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.

The situation in Palestine, if it can even be called that, is not a war or conflict. It is a gross injustice. An ongoing erasure of innocent lives and entire generations by an occupying power that entered a land, was tolerated by its people, and then systematically displaced them. That is the context for this book. That is the only honest context.

Mornings in Jenin gives you the full weight of Palestinian life under occupation. Not just the loss, though there is devastating loss. You see the love, the laughter, the pride, the belonging, all of it existing alongside unimaginable pain. abulhawa does not let you look away from the abuse and systemic subjugation her characters face, but she also refuses to reduce them to their suffering. These are people trying to find meaning in days that keep being stolen from them.

This is not a book about war. It is a book about what happens when an occupier decides that a ten-year-old throwing a rock at a tank deserves collective punishment. It is about generations wiped out not because they fought back, but because they existed. The vengeance in these pages was not created by the occupied. It was created by the occupier.

The timeline and voice shifts do create moments of disorientation as the book moves across four generations and sixty years. But the pace justifies the urgency. The structure reflects exactly what it needs to: the emotional weight of a history too large and too ongoing to be told in a straight line. There were no storylines that felt unjustified or without impact. Every detail mattered to the larger picture, and the larger picture is the point.

Amal is the character who stays. She is the family's heart, the one who carries the most, the one through whose eyes the book sees most clearly. She is not a symbol of Palestine. She is a specific person: a girl who had poetry read to her at dawn by her father, a woman who found love and lost it, someone carrying a brother she never fully had and a home that no longer exists. abulhawa does not use Amal to make a political argument. She uses her to show what a life costs when it is lived under these specific conditions. That distinction is what makes the book work as literature rather than as testimony.

The Ismael/David subplot, the infant son stolen from his mother at birth and raised as an Israeli soldier, is where abulhawa does her most precise and difficult work. This is not a story about two sides. It is a story about what it means to have your identity constructed for you, and what happens when that construction meets the thing it replaced. abulhawa handles this without sentimentality and without easy resolution. That is the harder and more honest choice, and she makes it consistently.

The writing is lyrical without being ornate. She writes grief as landscape, as the smell of olive groves, as the specific weight of a mother's arms, as food made in kitchens that no longer exist. She writes violence without exploiting it. She writes hope without falsifying it. For a book covering this much history and this much loss, the emotional register is remarkably controlled throughout. Nothing is overstated. Nothing needs to be.

I already knew this history and I am still heartbroken. That is not a small achievement. It means abulhawa did not write a history lesson. She wrote a family, and through that family, something true and specific about what displacement means over time. Not as a political term. As a lived reality across generations of people who had names and lives and mornings.

Read this book. Read it openly and without apology. The people it was written about deserve to be read.

Four stars. I'm heartbroken and sad and I would not change a page.

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.

Cecelia Ahern gave us a dead husband's letters. Richard Curtis gave us a bookshop in Notting Hill. Libby Page took both and built something that earns its inheritance.

Tilly Nightingale is a book editor who stopped reading when Joe died. Page uses this detail with precision: the thing Tilly built her identity and livelihood around is the thing grief took from her, exactly when she needed it most. Then Alfie Lane, who runs the local bookshop Book Lane, calls to say Joe left a birthday gift: twelve books, one per month across an entire year, each with a letter tucked inside.

Joe is the most interesting construction in the novel and is never present in it. He exists entirely through his selections and his writing, which means Page builds a full human character out of the things he chose for someone else. The letters reveal a person who knew Tilly the way only someone who paid close attention for years knows another person: not perfectly, not without ego, but with a real and specific generosity. When this works in fiction, the absent character becomes the emotional center. Joe works.

Alfie falls first. This is visible early and is not a spoiler. What Page does with this information is refuse to rush it, which is the correct decision. Alfie holds the books, holds the space, and does not make Tilly's grief smaller to fit his own timeline. The romance is built on patience rather than pressure, and the ending earns its warmth because of that restraint. Falling for Alfie while listening was, to use the word directly, inevitable.

The grief is real and sustained across the full year the book covers. It shifts shape, as grief does, without disappearing. Page does not use it decoratively in the first three chapters and then quietly set it aside. Tilly's loss is present throughout, and the twelve-book structure earns its emotional logic: recovery is not a single event but a series of small, specific encounters with the world, and each book Joe selected sends Tilly somewhere new.

The book recommendations at the start of each month, titled Book Lane Recommends and listing four actual titles, are the detail that separates this from the version of itself that is merely a good premise. Page selected real books with real consideration. For a reader who loves books, encountering these recommendations inside a story about someone receiving book recommendations produces a specific pleasure: your own TBR grows inside the story's TBR, and the two lists become the same conversation.

“Getting back into reading feels like stepping inside the house of a beloved friend she hasn't seen for a long time. It feels like coming home.” This is the book's central argument expressed through image rather than thesis, and it lands because Page earns it across all 416 pages rather than announcing it on page one.

The intimate scenes are calibrated correctly. Present, honest, not detailed to the point of distraction. Page handles the romantic dimension with the same precision she applies to the grief.

“I am the person I am because of the books I have read.” For any reader who genuinely loves books, the sentence stops being a character's line and becomes something personal.

Five stars. Two days. Cried more times than planned. My top feel-good read of 2026 by a distance.

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.

Fredrik Backman is truly my favorite author, so I am going to attempt to write this review, the way he writes his books. I'm destined to fail but I will die trying.

This is a review of a book. But that is probably not what it is, really.

The truth is that writing a review of Fredrik Backman is a little like trying to describe the specific feeling of finding out the thing you were absolutely certain was chocolate, and in Fredrik Backman's words; is actually liver pate. You can describe the mechanics of it. The expectation, the bite, the pause, the slow and dawning horror of realizing you were wrong about something you had no business being wrong about. But the actual sensation of it, that particular cocktail of betrayal and absurdity and the strange aftertaste that stays with you longer than it has any right to, you cannot fully explain that. You have to read the book.

