book, and I will be back for more.
It took me a while to get into it, and I want to be honest about that. Part I is slow, and at the time I did not understand why. Looking back, the slowness is deliberate. Greer uses Part I to lay every thread he pays off later, so that by Part II the immersion feels earned rather than granted. The book asks for your patience up front and then rewards it.
Anyone who knows me knows I have a soft spot for senior characters, and Lisabetta, the ninety-two-year-old Baronessa known as Coco, had my heart from the start. Her stories, not all of them true, are entirely hers. She is "as uncontrollable and changeable as the wind, she is also contrarily constant." Greer builds her with such specificity that she stops reading like a character and starts reading like someone you met.
The book moves through many characters, and I understand how that could frustrate a reader trying to track them. The prose is what holds it together. The writing is slow, and the slowness is the point. Slow, cozy, and vivid. Reading Villa Coco feels like a Sunday afternoon in the cool autumn sunshine, warm hot chocolate in hand, at peace with everything around you, even though the story itself runs on chaos. Greer holds calm and chaos in the same hand, and that balance is the real achievement of the book.
The narrator goes by many names, never his own. That anonymity worked for me. By the time I was immersed, the names stopped mattering and who these people were took over. The first-person voice reads like a confidential memoir, which pulls you close and makes his coming-of-age feel like something you are inside of rather than watching.
This is not a book for everyone. It is slow, and it branches so many times it risks leaving you behind. That branching is what hooked me. All our lives are made of a thousand branches, each one shaping the life we end up living, and the book is built to mirror that. By Part II, I was fully immersed in this tiny Tuscan village, the sights, the smells, the imagery, all of it written well enough that I felt like a silent observer of these people's everyday lives. Some moments run over the top, but with a ninety-two-year-old self-proclaimed Baronessa at the center, you expect nothing less.
Do not come for a plot, because there is not one. Come for the verbal swordplay between the young narrator and Coco, and the anecdotes they trade, which show off Greer's sharp observational humor. This is a book about life. About the choices you make, the paths you take, and the people you love and live alongside.
"'Lisabetta knows the trick to life,' she said, 'is knowing what you want.'"
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.
This is one of those books I admired more than I loved, and I mean the admiration sincerely.
I went in expecting a dark romance, an obsessive FMC and a morally grey professor. What I got was a psychological thriller layered with conspiracy, engineering, human experimentation, and questions about identity. It's ambitious, and I respect how much it reaches for. I'm just not convinced every layer earned its place.
The first half completely had me, and that's almost entirely down to Ariella. She's the strongest part of the book by a wide margin. She could so easily have collapsed into the stereotypical "crazy stalker," and she never does, because her obsession is rendered with absolute consistency. Tes Archer doesn't tell you Ariella is obsessed. She lets you watch it happen. Ariella memorizes lectures until she can predict the next sentence. She learns engineering because of him. She unconsciously adopts his accent. Every small decision quietly reshapes her world around a man who barely knows she exists. It's unsettling and fascinating, one of the most memorable character studies I've read in a while, and it works precisely because the book trusts the behavior to carry the meaning.
The quieter psychological tension between Ariella and Alistair is the other thing I loved. Those early chapters play like a slow-burning game of observation, two people trying to understand each other in completely different ways. That was the book I kept wanting more of.
As the story expanded into secret organizations, experimentation, and a wider conspiracy, my investment dropped. I could appreciate the ambition, but I never enjoyed those sections the way I enjoyed the intimate psychological story the book opened with. Ariella was compelling enough to carry a much smaller, tighter novel, and part of me wishes that had been the book.
The prose is the other thing holding it back. There were so many moments where a stronger version of the scene was sitting just beneath the surface. The characters' actions had already communicated everything, and then the narration would stay to explain the emotion anyway. I kept wishing the writing trusted the reader more, because the moments where it did are the moments that really land. That's a craft note, not a dealbreaker, and it's the kind of thing that sharpens with each book.
I'll also be honest that some of the spice didn't work for me. The psychological tension between Ariella and Alistair was far more interesting than the explicit scenes, which occasionally leaned into familiar dark romance territory in a way the rest of the novel didn't. The book is at its best when it's strange and specific, and the spice pulled it toward the conventional.
Here's what I keep coming back to, though: this never once felt like a book chasing trends. It has its own identity, and I would so much rather read an ambitious novel that doesn't land every idea than a safe one that risks nothing.
I don't know if I'll remember every twist six months from now. I do know I'll remember Ariella.
A note for readers: this is heavy dark romance with an extensive content warning list from the author. Please read those before picking it up.
