books

Mortedant’s Peril Review

Book: Mortedant’s Peril
Author: RJ Barker
Publisher: Tor Books
Year: 2026
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “In a city of ancient automata, strange spirits, and sleeping gods, a cleric of death is about to find his own life on the line…unless he can find his apprentice’s killer first. This thrilling fantasy murder mystery is the first in a perilous new series from the acclaimed author of The Bone Ships and Age of Assassins.”

Review : Mortedant’s Peril is a winding, twisting, murder mystery wrapped in a fantasy novel set in a strange world filled with blood magic, old gods, and strange lands across the sea. It follows a Mortedant, that is, a death worker whose job is to read the final thoughts of those who have passed, named Irody Hasp as he embarks on a quest to not only seek out his apprentice’s killer but to take vengeance on those who may have, in fact, killed his apprentice on accident while attempting to kill Hasp himself. Hasp embarks on the journey with the help of his apprentice’s young sister, Mirial, and his assigned bodyguard, Whisper, a sea person warrior with potentially royal family ties. What follows is a classic murder mystery with winding back roads, secret passageways, poison berries, death cults, and magical beings who seemingly control the city and, indeed, seem to control Hasp’s own fate.

Mortedant’s Peril gets off to a slow, so very slow, start. It was difficult for me to find my way into the world of Elbay, the city Hasp resides within, and even more difficult for me to wrap my head around all the different creatures, spirit forms, and even the way people are addressed within the world. It didn’t feel like a smooth dive into a new world and the world building felt a bit stunted. There were several instances where I found myself reading and rereading passages, trying to make sense of Barker’s descriptors, often times leaving things without an image in my mind. There’s a sweet spot with fantasy novels where the reader doesn’t have to work too hard to imagine what’s being introduced and this book missed the mark a bit in that regard. However, while a slow start, once I got into the meat of the novel, I found it hard to put down. If you can make it through the first hundred pages or so, you’ll be well into an enjoyable mystery.

While a fantasy first, this book is at it’s heart a mystery so I do want to tell you that I was able to solve the mystery – though, not the mechanics – long before the book reached it’s zenith. On top of that, Barker introduces the reader to so many different religious sects, cults, and names I found difficult to connect to, that the mechanics of how the murder took place and who exactly was involved felt hard for me to piece together in the end. It didn’t keep me from enjoying the reveal, but it did take something away from the experience.

I struggled a bit with the broader picture of what this book was ultimately about. At first, I believed this was a fantasy novel written to reveal to the reader the dangers of racism and an us vs them perspective, as Hasp, and truly so many people in this book, relies heavily on what I could only call racism (though, in this fantasy world we’re talking about the distinction between people of land vs people of sea, rather than people of differing skin colors) and it’s that very racism that made me recoil at the first bit of the book. The use of “it” as a pronoun is difficult to stomach, to say the least. But the anti-racist plotline doesn’t really pan out beyond Hasp’s subtle move from using “it” to “she” when referring to Whisper, though notably, not when he refers to other creatures. There’s also a strange “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument made toward the end of the book that didn’t sit well with me, either.

All in all, I enjoyed the overall plot of Mortedant’s Peril, I was able to figure out the mystery before the end of the book, and there are several questionable themes throughout the book that don’t resolve in a way that feels good. I found myself returning to the book over and over again to turn the pages and see how things would play out, so this was better than it wasn’t, but it was still not my favorite nor was it a truly successful fantasy book.

Advice : If you love fantasy, or dark and dystopian worlds, if you don’t mind doing extra work where world building lacks, and like the idea of a mystery fantasy novel, this will be a great read for you! If you don’t want to do the work, you might skip this one or check it out from your local library rather than buying it outright.

The Nature Embedded Mind Review

Book: The Nature Embedded Mind
Author: Julie Brams
Publisher: Changemakers Books
Year: 2025
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “The Nature Embedded Mind explores some of the most vital questions our culture is facing, regarding the broken relationship between humans and nature. Our persistent and shared delusion that we are different from the rest of nature is at the heart of why we behave in ways that destroy our own habitat. Focusing on our personal and collective beliefs, The Nature Embedded Mind shows how we can begin healing the most important relationship we have, our relationship with Earth. These pages combine the latest scientific research, personal stories, and writing prompts that will allow you to expand your own thinking. Challenging Western psychology, this book aims to prioritize its offered repair as the new foundations for mental health and social wellness.”