So let me try anyway.

Anxious People is, technically, about a group of strangers who end up hostage inside an apartment they had no real intention of buying. It is technically about a failed bank robbery, a father-and-son detective duo, a real estate agent having the worst Tuesday of her professional life. This is all true and also almost entirely beside the point.

What it is actually about is idiots.

We are all idiots. This is not an insult. Backman means it the way you would mean it about someone you love: with the full knowledge that idiocy is not a character flaw but a condition of being a person, of trying to be grown up in a world where nobody has explained the instructions and the instructions would be wrong anyway. We are all trying to love each other and understand each other and figure out how to insert USB cables correctly on the first attempt. We are all failing, in different ways, at different speeds, usually at the precise moment we were most confident we had it handled.
Backman knows this. He has built his entire body of work on knowing this, and if you have read anything else he has written, you know that no other author alive describes the exact shape of being a person the way he does. Not the feeling of being human in some broad, inspirational-poster sense. The specific, embarrassing, trying-too-hard texture of it.

Anna-Lena's top as a color ‘usually online seen on parquet floors.' Or describing the feeling of being uncomfortable like ‘when you discover you're starting to share the same taste in music as your parents, or biting into something you think is chocolate but turns out to be liver pate.'

These are not jokes. They are the exact right words, and the fact that they are also funny is the point entirely.

The characters in this book will rearrange themselves in your chest in ways you will not see coming. Roger and Anna-Lena, hunting for fixer-uppers they do not need, because they do not know how to fix the thing that actually needs fixing. Zara, whose grief has learned to dress itself in other clothes and attend open houses it has no intention of buying. Estelle, who has lived long enough to know that survival, quiet and daily and unremarkable, is its own achievement.

Perhaps you will cry. Perhaps you will laugh first and then cry, which is worse. Perhaps you will read a passage near the middle of this book, on a page you will probably photograph and send to someone you love without fully being able to explain why, and the last line of that passage will stay in you like a splinter you have decided not to remove because it is the good kind.

There'll be another one along tomorrow.

Five stars. My number one author. The distance between him and everyone else is not a gap. It is a different country entirely, and he is the only one who lives there.

3.75 rounded up

The best thing about Dissection of a Murder is Leila Reynolds. The second best thing is the main twist. The third best thing is the courtroom. Everything else the book does, it does in spite of those three, not because of them.

Jo Murray was a criminal barrister before she was a novelist, and the courtroom sequences read as evidence of that. Not vivid evidence. Specific evidence. The procedural scaffolding of the trial is accurate in the way firsthand knowledge produces rather than research, and the gendered mechanics of the legal profession sit in the background of every relevant scene without becoming a lecture. The women in the chambers are nicknamed after pop stars while the men take historical figures. Nobody remarks on it because Leila has stopped remarking on it. These details land because Murray doesn't underline them.

The setup earns its weight. Leila is handed her first murder case: defending Jack Millman, accused of killing a well-regarded judge. Millman won't speak to anyone, including Leila. The prosecutor across the aisle is her husband, Julian, who knows every professional and personal pressure point she has and is not above using them. The courtroom is already a space where law and personal history are colliding at pressure. Murray doesn't need to add much. She adds a great deal anyway, which is the book's central tension and its central problem.

What Murray adds: the Witness X chapters. These are narrated from an anonymous point of view woven throughout the main narrative and are structured around an undisclosed identity. This is a legitimate literary device when the anonymous narrator has genuine interiority, a distinct consciousness, a specific way of moving through the world that exists independently of the mystery of their name. What these sections offer instead is the experience of deliberate absence. You feel the writer choosing not to tell you something rather than a character with reasons for silence. One of those is a device. The other is fiction. The Witness X chapters are the former, and they sit in the text like furniture placed to block a door rather than to furnish a room.

The subplot layer has a similar problem. Murray builds toward one central revelation with real structural patience, seeding information across the full book in a way that reads as fair in retrospect. When it arrives, it reframes enough prior material to qualify as genuinely earned, which is the hardest thing to do in this genre and is done well here. She then builds several subsidiary revelations around it. Not all of them earn their place. Some actively work against the main event by diluting the focus around it. For a debut novelist, this reads as the anxiety of not fully trusting the strongest idea. The central idea did not need protection. It needed space.

Leila is where Murray demonstrates she has real novelistic instinct. Leila is not an admirable protagonist by any conventional standard. She withholds information from the people defending her, makes professionally reckless decisions driven by personal fear, and operates visibly beyond the edge of her competence throughout the trial. These are the right contradictions for this story. She is not a woman you admire from a distance. She is a woman you recognize up close, which is the harder and more interesting achievement. Watching her navigate the space between what she knows and what she admits to knowing is the book's most consistent source of tension.

For what it's worth: the audiobook took two days to finish, working full-time. The criticisms above were present throughout. The book moved anyway, which says as much about what Murray gets right at the core as anything else here.

For a debut, this establishes someone with genuine structural range and a real instinct for misdirection. The decisions holding the book back, the reliance on withholding rather than character in the Witness X sections, the impulse to surround a strong central idea with additional architecture it doesn't need, tend to resolve when a novelist learns to trust their own best instincts. Murray's instincts are good enough to make the second book worth watching for.

This one is good, with a core that is genuinely excellent.

4.5 stars, rounded up.

Aris is not trying to be a hero. She walked into an immortal death trap with a grudge she has been sharpening for years, and the man who complicates everything is, honestly, her own fault for being a person with a past.

That is the specific pleasure of Starside. This is not a story about someone accidentally becoming important. Aris deliberately enters the Culling, the king's competition to select the fifty Stormside mortals who cross into the gods' world every fifty years in search of a magic pool, because the Culling is the only door into a world where she has unfinished business with a deity. She is not here for the magic. She is here to kill the goddess who burned her village and her family when she was a child, and then work her way up the divine hierarchy from there.