3.75 stars rounded to 4.
I received this ARC directly from the author in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.
This is one of those books I admired more than I loved, and I mean the admiration sincerely.
I went in expecting a dark romance, an obsessive FMC and a morally grey professor. What I got was a psychological thriller layered with conspiracy, engineering, human experimentation, and questions about identity. It's ambitious, and I respect how much it reaches for. I'm just not convinced every layer earned its place.
The first half completely had me, and that's almost entirely down to Ariella. She's the strongest part of the book by a wide margin. She could so easily have collapsed into the stereotypical "crazy stalker," and she never does, because her obsession is rendered with absolute consistency. Tes Archer doesn't tell you Ariella is obsessed. She lets you watch it happen. Ariella memorizes lectures until she can predict the next sentence. She learns engineering because of him. She unconsciously adopts his accent. Every small decision quietly reshapes her world around a man who barely knows she exists. It's unsettling and fascinating, one of the most memorable character studies I've read in a while, and it works precisely because the book trusts the behavior to carry the meaning.
The quieter psychological tension between Ariella and Alistair is the other thing I loved. Those early chapters play like a slow-burning game of observation, two people trying to understand each other in completely different ways. That was the book I kept wanting more of.
As the story expanded into secret organizations, experimentation, and a wider conspiracy, my investment dropped. I could appreciate the ambition, but I never enjoyed those sections the way I enjoyed the intimate psychological story the book opened with. Ariella was compelling enough to carry a much smaller, tighter novel, and part of me wishes that had been the book.
The prose is the other thing holding it back. There were so many moments where a stronger version of the scene was sitting just beneath the surface. The characters' actions had already communicated everything, and then the narration would stay to explain the emotion anyway. I kept wishing the writing trusted the reader more, because the moments where it did are the moments that really land. That's a craft note, not a dealbreaker, and it's the kind of thing that sharpens with each book.
I'll also be honest that some of the spice didn't work for me. The psychological tension between Ariella and Alistair was far more interesting than the explicit scenes, which occasionally leaned into familiar dark romance territory in a way the rest of the novel didn't. The book is at its best when it's strange and specific, and the spice pulled it toward the conventional.
Here's what I keep coming back to, though: this never once felt like a book chasing trends. It has its own identity, and I would so much rather read an ambitious novel that doesn't land every idea than a safe one that risks nothing.
I don't know if I'll remember every twist six months from now. I do know I'll remember Ariella.
A note for readers: this is heavy dark romance with an extensive content warning list from the author. Please read those before picking it up.
3.75 stars rounded to 4.
I received this ARC directly from the author in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.
I saw this book all over my feed and couldn't wait to listen the moment I found out Julia Whelan was narrating. Julia Whelan can do no wrong. I'd listen to her read a grocery list. And she's most of why this is a three-star book and not lower. A five-star narrator carrying a three-star story. If I'd read this in print instead of listening to her, the rating would have dipped.
The premise gave me Pretty Woman flashbacks about 10% in. Rich, put-together business guy enters a paid fake romance to seem more presentable. Stewart is essentially Richard Gere with the charm dialed down, more boring than magnetic. Dolly, though, is the reason to be here. She's funny, intelligent, and a genuine delight, the kind of character who deserved a better book around her. Annabel Monaghan builds her with real specificity, and every scene Dolly drives is the book at its best.
The problem is structure. It starts well and stays exciting until around the 40% mark, then drags for no good reason. The middle is drawn out well past what the story needs, and the writing itself is fair, serviceable in the way a lot of this genre is, nothing that elevates the slower stretches. The big exposure of their fake romance, which should be the centerpiece, lands anticlimactically and stretches believability past breaking. People in their late thirties and early forties do not behave the way these characters do in that sequence.
It picks up again near the end when Dolly confronts Stewart, comes into her own, and stands up for what she actually wants. That was the peak of the book for me. She earned an exit. She had the courage, she said the words, and for a few chapters I thought Monaghan was going to let her walk away whole.
And then she takes him back.
This is my real problem with the book, and it's structural, not just taste. Stewart left her at an event he invited her to, disappeared for a year, and came back, and Dolly dispels every bit of the courage she'd just found in order to accept him. The genre's demand for a tidy happy ending overrides everything the character had earned. Her arc was about coming into her own, and the ending walks it back for a HEA she'd already grown past. It frustrated me more than any pacing issue, because it's the book betraying its own best character.
It wasn't a terrible book. But it didn't use its full potential, and that's the sad part. There was a sharper, braver story in here, and it flinched at the last moment.