Review : The Nature Embedded Mind, while written by a psychotherapist and geared toward therapists and allied professionals, is ultimately a book for everyone. You might think a book about letting our collective repair with that natural world expand outward into the repair necessary with other humans would be specifically for those who already feel a deep connection with the Earth, but realistically, the message of this book is for every person on this planet. That message is namely that if we can begin to reframe our human perception of the Earth and the other-than-human beings who live here with us as being less about hierarchy and more about coexistence with our siblings, we may very well be able to find ourselves in a place that is less caustic, less inflamed, and less ill.

Over the years I’ve read several books on the benefits of Forest Bathing and how one might go about participating in such an event. Brams has created a work that does more than delve into the positive impact Forest Bathing might have on a person’s psyche; she’s created a work that’s gathered scientific data around how we as humans interact with the natural world and how we not only gain benefits from it, but how we might benefit the world around us in a relationship of equal exchange. If you’re a fan of Robin Wall Kimmerer, not only will this concept not be new to you, it will likely be quite welcome to read. While not overt, Brams readily suggests a concept that will be familiar to anyone who’s studied yoga : we are the microcosm of the macrocosm. Meaning? What happens in the natural world is reflected within our own being and vice versa. Brams suggests that we’re experiencing a collective awakening and desire to return to something we may have only experienced in childhood, a freedom that comes from an unfettered connection to and collaboration with the world around us. When we stop viewing the world and the non-human life that exists within it as separate from ourselves, Brams says, we can start to experience the necessary perspective shift for a new way of life to unfold.

The Nature Embedded Mind reads like a both manual for reshaping and reframing our collective ideals about the natural world and an introduction into the world of Forest Therapy (Brams is certified by the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy, or ANFT, and regularly leads walks for those in her area). There are periodic writing and experiential prompts throughout the book that are geared toward gently shifting the reader’s mindset away from our standard collective idea that humans exist on a hierarchy outside of nature, somehow both separate from it and at the top of the pyramid within it. The prompts allow for playfulness and exploration, and paired with the way Brams speaks about nature, it’s a gentle shaking of the norms so that the reader has the freedom within a container to begin to safely consider how they think about and interact with the non-human world around them. Concluding with a prompt that comes directly from Nature Therapy, Brams has given the reader ample room to begin their own immersive journey into forest bathing techniques, or at minimum, to begin to explore the idea of what a deeper relationship with the Earth might look like outside of a modern, Western point of view.

I found this book to be incredibly necessary and timely. I’ve already recommended it to several friends : therapists, those in therapy, and other folks in allied professions that are doing the work on their own and beginning to question if the ways we interact with the world around us are truly serving our collective consciousness. I found Brams to be quite relatable as an author and enjoyed her perspective immensely. I expected as I dove into the book that I would already have a nature embedded mind, as I consider myself pretty connected to the planet, an outdoorsy kind of gal who views herself as part of nature rather than something disconnected from it, but Brams truly challenged my way of thinking and helped me turn some of my thought patterns around on their head. It’s easy to view humanity as the top of the food chain, sitting pleasantly at the top of a hierarchical caste of sorts, but the reality is that we live in tandem with the world around us, it’s completely intertwined and our own existence is reliant on the existence and persistence of the whole of the Earth. As we witness destruction on new and unparalleled levels each year, and seemingly worse each day, finding our way back to the understanding that we are no different than the other-than-human creatures who live on this planet feels imperative to the collective survival of, frankly, everyone and everything. If the soil is as similar to me as my own hand, wouldn’t I fight long and hard to keep the soil healthy? If I enjoy time in nature as I would time with a friend, wouldn’t I take the time to clean up some trash? To fight for legislation that keeps the body of Earth well? Wouldn’t I consider her my home rather than an object?

The Nature Embedded Mind is a quick read but it’s worth taking your time with. It explores the idea that we aren’t so different from the planet and that the planet isn’t so different from us. It’s a reminder that as humans we aren’t actually separate from nature at all, but truly part of nature just like everything else on this planet. And finally, it’s an invitation to explore ways in which you connect with the planet, inviting the reader to try their hand at simply existing with the planet, to forest bathe or to seek out forest therapy or to just sit and be connected with a friend (the Earth, her abundance, her creatures, and her cycles). It’s a necessary way forward. Perhaps it’s the only way forward.