That precision of purpose is what keeps the book from feeling like standard romantasy scaffolding. Aris's goal is singular and personal, and every obstacle she encounters in Starside, the ancient creatures, the political games of immortals who have had too much power for too long, the mounting evidence that she carries a secret bigger than she understands, is filtered through whether any of it gets her closer to or further from the thing she actually came here to do. The stakes stay personal even as they expand.

Harlan Raker is the construction worth paying attention to. He is the king's guard who betrayed Aris years before the story opens, and Aster is careful never to let the reader fully off the hook about what that betrayal cost Aris. The full context arrives in pieces, and each piece changes how you read the dynamic retroactively. By the time the book delivers what you have been waiting for, the relationship between these two people has earned its emotional weight through sustained, credible tension between what they want from each other and what they are willing to admit they want. The enemies-to-lovers here is built on actual history and actual anger, not a misunderstanding or a manufactured obstacle. The distinction matters.

The sword-based magic system is the kind of world-building decision that looks straightforward and turns out to be precise. Swords function as conduits for power, which means every fight carries logical consequence within the world's internal rules. The action sequences are never decorative. This is a harder standard to maintain than it sounds, and Aster maintains it.

Pacing is the book's most variable quality. The first third, covering the Culling and Aris's entry into Starside, is tight and purposeful. The final quarter is the best writing in the book, noticeably elevated in both prose and emotional precision. The middle section is where the momentum dips. The structure becomes episodic there, a series of creature encounters and narrow survivals, competently written but lacking the specific charge of the scenes built around Aris and Raker's dynamic. You feel the difference.

The secondary cast is thin. A book with fifty competitors and an immortal world full of political history is sitting on material it doesn't fully use. At 512 pages, this reads as a structural choice rather than a page-count problem, and it is one the sequel, Starscythe (release date pending), will need to address.

What the final chapters deliver is the payoff for all of it. The prose tightens, the emotional stakes become cinematic without tipping into excess, and the ending closes the immediate arc while leaving enough unresolved to make the sequel feel genuinely necessary rather than commercially arranged.

Starside works because Aris has a reason, not a destiny. The story built around that distinction is imperfect, propulsive, and emotionally specific in ways that earn four stars.

This is the kind of neighborhood mystery that works because the people feel real before the secrets do.

Mad Mabel absolutely charmed me.

The novel makes its promise early: this is going to be a character-driven story built around community, eccentricity, buried tensions, and the messy intimacy that develops between people living too close to each other for too long. And honestly, it delivers that beautifully.

What stayed with me most was Mabel herself. She is written with so much warmth, specificity, and emotional intelligence that she immediately felt alive to me. In many ways, she reminded me of Sybil Van Antwerp from The Correspondent; that same feeling of a woman who could have easily become a quirky caricature in lesser hands, but instead becomes deeply human. Sharp, observant, complicated, lonely in certain ways, but still full of presence.

The character work across the board is excellent. Hepworth understands that neighborhood stories only work if the setting itself starts to feel inhabited, and by the middle of the book, I genuinely felt like I lived on Kenny Lane alongside everyone else. The relationships, tensions, habits, gossip, and emotional undercurrents all feel lived-in rather than constructed for plot convenience. Persephone is the glue that holds them all together.

The descriptive writing also deserves credit. I loved the way fashion, interiors, and personal details were woven into the narrative. None of it felt random. The specificity adds texture and quietly reveals personality, class, insecurity, aspiration, all the things good detail should be doing in fiction.

And I will always have a soft spot for books that lovingly reference other books. The mentions of Anne of Green Gables and other literary touchpoints added a warmth that made the world feel even more personal and inhabited.

Structurally, the novel maintains strong narrative rhythm. The tension comes less from shocking twists and more from gradual revelation and interpersonal dynamics. Hepworth understands that curiosity is often more sustainable than constant shock. Every scene either deepens the emotional architecture of the neighborhood or sharpens the reader's understanding of the characters.

If I had one criticism, it's that the mystery itself occasionally feels secondary to the atmosphere and relationships. But honestly, that imbalance worked for me because the emotional investment in the characters was already so strong.

This was my first Sally Hepworth book, but definitely not my last. And honestly? I can already see this becoming one of those books that quietly ends up on a lot of people's “best of 2026” lists.

A warm, immersive, deeply character-driven novel that makes its neighborhood feel so real you half expect to bump into the residents afterward.

This is a novel that understands tenderness without confusing it for simplicity.

We Burned So Bright continues what has increasingly become T.J. Klune's defining literary strength: the ability to write emotionally generous fiction that still acknowledges grief, fracture, and emotional ambiguity beneath its warmth.

At its core, the novel is concerned with love in its most difficult form, not romantic idealization, but the sustained act of caring for someone even when understanding fails, values clash, or pain complicates connection. The central relationship between Rodney and Don embodies that tension beautifully. Their dynamic gives the novel its emotional architecture, allowing Klune to explore parental love not as perfection, but as endurance, compromise, and repeated choice.

What the book promises very early is a character-driven emotional narrative rooted in intimacy, family, and loss rather than plot mechanics, and it largely fulfills that promise with remarkable consistency. Klune understands that emotional fiction still requires tension. Here, that tension comes not from suspense, but from unresolved grief, generational distance, emotional vulnerability, and the fear of losing connection with the people one loves most.

The character work is particularly strong because the novel avoids flattening its relationships into ideological symbols. Rodney and Don are not written as abstractions representing “acceptance” or “conflict.” They remain recognizably human throughout: loving, flawed, occasionally limited, but emotionally legible. That emotional legibility is what gives the book its force.

Klune's prose remains deceptively simple. His writing is not stylistically ornate, but it is tonally controlled and emotionally precise. He has a strong instinct for modulation, knowing when to lean into humor, when to withhold sentimentality, and when to allow silence or restraint to carry emotional weight. The result is prose that feels accessible without becoming emotionally shallow.