Three stars, and Julia Whelan earned at least one of them on her own.
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.
I saw this book all over my feed and couldn't wait to listen the moment I found out Julia Whelan was narrating. Julia Whelan can do no wrong. I'd listen to her read a grocery list. And she's most of why this is a three-star book and not lower. A five-star narrator carrying a three-star story. If I'd read this in print instead of listening to her, the rating would have dipped.
The premise gave me Pretty Woman flashbacks about 10% in. Rich, put-together business guy enters a paid fake romance to seem more presentable. Stewart is essentially Richard Gere with the charm dialed down, more boring than magnetic. Dolly, though, is the reason to be here. She's funny, intelligent, and a genuine delight, the kind of character who deserved a better book around her. Annabel Monaghan builds her with real specificity, and every scene Dolly drives is the book at its best.
The problem is structure. It starts well and stays exciting until around the 40% mark, then drags for no good reason. The middle is drawn out well past what the story needs, and the writing itself is fair, serviceable in the way a lot of this genre is, nothing that elevates the slower stretches. The big exposure of their fake romance, which should be the centerpiece, lands anticlimactically and stretches believability past breaking. People in their late thirties and early forties do not behave the way these characters do in that sequence.
It picks up again near the end when Dolly confronts Stewart, comes into her own, and stands up for what she actually wants. That was the peak of the book for me. She earned an exit. She had the courage, she said the words, and for a few chapters I thought Monaghan was going to let her walk away whole.
And then she takes him back.
This is my real problem with the book, and it's structural, not just taste. Stewart left her at an event he invited her to, disappeared for a year, and came back, and Dolly dispels every bit of the courage she'd just found in order to accept him. The genre's demand for a tidy happy ending overrides everything the character had earned. Her arc was about coming into her own, and the ending walks it back for a HEA she'd already grown past. It frustrated me more than any pacing issue, because it's the book betraying its own best character.
It wasn't a terrible book. But it didn't use its full potential, and that's the sad part. There was a sharper, braver story in here, and it flinched at the last moment.
Three stars, and Julia Whelan earned at least one of them on her own.
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.
Where do I even start with this one.
Let me set expectations first, because they matter for this book. Promise Me Sunshine is not literary fiction and never pretends to be. It isn't reaching for philosophical depth, and it isn't vain about its own cleverness either. What it does, and does well, is hold all of us in its palm and let us be ourselves. Bastone knows exactly what kind of book she's writing, and that self-awareness is half of why it works.
Structurally, this is a fascinating little machine. It's almost entirely dialogue, with very little narration carrying the load. That construction usually fails. Books that lean this hard on dialogue tend to feel thin, like you're watching characters talk in a void. Here it doesn't, because the pacing carries you through without ever forcing it or dragging, and because the voices are distinct enough to hold the weight the prose isn't trying to. It's fast, the sentences are short, nothing is vivid or ornate, and that simplicity consistently serves the accessibility rather than costing the book emotional depth. This is a deliberate, controlled choice, not a limitation.
The grief structure is the smartest thing Bastone does. This is a grief story wearing a romance as its outer layer, and the two aren't just stitched together, they grow from the same root. Lenny and Miles fall for each other while trying to save each other. "He walked into hell and dragged me back out." But Bastone never lets the romance neatly resolve the grief, which is the trap most books like this fall into. The grief keeps showing up, in small things, threaded all the way through, and the love blossoms from inside it rather than erasing it. That honest tension is what gives an otherwise light book its real weight.
Lenny is the fully drawn character here, and she runs the show completely. Her grief, her wit, her chaotic mind, all of it is rendered with specificity. Miles, by contrast, functions more as the steady, patient vehicle for her healing. You see parts of him as he reveals himself to her, but it's clear whose story this is. I'd normally count a love interest who exists mostly to hold space for the protagonist as a flaw, but in a book this committed to one woman's interior journey, it reads as a deliberate framing rather than an oversight.
The predictability is worth talking about honestly, because it's predictable from the very first pages and it does not matter at all. This is the advantage of a feel-good book done properly. There's no pretense, no sense of being misled, you know exactly where it's headed and you happily ride there alongside them. Comfort fiction is supposed to feel good, and the reassurance of knowing the shape of the ending is part of what makes it safe to feel something while you're grieving. Done badly, predictability is a weakness. Done like this, it's the entire point, and a genuine strength.
My honest criticism, and this is personal taste, is the spice. I'm a closed-door reader by preference, so the roughly five pages of detailed foreplay weren't for me, and I skimmed. The moment Bastone referred to his manhood as "his pal," I was fully out. It's a small thing, but the cutesy language clashed with the emotional sincerity of everything around it.