Advice : If you experience the deep, unsettled feelings of doom connected to climate change, practice meditation, enjoy being in the woods or smelling flowers or watching bees flit from flower to flower, if you’re a therapist, a yoga or Ayurveda practitioner, an activist, or simply a human being navigating existence on a planet that feels daily more and more disconnected from your life, this book is truly for you. It’s a quick read but it’s packed full of insight and wisdom and filled with journal prompts and ideas for how you might connect more deeply with the world around you and ultimately reshape your understanding of the Earth and your relationship with it.

A Zoom With A View Review

Book: A Zoom with a View
Author: Jess Cannon
Publisher: Dutton
Year: 2026
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “Leo can’t believe she’s back in Blue Oak. Her small, quirky Texas hometown feels suffocating after trying to make it big as an English professor in New York – especially due to her strained relationship with her overly hair-sprayed mother, Karina. But with Leo’s career in academia in shambles, at least she’s able to work as a photographer for her godmother’s real estate business. And her best friend, Emily, is around to help her navigate through the mess – and maybe force her to reconnect with her old high school boyfriend, Mack.
But while at work, Leo makes a grisly discovery: the dead body of rival real estate agent and social media influencer Chaz. Even worse, Leo and Emily have been secretly running a snarky Reddit page making fun of Chaz’s cringe-inducing advice and duck-faced selfies. When someone Leo loves is accused of the murder, she finds herself flung headfirst into a dangerous investigation, teaming up with a local detective who grew up to be quite attractive. Meanwhile, Karina has been acting stranger and stranger, as if all her hair hides a big secret…”

Review : A Zoom with a View is a cute, sort of cozy, I-just-moved-back-home mystery I love. I extra love that it’s a mystery with a female protagonist who is neither drunk, nor having a mental break. It’s the perfect break from the (ugh) normalized unreliable female narrator trope. We need that. An entire genre of modern mystery books needs that. Jess Cannon has created a fun, hard to put down narrative of twists and turns and fun characters that feel like they stepped right out of your own lived hometown experience, and I genuinely enjoyed reading this book for all of those reasons.

Once I got into the meat of the novel, the plot was easy to follow and the mystery was fun to unravel. I did figure out whodunnit fairly early on, but I will say that the motive was unclear to me until close to the end of the book, so while you may be able to narrow it down early, it doesn’t necessarily take away from the plot. I won’t give the ending away for you, but I will tell you that I thought the villain would have a different motivation and felt the ending suffered a bit from a fairly reductive character. The final reveal felt semi-believable, but I wanted a little more depth than we were given. There’s still time, I think…

Cannon lost me early on, and I want to warn you, reader, that A Zoom with a View has an incredibly slow start and hasn’t been smoothed out in a way that felt easy to read. While it does get much better as you get into the meat of the book, the plot is a bit meta, if you’ll pardon the pun, and this is the real problem with Cannon’s rocky start. In attempting to lay the groundwork for her novel, Cannon has set herself up for some tricky narrative and it doesn’t seem to me that she’s entirely succeeded in making it something everyone will be able to follow. The main character, Leo, runs a snark subreddit centered around someone she went to high school with, Chaz, who as grown up to become a wellness influencer. Leo, and subsequently Cannon, spends a great deal of time explaining the subreddit, running through the cast of characters in Chaz’s universe, and laying out a lot of Chaz jargon. All of this feels true to life, but it’s not written in a way that brings ease to the reader. Snark subreddits aren’t new to me and I still found myself going back and rereading paragraphs, trying to wrap my head around what Cannon was attempting to describe. There’s a sweet spot you find in books where the words flow and the narrative unfurls in your mind and you don’t have to do much work as a reader, and it isn’t really until about halfway through the book that I found that sweet spot here. The first good bit requires you to work for it, and that’s hard for me to argue for. I don’t think it’s necessarily due to the content, though it’s not an easy task to describe a subreddit and an entirely made-up world, but fantasy writers world build all the time. Sometimes it reads easily and sometimes it doesn’t. This was the latter.