One of the novel's greatest strengths is its handling of grief. The sadness running through the story never feels performative or manipulative. Instead, it exists as a quiet undercurrent shaping the emotional behavior of the characters. The book understands that grief rarely announces itself dramatically; more often, it alters the texture of ordinary life.

Structurally, the novel maintains a steady rhythm that suits its intentions. It prioritizes emotional accumulation over dramatic escalation, allowing the relationships to deepen gradually rather than relying on artificial plot intensity. Readers expecting sharper narrative propulsion may find the pacing gentle, but the restraint feels deliberate rather than inert.

If there is a limitation, it is that Klune's emotional sincerity occasionally borders on over-articulation. At times, the novel risks explaining emotions that are already evident through character and scene work. Nevertheless, the strength of the emotional foundation prevents that softness from tipping fully into sentimentality.

Ultimately, We Burned So Bright succeeds because it treats kindness not as naïveté, but as emotional labor. The novel's worldview is compassionate without being simplistic, and that distinction matters.

A deeply humane novel about grief, family, and the difficult, ongoing work of loving people imperfectly.

This is a thriller that relies on its twist a little too much.

The Silent Patient makes its promise immediately: a psychological thriller built around a shocking premise and a big reveal. And to be fair, that hook works. It pulls you in fast and makes you curious enough to keep going.

But after that strong start, the execution didn't fully hold up for me.

The writing is good, but it never goes beyond that. It feels flat in places where you expect emotional depth, especially given how intense the story is supposed to be. For a book that leans so heavily on psychology and trauma, I wanted to feel more. Instead, there's a kind of distance throughout that makes it hard to fully invest.

The narrative structure also threw me off. The timeline feels intentionally misleading, but not in a satisfying way. I spent a large part of the book assuming things were happening simultaneously, only to realize later that they weren't. That shift didn't feel clever, it felt disorienting in a way that pulled me out of the story rather than deepening it.

In terms of tension, the book does a decent job of keeping you curious. There's always that underlying question of what really happened, which keeps the pages turning. But the tension is more intellectual than emotional. You're trying to solve it, not necessarily feeling it.

And then there's the twist.

I get what the book was going for, and yes, it's interesting on paper. But for me, it felt both over the top and oddly anticlimactic at the same time. Once it lands, instead of everything clicking into place, it raises more “wait... really?” questions than it answers. It doesn't feel inevitable, it feels constructed.

That's ultimately where the book falls short. It builds everything around the twist, but the foundation underneath it isn't strong enough to fully support it.

I can see why this worked for a lot of people. It's fast, intriguing, and easy to read. But for something that was so hyped and labeled “book of the year,” I expected more emotional depth and a more convincing payoff.

A solid concept with a strong hook, but a twist that doesn't quite earn its impact.

This book is unhinged, and completely in control of it.

Yesteryear genuinely left me sitting there afterward wondering what the hell I had just read, in the best possible way.

The book follows Natalie Heller Mills, and from the beginning it promises a very specific kind of experience: intimate, chaotic, psychologically messy, and deeply tied to Natalie's voice. It's written in a stream-of-consciousness style that completely traps you inside her head, and the wild thing is... it works brilliantly.

This is one of those books where the voice is the engine.

Natalie's narration feels so alive that the book becomes less about “plot” and more about emotional immersion. You don't just observe her spiraling, rationalizing, performing, loving, resenting, and unraveling, you experience it with her in real time. One minute you're rooting for her, the next you're horrified by her choices, and then somehow five pages later you're back to empathizing with her again.

That emotional instability is what gives the novel its tension. There's this constant unresolved feeling underneath everything, like Natalie herself doesn't fully understand whether she loves her life, hates it, or is simply performing it because the cameras are rolling and she no longer knows how to stop.

And honestly? That is fascinating.

The character work here is incredible. Natalie feels contradictory in a way that real people are contradictory. She wants the tradwife fantasy while also quietly suffocating inside it. She wants validation, love, attention, purpose, and escape, often all at once. The book understands that people can deeply desire something and still be destroyed by it.

The supporting cast adds to that unease perfectly. Caleb is painfully ignorant in a way that feels disturbingly believable. Doug is manipulative and predatory without ever becoming cartoonishly evil. Caleb's mother feels emotionally hollowed out by her own life. Even Shannon, who arguably has the best intentions in the book, still drove me insane half the time.

Nobody escapes cleanly.

What impressed me most is how controlled the writing actually is underneath the chaos. Stream-of-consciousness can so easily become self-indulgent or unreadable, especially in a debut. But every scene here feels intentional. Every emotional swing, every absurd moment, every uncomfortable laugh is building toward something. The book constantly shifts your understanding of Natalie, her relationships, and even the kind of story you think you're reading.

And it's funny. Genuinely funny. I caught myself laughing out loud multiple times, especially in the little moments that reminded me so much of older religious women I've known. The “curse then immediately apologize to God” energy felt painfully familiar. My own mother does this constantly, which somehow made parts of this feel even more real to me.

When I finished this book, my head was spinning. I felt stunned, unsettled, confused, deeply shaken, and honestly a little emotionally manipulated, but in a way that made me admire the book rather than resent it.

This is my favorite book of 2026 so far.

And the fact that this is a debut novel is insane to me. The confidence, control, and distinctiveness of the voice feel like the work of someone who has been doing this for years.

This book will stay with me.

In Jesus Name, Amen.

This book is chaos wrapped in comfort.

The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches was my first Sangu Mandanna book, and honestly, one of my highlights of the year. It had this warmth and wholesomeness to it that completely won me over. So going into A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping, I already knew what kind of emotional space I wanted to return to.

And while this one didn't engage me quite as immediately, I still really loved it.

What Sangu Mandanna does very well, in both books, is build stories around the idea of belonging. That theme sits quietly underneath everything: lonely people finding connection, chaotic people finding acceptance, and characters slowly realizing they deserve a place to land. It's an emotional thread that really works for me, and this book leans into it beautifully.