Fair warning on tone: this book runs on a lot of Gen Z energy. Lenny is as quirky as they come, and if you don't enjoy over-dramatic, chaotic characters, this might not land for you. For me, it was infectious. The banter made me laugh out loud more than once, and that levity is doing real structural work, giving you somewhere to breathe between the heavier grief beats.
I listened on audio, and Alex Finke carried the whole damn book. I ran it at 2x speed, which I recommend, and even sped up she captured every emotion in it. Every sigh, every heartache, every grief-stricken thought Lenny carried. In a book that's mostly dialogue, the narrator is doing an enormous amount of the characterization, and Finke delivers it. I've already ordered a physical copy, which is the highest compliment I can give an audiobook.
At its core, this book takes your grief-stricken, broken heart, heals a small part of it, and sets you down among other grieving hearts. It reminded me that as I move through my own grief, the happy, smiling people around me are carrying theirs too, in the only ways they know how. Two moments I'm taking with me: Lenny inventing a quick, kind future with every new person she meets, judgment left at the door, and Miles closing his eyes to savor a moment, committing it to memory.
I'd never read Cara Bastone before. Consider me converted.
"The only way out is through."
Originally posted at www.goodreads.com.
Where do I even start with this one.
Let me set expectations first, because they matter for this book. Promise Me Sunshine is not literary fiction and never pretends to be. It isn't reaching for philosophical depth, and it isn't vain about its own cleverness either. What it does, and does well, is hold all of us in its palm and let us be ourselves. Bastone knows exactly what kind of book she's writing, and that self-awareness is half of why it works.
Structurally, this is a fascinating little machine. It's almost entirely dialogue, with very little narration carrying the load. That construction usually fails. Books that lean this hard on dialogue tend to feel thin, like you're watching characters talk in a void. Here it doesn't, because the pacing carries you through without ever forcing it or dragging, and because the voices are distinct enough to hold the weight the prose isn't trying to. It's fast, the sentences are short, nothing is vivid or ornate, and that simplicity consistently serves the accessibility rather than costing the book emotional depth. This is a deliberate, controlled choice, not a limitation.
The grief structure is the smartest thing Bastone does. This is a grief story wearing a romance as its outer layer, and the two aren't just stitched together, they grow from the same root. Lenny and Miles fall for each other while trying to save each other. "He walked into hell and dragged me back out." But Bastone never lets the romance neatly resolve the grief, which is the trap most books like this fall into. The grief keeps showing up, in small things, threaded all the way through, and the love blossoms from inside it rather than erasing it. That honest tension is what gives an otherwise light book its real weight.
Lenny is the fully drawn character here, and she runs the show completely. Her grief, her wit, her chaotic mind, all of it is rendered with specificity. Miles, by contrast, functions more as the steady, patient vehicle for her healing. You see parts of him as he reveals himself to her, but it's clear whose story this is. I'd normally count a love interest who exists mostly to hold space for the protagonist as a flaw, but in a book this committed to one woman's interior journey, it reads as a deliberate framing rather than an oversight.
The predictability is worth talking about honestly, because it's predictable from the very first pages and it does not matter at all. This is the advantage of a feel-good book done properly. There's no pretense, no sense of being misled, you know exactly where it's headed and you happily ride there alongside them. Comfort fiction is supposed to feel good, and the reassurance of knowing the shape of the ending is part of what makes it safe to feel something while you're grieving. Done badly, predictability is a weakness. Done like this, it's the entire point, and a genuine strength.
My honest criticism, and this is personal taste, is the spice. I'm a closed-door reader by preference, so the roughly five pages of detailed foreplay weren't for me, and I skimmed. The moment Bastone referred to his manhood as "his pal," I was fully out. It's a small thing, but the cutesy language clashed with the emotional sincerity of everything around it.
Fair warning on tone: this book runs on a lot of Gen Z energy. Lenny is as quirky as they come, and if you don't enjoy over-dramatic, chaotic characters, this might not land for you. For me, it was infectious. The banter made me laugh out loud more than once, and that levity is doing real structural work, giving you somewhere to breathe between the heavier grief beats.
I listened on audio, and Alex Finke carried the whole damn book. I ran it at 2x speed, which I recommend, and even sped up she captured every emotion in it. Every sigh, every heartache, every grief-stricken thought Lenny carried. In a book that's mostly dialogue, the narrator is doing an enormous amount of the characterization, and Finke delivers it. I've already ordered a physical copy, which is the highest compliment I can give an audiobook.