Once I got into the swing of things and found the rhythm of A Zoom with a View, I found myself really enjoying how things were unfolding. Like I said, I had the mystery solved pretty early on, but I enjoyed going with Leo to interview each character, seeing how things were happening in Blue Oak and in the broader Chaz snark subreddit world, and seeing my own suspicions confirmed. What really let me down, though, was the ending. I’ve found myself frustrated in recent years by suspense and mystery books that spend 90% of the novel building up to a climax, revealing the villain, and then wrapping the whole book up in the last couple of pages and unfortunately, that’s exactly what A Zoom with a View has done. It’s only in the final few pages of a pretty hefty book that we finally find out the truth behind Leo’s Mom’s secrets and as soon as we learn her secrets, the book ends. It’s a gnarly cliffhanger, if it actually is a cliffhanger. I can’t find any information online about whether this is the first of a series or at least the first of two books and the ending is so nebulous, yet still ties everything up, that I have no idea if it was meant to leave me feeling confused or it was an intentional set-up for the next book. I have to hope it’s a set-up, and I would surely read book two if there were to ever be a sequel, but it felt disjointed and rushed. The ending unraveled fast. I wanted more. So much more. I think much of what I found off-putting about this book would be a non-issue in a sequel now that the groundwork has been done. Ultimately, Cannon is an enjoyable writer who’s created an enjoyable universe and I have questions I’d like to see answered in a second book. Sign me up.

Advice : If you like a well-written mystery that doesn’t feature an unreliable female narrator, I think you should stick out the slow start and give this book a chance! It was fun and enjoyable and once I got into it I found myself swiftly turning the pages. It’s worth the read.

In Deadly Company Review

Book: In Deadly Company
Author: L.S. Stratton
Publisher: Union Square & Co.
Year: 2025
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “As the assistant to the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, Nicole Underwood has plenty of tasks on her to-do list – one of which is the blowout celebration for her nightmare, on-percenter boss, Xander Chambers. But when the party ends in chaos and murder and Nicole is one of the survivors, suspicion – from the investigators to the media – lands on her. Was she the reason for all the bloodshed?
A year after those deadly events, Nicole tries to set the public record straight by agreeing to consult on a feature film based on her story. However, while on set in Los Angeles, she’s sidelined by inappropriate casting and persistent, bizarre script changes – and haunted by persistent visions of her now-deceased boss. It seems clearing her name ins’t so simple when the question of guilt or innocence is…complicated.”

Review : In Deadly Company is an enjoyable, inventive, and easy to read thriller with a truly unique plot that doesn’t fall into the trap of the unreliable female protagonist trope so many thrillers seem to adore. It’s well written, quick moving, and leaves you guessing all the way until the end. While I did find the final reveal to be a bit obvious and contrived, it was still fun to get there in the end. I thoroughly enjoyed this read, found myself wanting to slow things down so it wouldn’t end quite so soon, and have been chewing it over since I finished it yesterday – all hallmarks of a good book.

The narration jumps a bit, and doesn’t hold fast to a set-in-stone pattern which I found to be unnecessary, but provided some texture and certainly helped give context to the way events played out. Between Nicole’s present day and her past, we watch the fateful events of her boss’s birthday party unravel, not only the alluded to murders (yes, plural), but the behind the scenes goings on in Nicole’s personal life that we are only granted glimpses of throughout the book. In the present, Nicole is watching and “consulting” on the movie retelling of the events of her boss, Xander Chambers’ birthday – she wields almost no say in how the story gets told, but she’s been hired by the production team and so she’s there, on set, watching the events play out once more despite very clearly having PTSD. In the past, we simultaneously watch the events play out in real time, catching little bits here and there that might reveal who ends up murdered and why, but never enough to fully catch on to the carnage that would eventually play out by the time the birthday weekend was over.

This review will be short and sweet, nearly anything else I have to say would include spoilers that might truly wreck the ending for you, so I’ll leave things where they are. I will say, however, that I wish the ending had taken a slightly different turn – without giving you the details, you’ll have to read those for yourself, the final twist at the end felt contrived and forced, giving the power of the novel a bit of a lackluster finish. It didn’t feel well thought out, but it did feel a bit messy. Things could have tied up in a nicer way, been a bit less all over the place, and not included one of the most obvious plot twists in history. Okay, that’s all. If I say more, I’ll spoil it for you!