That said, this story feels darker than Irregular Witches. Not grim or heavy, but emotionally deeper. There's more pain sitting underneath the warmth, and the characters feel slightly rougher around the edges because of it.

The cast is probably the book's biggest strength. There are so many personalities moving around this story that, on paper, it should feel overcrowded. Instead, it somehow becomes part of the charm. Every character feels distinct, and even the chaos feels intentional. The book has this constantly shifting energy where everyone is colliding emotionally, magically, or both.

And yes, it absolutely made me laugh out loud multiple times.

Structurally, this is definitely a slower build. The opening takes its time establishing the world, the inn, and the relationships, and for a while I wasn't fully hooked. But somewhere around the 40% mark, the story suddenly clicks into place and becomes incredibly entertaining. Once the emotional dynamics settle and the tension starts building properly, the book really comes alive.

The writing style also suits the story perfectly. It's easy to read without feeling flat, warm without becoming overly sentimental, and it flows naturally. Mandanna has a very readable voice that makes even quieter scenes enjoyable to sit with.

What I appreciate most is that the emotional beats feel genuine. The relationships, friendships, and moments of vulnerability feel earned rather than manufactured. Even when the book leans cozy, it still allows the characters to carry real emotional weight.

If I had one criticism, it's mainly the pacing early on. The slower setup might lose readers who want immediate momentum. But once the story finds its rhythm, it becomes very hard not to get swept up in it.

This is a great pick for readers who love cozy fantasy with emotional substance, chaotic found-family energy, lovable characters, and stories that care more about connection than spectacle.

Messy, magical, heartfelt chaos, exactly the kind I enjoy most.

This is historical fiction that pulls you in and doesn't let go.

This was my first Sadeqa Johnson book, and definitely not my last. If anything, this confirmed that historical fiction might actually be my guilty pleasure.

Keeper of Lost Children makes its promise early: this is going to be a character-driven story rooted in real history, focusing on the emotional consequences of war rather than the war itself. Specifically, it looks at the aftermath of American military presence abroad and the children left behind. That angle alone already gives the story weight, and the book leans fully into it.

What stood out immediately is how engaging it is. The story pulls you in from the start and keeps moving. There's a strong sense of narrative intent here. Every scene feels like it's either deepening a character, pushing the story forward, or adding another layer to the emotional stakes. It never feels indulgent or stretched.

The tension isn't loud, but it's constant. It comes from questions of identity, belonging, abandonment, and responsibility. There's always something unresolved, especially in how these characters are trying to reconcile where they come from with who they are expected to be.

Character work is where this book really shines.

Ethel Gathers is incredible. Fierce, determined, and completely driven by purpose. You understand exactly what she wants and why she refuses to back down. She anchors the story with a kind of strength that feels earned.

Sophia Clark feels very relatable in a different way. Her struggle to find where she fits, to understand her roots, feels modern even within a historical setting. There's a quiet frustration to her journey that makes her easy to connect with.

And then there's Ozzie Philips. I understood his circumstances, but I didn't feel empathy for him, which I think is intentional. The book doesn't force you to forgive its characters. It lets them sit in their choices.

Thematically, the book is doing something important. It explores the human consequences of war that are often overlooked. Not the battles themselves, but what gets left behind. The women, the children, the fractured identities. It made me think about that in a way I hadn't before, and that's always a sign the book is doing real work.

Sadeqa Johnson's writing is another highlight. It's clean, emotional, and very readable without losing depth. There's a sincerity to it that makes the story feel like it's coming from somewhere real. The emotional beats feel earned, not forced.

If I had to point to a limitation, it would only be that the book leans more into emotional storytelling than structural complexity. But for me, that worked. It knew what it wanted to be and stayed true to that.

This is for readers who enjoy character-driven historical fiction, especially stories that explore identity, belonging, and the long shadow of history on personal lives.

A powerful, emotional story that reminds you that the aftermath of war doesn't end when the fighting stops.

This is a cozy mystery that knows exactly what it's doing.

I went into The Midnight Taxi a little biased, being half Sri Lankan, I was already rooting for this. But even putting that aside, this is a really solid debut.

The book makes its promise early: a cozy, character-driven murder mystery with a strong sense of place and a relatable lead. It doesn't try to overcomplicate itself or turn into something bigger than it needs to be. It knows its lane and stays in it, which honestly works in its favor.

What stood out immediately was the pacing. For a debut, this is impressively controlled. A lot of first-time authors try to do too much or “show off” and the story ends up losing focus. That doesn't happen here. Every scene either moves the mystery forward or builds out the characters and their dynamics. There's no unnecessary drag, which makes it very easy to keep reading.

The tension is quiet but consistent. It's not high-stakes thriller tension, it's more that steady “what's really going on here?” feeling that keeps you engaged. It reminded me a lot of true crime podcasts in that way, where you're constantly piecing things together alongside the main character rather than being overwhelmed with twists.

Character-wise, this is where the book really lands. Siriwathi Perera is incredibly likeable. She feels real, flawed in small, human ways, and easy to root for. There's something about her that feels familiar, like she's just a slightly braver version of someone you know, or maybe even yourself.

The supporting cast works well too. Amaya Fernando is very much that “immigrant parent dream” archetype, and it's written in a way that feels recognizable rather than forced. Alex plays his role exactly as expected, not surprising, but functional within the story.

The voice is simple and clean, which suits the genre. It doesn't try to be overly literary or complex. It focuses on clarity, character, and momentum, and that's exactly what this kind of story needs. The specificity in the setting and cultural details adds a layer of authenticity that makes the world feel lived-in rather than staged.

If I had to point to a limitation, it would be that the book plays things a bit safe. It doesn't push too far outside its structure or take big risks with the mystery. But at the same time, it doesn't need to. It delivers what it promises without losing control.