At its core, this book takes your grief-stricken, broken heart, heals a small part of it, and sets you down among other grieving hearts. It reminded me that as I move through my own grief, the happy, smiling people around me are carrying theirs too, in the only ways they know how. Two moments I'm taking with me: Lenny inventing a quick, kind future with every new person she meets, judgment left at the door, and Miles closing his eyes to savor a moment, committing it to memory.
I'd never read Cara Bastone before. Consider me converted.
"The only way out is through."
Originally posted at www.goodreads.com.
Glow Job
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.
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.
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.
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.
Hello Beautiful is a heavy book, and I mean that as the highest compliment. It's full of love, life, and grief, and it carries all three without ever buckling under the weight.
The novel follows the four Padavano sisters, Julia, Sylvie, Cecelia, and Emeline, and William, the lonely boy who marries into their family and finds in them the warmth he never had growing up. I didn't know going in that this was a Little Women retelling. I started feeling the shape of it somewhere in the middle, and when the book named it outright, the recognition landed hard. It could not have been a coincidence. Ann Napolitano knew exactly what she was building.
What struck me most is the flow. The way the story moves from one character to the next is seamless, never awkward or forced, one of the smoothest narrative structures I've read recently. You move through Julia's stubbornness and cold edges, Sylvie's anxiety over every decision, Alice's heartache as she works toward self-discovery, and Izzy's easy optimism about a life she was handed. And William, whose fears, hopes, and dreams you feel as strongly as he does, whose childhood quietly shaped everything about him until Sylvie arrived. It was hard to dislike any of them, because the writing refuses to let you.
Sylvie is the one who stayed with me. Her anxiety over her choices captures something a lot of us know firsthand: loving someone your family doesn't have the luxury of approving. The book understands that making the right choice for yourself is the most important one, even when it costs you the people who share your blood.
Napolitano's prose is tender and precise exactly where it needs to be. One passage about loss has stayed with me, the idea that when your love for someone is so profound that it becomes part of who you are, their absence becomes part of your DNA, your bones, your skin. And a quieter moment where Alice realizes her mother tried to control her past the same way she controlled her wild hair, and thinks, "She's done the same with me." That one landed in my chest.
This book is underrated and doesn't get the hype it deserves. But I'll be honest about who it's for. It will resonate most with readers who understand what it means to distance themselves from family that doesn't always have their best interest at heart, who have had to accept that blood is not always thicker than water, who have lost someone close. For other readers, I think some of it may be lost.
A quiet, devastating, deeply human story about how love comes in different shapes and how some of them truly heal.
Hello Beautiful is a heavy book, and I mean that as the highest compliment. It's full of love, life, and grief, and it carries all three without ever buckling under the weight.
The novel follows the four Padavano sisters, Julia, Sylvie, Cecelia, and Emeline, and William, the lonely boy who marries into their family and finds in them the warmth he never had growing up. I didn't know going in that this was a Little Women retelling. I started feeling the shape of it somewhere in the middle, and when the book named it outright, the recognition landed hard. It could not have been a coincidence. Ann Napolitano knew exactly what she was building.
What struck me most is the flow. The way the story moves from one character to the next is seamless, never awkward or forced, one of the smoothest narrative structures I've read recently. You move through Julia's stubbornness and cold edges, Sylvie's anxiety over every decision, Alice's heartache as she works toward self-discovery, and Izzy's easy optimism about a life she was handed. And William, whose fears, hopes, and dreams you feel as strongly as he does, whose childhood quietly shaped everything about him until Sylvie arrived. It was hard to dislike any of them, because the writing refuses to let you.
Sylvie is the one who stayed with me. Her anxiety over her choices captures something a lot of us know firsthand: loving someone your family doesn't have the luxury of approving. The book understands that making the right choice for yourself is the most important one, even when it costs you the people who share your blood.
Napolitano's prose is tender and precise exactly where it needs to be. One passage about loss has stayed with me, the idea that when your love for someone is so profound that it becomes part of who you are, their absence becomes part of your DNA, your bones, your skin. And a quieter moment where Alice realizes her mother tried to control her past the same way she controlled her wild hair, and thinks, "She's done the same with me." That one landed in my chest.
This book is underrated and doesn't get the hype it deserves. But I'll be honest about who it's for. It will resonate most with readers who understand what it means to distance themselves from family that doesn't always have their best interest at heart, who have had to accept that blood is not always thicker than water, who have lost someone close. For other readers, I think some of it may be lost.
A quiet, devastating, deeply human story about how love comes in different shapes and how some of them truly heal.