Advice : This was such a fun read! If you’ve been disillusioned by thrillers written from a female perspective, I think you should really give this one a shot! Be warned, there are graphic descriptions of blood, gore, and death; the author describes PTSD flash backs; and there’s mention of the date rape drug as well as what happens when it’s used.

The Last Resort Review

Book: The Last Resort
Author: Erin Entrada Kelly
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Year: 2025
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “Just before her Grandpa Clem’s funeral, twelve-year-old Lila makes a shocking discovery. He didn’t die of natural causes – he was murdered. Possibly by someone who wanted to control his inn…and its secret portal to the afterlife. Now, a girl who’s vowed to become “less dramatic” must uncover her grandpa’s killer AND stop the ghosts desperate to make it back to our world.”

Review : The Last Resort is a super fun and enjoyable mid-grade read (grades 3-7) about the power of friendship, family, and finding places where you can be yourself. Lila, a twelve year old whose so-called best friends have described as “too much” and “overly dramatic” and, worst of all, “immature”, is ready for summer vacation so she can work on being as calm as a rock, as cool as ice, and as mature as her two besties think they are as they all head toward seventh grade next year. Her friends have stopped hanging out with her and have begun to hang out without her, she doesn’t have much time to regain their friendships. So when a relative she’s never met, Grandpa Clem, passes away unexpectedly and her family decides to travel out of state for his funeral, Lila is distraught. With the backdrop of frenemies / bullies who find Lila to be too much, we delve into Grandpa Clem’s world of ghosts, crystals, and portals to the world beyond the veil – a less than perfect scenario for a pre-teen who’s trying to be a lot less.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, it was cute and fun and had some twists and turns that, while I saw coming, didn’t fully take shape until they’d arrived. It doesn’t talk down to the reader or assume the reader’s too young to understand new concepts and it presents unknowns and uncertainties in a way that makes it a true learning experience. I’m always pleased to find a middle grade read that doesn’t feel incredibly dumbed down for a kid to read and The Last Resort really held up. It did include some scary imagery, so I think this might be a proceed with caution book if you or your reader are a bit antsy when it comes to large spiders, the idea of death, or ghostly apparitions – but all in all I found it to be a safe and spooky walk on the paranormal side, perfect for fall! In the finished copy of the book, there will be ghostly illustrations who will come to life on the page via a QR code, which is such a fun addition to an already ghostly book, I think it’ll help bring the book to life in a way that’ll keep the reader thinking about it for a while.

While at Grandpa Clem’s inn, Lila meets a neighbor who’s her age, a boy named Teddy. It’s through Teddy’s friendship that Lila finds her place with someone who doesn’t view her as too much, who lets her be exactly who she is, and who doesn’t dismiss her as being an overly dramatic person. It’s an important lesson without being preachy, that bullies have no place in our lives, and that shrinking ourselves down to fit into the box of other people’s expectations makes us a shell of ourselves. In a world where even adults struggle with this concept, and even the concept of not being bullies to other adults, I found this messaging to be a refreshing change of pace from what we see day-to-day. Ultimately, Lila’s friendships are the cornerstone for this book, not the ghosts!

Finally, I gave this book 4 stars rather than 5 because I felt the ending was too abrupt and lacked the closure I wanted from it. It didn’t need to be drawn out or even significantly longer than it already is, but it would have benefitted from a little more than it received. I think the door was left open for further books down the road, and I’m not ashamed to tell you that this adult will absolutely be reading whatever Kelly comes up with next if she decides to continue this book into a series!

Advice : If you have enjoyed any iterations of Disney’s Haunted Mansion (including the ride), I think you’d enjoy The Last Resort! As advised above, if you or your reader have any squeamishness around spiders, near death experiences, dogs, crows, the threat of death, or ghosts, this might be one you approach cautiously. I think it’s the perfect amount of spooky and calm – a great way to dip the toes into a paranormal subject without diving in head first and scaring the bajeesus out of yourself.