This is perfect for readers who enjoy cozy mysteries, character-led investigations, and stories that feel grounded but still engaging. Especially if you like that true crime podcast vibe where you're slowly putting the pieces together.

A strong, well-paced debut that keeps things simple and does it really well.

This is a fast-paced mystery that knows exactly how to keep you hooked.

This Story Might Save Your Life makes its promise immediately: a tight, fast-moving mystery with thriller tension and a best-friends-to-lovers angle layered underneath. It doesn't try to be overly complex or heavy. It's here to pull you in, keep you guessing, and make you turn pages. And it absolutely delivers on that.

What worked best for me was how intentional the story felt. Every scene had a purpose. Either it was pushing the mystery forward, giving you new clues, or deepening the relationships and dynamics between the characters. There was no sense of filler. Even the quieter moments were doing something, either building tension or helping you understand the people involved.

And there's always tension. Not in a loud, constant action kind of way, but in that “something is off” feeling that sits underneath everything. You're given just enough information to stay curious, but never enough to feel comfortable. I genuinely felt like I was trying to solve the mystery alongside Benny, even though I was pretty sure from the start that he wasn't involved. That push and pull between suspicion and certainty kept the story engaging.

Character-wise, this is where the book really holds together. Everyone feels like they want something, even if they're not always honest about it. Benny is driven and reactive in a way that makes sense, Joy balances him well, and their banter was honestly a highlight. It adds warmth and keeps the tone from becoming too heavy. Their relationship sits in that best-friends-to-lovers space, and while the romance can feel a little convoluted at times, it still works because of how naturally they interact.

I also liked how the wider cast was handled. I didn't like Mallory from the start, but I understood exactly why she was there and what she brought to the story. Sarah and Luna were great additions too. Their proximity to Benny, Joy, and Xander adds another layer to the mystery and makes everything feel more interconnected. It never feels like random characters being thrown in. Everyone has a place.

Structurally, the book is strong. It moves quickly without feeling rushed, and there's a clear sense of cause and effect. Each discovery leads to another question, each interaction shifts something slightly, and the story keeps building without losing direction. That's what makes it so easy to read. You're constantly being pulled forward.

The voice also fits the story well. It's clean, direct, and readable, which is exactly what this kind of book needs. It doesn't try to overcomplicate the language, it focuses on clarity and momentum, and that works in its favor.

Thematically, it touches on trust, friendship, and the way people show up for each other under pressure. It doesn't over-explain these ideas, but they're present in how the characters act and react, which makes them feel earned rather than forced.

If I had to point out a weakness, it would be that the romance doesn't always feel as strong as the mystery. It's there, and it adds to the story, but it's not the main driver. The book works best when it leans fully into the suspense.

Overall, this is a book that understands its assignment. It promises a fast, engaging mystery with strong character dynamics, and it follows through without overreaching.

A sharp, bingeable read that keeps you guessing while still giving you characters to root for.

This book is chaos, but not the careless kind.

From the first few pages, Lost Lambs throws you straight into the Flynn family's mess with zero explanation, and for a while you're just sitting there like... what is actually happening right now?

But that confusion feels intentional.

The book makes a very clear promise early on: this is going to be messy, fast-moving, and driven by a family that is deeply dysfunctional but impossible to ignore. It's not trying to be neat or controlled. It leans fully into the chaos, and for the most part, it works because there's enough structure underneath to keep everything from falling apart.

What really carried the book for me was the momentum. Even when I didn't fully understand what was going on, I wanted to keep reading. There's always something unresolved: secrets, bad decisions, shifting loyalties. The story keeps moving, and that constant sense of “something is off” creates tension even in the quieter moments.

Character-wise, this is where the book surprised me. At the start, I was clearly rooting for Harper. She feels like the easiest way into the story. But somewhere in the middle, that shifts. You realize you're rooting for all of them, even when they're making questionable decisions. The Flynn family is chaotic, but they're not hollow. They feel messy in a very human way, which makes the emotional beats land.

The writing itself is super easy to get through. It's fast, sharp, and very readable without feeling shallow. There are also moments that are unexpectedly warm, which balance out the dysfunction really well. The book deals with some heavier topics, but it doesn't get stuck in them. It keeps things moving without losing that emotional undercurrent.

If I had one issue, it's that the book sometimes pushes the chaos a little too far. Most of it feels grounded enough to be believable, but there are moments, especially around Alabaster, where it leans more into exaggeration than it needs to. That's where it slightly loses the balance it builds everywhere else.

Still, the core of the story holds.

This is one of those books that looks completely unhinged on the surface but is actually doing something quite controlled underneath. It's messy, funny, a little wild, but also surprisingly heartwarming in parts.

A chaotic family story that shouldn't work this well, but absolutely does.

This is a love story that forgets to feel like one.

I went into Great Big Beautiful Life expecting an Emily Henry romance. That's the promise she usually makes: emotional intimacy, sharp dialogue, and characters who fall into each other in a way that feels earned.

This... wasn't that.

To her credit, Emily Henry clearly tries to step outside her usual lane here. The book leans more into reflection, legacy, and storytelling through Margaret's “The Story” chapters, rather than the banter-heavy, chemistry-driven dynamic she's known for. I didn't mind the shift in direction. I minded the execution.

The biggest issue for me was connection. I struggled to connect with Margaret, and since so much of the book is built around her story, that became a structural problem. Those sections are long, frequent, and meant to carry emotional weight, but they felt hollow. Not in content, but in voice. It didn't sound like someone genuinely telling their life story. It sounded written, and that distance made it harder to care.

And because those sections take up so much space, the rest of the book suffers.

The relationship between Alice and Hayden, which should be the emotional engine, feels underdeveloped. There's very little of the dialogue, humor, and tension that usually defines Emily Henry's work. Their connection doesn't build in a way that feels inevitable. It just kind of... exists. For a book positioned even loosely as a love story, that's a problem.

There's also a familiarity here that didn't quite work in its favor. It echoes Beach Read in structure and character dynamics, the respected male writer, the less respected female writer, the deadlines, the research process bringing them together. But where Beach Read had emotional clarity and payoff, this one feels like a diluted version of that same formula.

Thematically, the book is reaching for something bigger. Legacy, identity, creative ownership, grief. It wants to explore these ideas through multiple characters and timelines, but instead of deepening them, it spreads itself too thin. We get glimpses of who these characters are, but not enough to reach the core of them. The emotional beats are there in theory, pain, love, longing, but they don't land with the force they should.

And then there are the Taylor Swift references. I understand the intention. It fits the tone she was going for. But it starts to feel overdone, to the point where it pulls you out of the story instead of grounding it.

That said, the book is still readable. Emily Henry's writing is clean and easy to move through, even when it's not hitting emotionally. And I do respect that she tried to do something different here rather than repeating the exact same formula.

It just didn't fully come together for me.

A book with an interesting direction, but one that loses its emotional core somewhere along the way.

Island Queen is the kind of book where the story itself is undeniably powerful, even when the reading experience doesn't fully match it.

This novel follows Dorothy “Dolly” Kirwan Thomas, born in Montserrat in 1756 and later becoming one of the most formidable and complex women in the Atlantic world. She survives slavery, navigates war, builds wealth, and moves through a world that was never designed for her to succeed in. On a premise level, this is exactly the kind of historical fiction I gravitate toward. And her life? Genuinely fascinating.

What Vanessa Riley is trying to do here is ambitious. This is not just a biography in novel form. It is a sweeping historical narrative that attempts to capture the scale of Dolly's life, the brutality of the systems around her, and the complicated choices she makes to survive and rise within them.

On that level, the book succeeds in telling an important and compelling story.

But for me, the issue was execution, specifically pacing and proportion.

This is a long book, and it feels long. There are sections that are gripping, urgent, and emotionally charged, especially when the story focuses tightly on Dolly's decisions and the consequences of those choices. Those moments are excellent. They carry the weight of the novel and remind you why her story matters.

But there are also stretches that feel extended without adding enough depth or momentum. Instead of building tension, they slow it down. I found myself wanting the narrative to be more selective, to trust that the strongest parts of Dolly's life did not need so much padding around them.

Character-wise, Dolly herself is compelling but also difficult at times, which I think is intentional. She is pragmatic, strategic, and often emotionally detached in ways that can feel uncomfortable. The fact that she has multiple children with different men, often for reasons tied to survival or advancement rather than love, is one of those areas where modern readers might struggle. I did at times. But I also recognize that this discomfort says more about the distance between our world and hers than it does about the character herself.

Thematically, the book is rich. It deals with power, survival, autonomy, race, and the moral compromises people make when the system is stacked against them. It does not simplify Dolly into someone easy to admire or judge, and I respect that. She is allowed to be complex, even when that complexity makes her hard to fully connect with.

In the end, this is a powerful story that I'm glad I read, even if I didn't love the experience all the way through. It's ambitious, emotionally layered, and rooted in a fascinating real-life figure. I just wish it had been more tightly told.

“Humans. For the most part, you are dull and blundering. But occasionally, you can be remarkably bright creatures.” ― Shelby Van Pelt, Remarkably Bright Creatures

That line really says it all.

Remarkably Bright Creatures is a warm, quietly emotional novel about grief, loneliness, and unexpected connection, but for me, the real heart of the book was never in the human characters. It was in Marcellus. The story follows Tova, an older woman still living with deep personal loss, Cameron, a drifting young man trying to find his footing, and Marcellus, the giant Pacific octopus whose observations give the novel its wit, charm, and much of its emotional clarity. The premise is unusual, but Shelby Van Pelt handles it with enough sincerity and restraint that it never feels as gimmicky as it could have.

⚠️ Spoilers below.

Marcellus was, without question, the standout. He is funny, perceptive, and strangely moving, and his chapters gave the book a distinct personality that the rest of the story sometimes lacked. It would have been very easy for him to feel like a clever narrative trick, but instead he felt like the most vivid character in the novel. Every time the story returned to him, it sharpened.

I also really liked Tova. There is something deeply affecting about the way her grief is written—quiet, contained, and woven into the routines of her life rather than constantly announced. Her chapters have a steadiness to them that gave the book much of its emotional weight, and her connection with Marcellus was easily the most compelling relationship in the novel for me.

Cameron, on the other hand, was a struggle. I found him insufferable for much of the book, and every time the narrative shifted heavily toward him, my interest dipped. I understand the role he serves in the story, but he never felt nearly as compelling as the book seemed to think he was. That imbalance mattered because it left me loving certain parts of the novel and merely tolerating others.

What worked overall was the storytelling itself. It is clever in structure, gentle in tone, and clearly written with a lot of heart. What held it back for me was that I was not equally invested in all of its moving parts. I loved Marcellus, really liked Tova, and found much of the human drama far less engaging by comparison.

In the end, this is a book I can absolutely appreciate, even if I did not love it as much as I wanted to. It is thoughtful, tender, and memorable largely because of one extraordinary octopus.

Loved Marcellus. Not so much the humans.

Broken Country is one of those books I can understand why others might like more than I fully loved. It has the kind of emotional intensity that makes it memorable, and even when I was frustrated by certain choices in the story, I could not deny its impact. This is a novel built on heartbreak, damage, and the lingering consequences of desire, and when it hits, it hits hard.

At the centre of the book is Beth, a protagonist whose life is shaped by love, betrayal, grief, and the complicated emotional loyalties that develop over time. The novel is less interested in subtlety than in emotional force, and that becomes clear quite quickly. It leans into painful choices, fractured relationships, and the way one decision can ripple outward and alter the course of several lives. That gives the story real weight, even when some of its methods are more dramatic than nuanced.

⚠️ Spoilers below

Beth was easily the biggest obstacle for me. I struggle with the idea of cheating in fiction and in general, and that absolutely shaped my reading of her. She is the kind of character the reader is clearly meant to see as flawed rather than purely admirable, but for me she often crossed from compellingly messy into simply aggravating. I did not trust her judgment, and I did not particularly enjoy being in her head for long stretches. That said, I do think the book benefits from refusing to make her too neat or too sympathetic. Beth's actions are part of what gives the novel its emotional charge, even if they also make her difficult to like.

What kept me engaged was the emotional depth. For all my issues with Beth, the novel understands how to build pain. There is a real sense of longing and damage running through it, and several moments land with genuine force. I found myself overlooking things I would normally be more critical of; especially some fairly melodramatic misunderstandings because the emotional core was strong enough to carry them. The book wants to devastate, and in many places it succeeds.

That does not mean all of its dramatic choices worked for me. Beth's mother, in particular, felt so villainous and exaggerated at times that she seemed to have wandered in from an entirely different kind of novel. She lacked the emotional complexity that the rest of the book at least attempts to give its central characters, and that made her feel more like a device than a person. It was one of the few elements that really broke the spell for me. The melodrama elsewhere I could mostly tolerate; with her, it tipped into caricature.

I also disagree completely with the comparison to Where the Crawdads Sing in the blurb. I did not see the similarity, and I do not think it is a particularly useful comp. Beyond a broad sense of rural atmosphere and emotional suffering, the books do not feel especially alike in tone, structure, or effect. I also was not a fan of Crawdads, so this was not a case of preferring one over the other. I simply do not think the comparison fits.

In the end, Broken Country worked on me more through feeling than through execution. I did not love all of its choices, I found Beth deeply frustrating, and some of the book's more over-the-top elements definitely tested my patience. But it still managed to feel heartbreakingly powerful in the places that mattered most. For me, that is what made it a three-star read rather than a forgettable one: flawed, yes, but emotionally strong enough to leave a mark.

I went into Better Than the Movies fully aware of what it was trying to be, and I think that shaped my experience of it quite a bit. This is a very trope-forward YA rom-com that leans heavily into charm, sentimentality, and exaggerated romantic tension. While it did not entirely work for me, I also would not say it failed. It gave me exactly what I had picked it up for: something light, familiar, and easy to move through at a time when I needed that.

The novel follows Liz Buxbaum, a hopeless romantic whose idea of love has been shaped by the rom-coms she watched with her late mother. When her longtime crush Michael returns, Liz sees an opportunity to finally step into the kind of love story she has always imagined for herself. The complication, naturally, is Wes Bennett, her irritating but charismatic neighbour, who ends up becoming central not only to her plan, but to the emotional heart of the story. The direction of the plot is fairly obvious from early on, but that predictability is part of the book's design rather than a flaw in execution alone.

Spoiler warning below.

What worked best for me was Wes. He brings warmth, humour, and enough emotional steadiness to make the romance believable, even when the broader story becomes overly sugary. His chemistry with Liz is noticeably stronger than anything she shares with Michael, and that contrast is one of the novel's clearest strengths. Michael functions more as an idea than a fully compelling romantic option, which is of course the point: he represents the fantasy Liz has constructed, while Wes represents something more authentic and emotionally grounded.

My main issue with the book was that it was simply too cheesy for my taste. I understand that this is exactly what many readers love about it, and I do think the novel is self-aware enough to justify some of that heightened tone. Still, there were several moments where the sweetness felt manufactured rather than earned, and the rom-com references occasionally pushed the story further into performance than feeling. I could appreciate what the book was doing without fully connecting to it.

Liz was also a difficult protagonist for me to invest in consistently. Her fixation on a movie-version of love is essential to the novel's central idea, so I understand why she had to remain attached to that illusion for as long as she did. Even so, there were stretches where her lack of perspective became frustrating, especially because the emotional truth of the story felt clear long before she was willing to confront it herself. That made parts of her arc feel more drawn out than revealing.

What gives the novel more emotional substance is the thread of grief running beneath all the romance. Liz's attachment to rom-com ideals is not just a personality quirk; it is tied to memory, longing, and her connection to her mother. That layer gives the book more heart and prevents it from feeling entirely superficial, even when the plot itself is fluffy and highly stylised.

In the end, this was not a standout read for me, but it arrived at the right moment. I picked it up while trying to read my way out of a depressive funk, and in that sense it did exactly what I needed it to do. It was light without being empty, easy without being entirely forgettable, and comforting in a way that mattered more than whether I thought it was especially good. I can understand why so many readers adore it. For me, though, it was more enjoyable than impressive.

I really wanted to like this more than I did.

Cleaner has the kind of premise I'd usually be drawn to: a young woman stuck in a life that feels too small for her, working as a cleaner in an art gallery, then getting involved with Isabella and slowly slipping into something more obsessive, murky, and emotionally unstable. On paper, it sounded like it had all the ingredients for something strange and compelling.

And to be fair, there is something here. The writing has a sharp, restless energy to it, and Jess Shannon definitely has a strong voice. There's wit, discomfort, and that kind of unstable edge that makes you feel like things could tip over at any moment. I could see the talent.

But for me, the book felt far more interested in creating a mood than in giving that mood enough shape to really land. The stream-of-consciousness style and lack of breaks made the whole thing feel intentionally claustrophobic, which I understand was probably the point, but it also made the reading experience feel exhausting. Instead of feeling pulled deeper into the narrator's mind, I mostly felt trapped there.

I also struggled with how ungrounded parts of it felt. I don't mind weird, messy, or even unlikeable characters, but I still need the emotional logic to hold. Here, it often felt like the book was pushing for strangeness and intensity at the expense of believability. After a while, it stopped feeling unsettling in an interesting way and just started feeling a bit too forced.

There's clearly a real voice here, and I can see why this will work for some people, especially readers who like literary fiction that is abrasive, intimate, and deliberately disorienting. But for me, it was one of those books I admired more than I actually enjoyed.