Hollow Review

Book: Hollow
Author: Taylor Grothe
Publisher: Peachtree Teen
Year: 2025
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “After a meltdown in her school cafeteria prompts an unwanted autism diagnosis, Cassie Davis moves back to her hometown in upstate New York, where her mom hopes the familiarity will allow Cassie to feel normal again. Cassie’s never truly felt normal anywhere, but she does crave the ease she used to have with her old friends.
Problem is that her friends aren’t so eager to welcome her back into the fold. They extend an olive branch by inviting her on their backpacking trip to Hollow Ridge, in the upper reaches of the Adirondacks. But when a fight breaks out their first night, Cassie wakes to a barren campsite – her friends all gone.
With sever weather approaching and nearing sensory overload, Cassie is saved by a boy named Kaleb, who whisks her away to a compound of artists and outcasts he calls the Roost. As Kaleb tends to her injuries, Cassie begins to feel – for the first time in her life – that she can truly be herself. But as the days pass, strange happenings around the Roost make Cassie question her instincts. Noises in the trees grow louder, begging the question : Are the dangers in the forest, on the trail, or in the Roost itself?
In a world where autistic characters rarely get to be the hero of their own stories, Cassie Davis’ one-step-back, two-steps-forward journey to unmasking makes Hollow as much a love letter to neurodiversity as it is a haunting tale you’ll want to read with the lights on.”

Review : This is a strange review for me; I spent the majority of my time reading Hollow absolutely certain this would be a 5-star-review kind of book. It was impeccably written, impossible to put down, and left me with so many questions bouncing around in my mind – waiting, waiting, waiting for the big reveal that would tie things up and explain the nuances and mystery of the book. Sadly, within the last quarter of Hollow, the plot completely fell apart, the twists and turns Grothe had to take in order to explain the strangeness became overly complex, and left me with so few answers I am almost totally baffled as to why and how it ended the way it did. The sharp turn toward confusion is something I’ve been mulling over for two days since reaching the ending and I’m having a hard time coming to terms with this as a purposeful choice and not a mistake in storytelling.

It’s worth saying that Hollow is genuinely so well written for the majority of the story, it’s a dark and winding suspense-filled mystery of a book filled with nuance and palpable anxiety as we experience Cassie’s world both externally as her camping trip goes horribly awry, and internally as we bounce back and forth between flash backs to a bullying incident at her last school and her present internal world as she navigates a new autism diagnosis. Hollow as a whole is a beautiful metaphor for the neurodivergent experience of masking, or putting on a face for each set of specific circumstances one might find themselves in during a day-to-day existence. Cassie returns to her hometown after living in the city with her family, following a mental breakdown that lead to an autism and trichotillomania diagnosis. She’s lost touch with her friends and upon returning, in an effort to rekindle their friendship, she’s invited on their annual backpacking trip into the Adirondack Mountains. Everything seems fine, at least on the surface, until the first night of their trip leads to too much to drink, blacking out, and waking to find half of her friends have left the group behind. With an imminent storm approaching, Cassie leaves the campsite behind to find and rescue her friends before something terrible happens. It’s during her initial panic as she searches for the rest of her group that Cassie stumbles, spraining her ankle, and finds herself being rescued by a strange boy she’s never seen before – Kaleb. This is where things begin to take a strange turn.

Kaleb and his mother Stasha live in a remote part of the mountains in a small, off grid community called the Roost. It’s here that Cassie is allowed the space to rest and recover while the storm rages around them, taking a break from searching for her friends until the storm passes and they can get radio signal to the rangers down the mountain. Within the Roost are several families, most of whom have stumbled across the community and have chosen to stay, each living in a small home that seems to have been built by Kaleb’s parents. While staying at the Roost, Cassie discovers that there’s a secret language everyone speaks, some strange mixture of different dialects and languages from across the globe. The members of the Roost seem pleasant, though there’s never quite a sense of ease, as they continue to speak in a foreign language Cassie is unable to get a grasp of, and the books are all written in some unknown tongue she’s equally unfamiliar with. Kaleb continuously tells Cassie how unfair it is that her friends have left her on the mountain to fend for herself and says repeatedly that they’ll have to pay for what they’ve done, which gives a nice sinister backdrop for the scene Grothe has created. While in the Roost, Cassie begins to notice that there are carved wooden dolls…everywhere. They seem to surround the Roost, filling buildings with their haunting, carved faces, peering down from rafters, and generally giving an air of strangeness to the entire community. There are so many instances like this where Grothe is clearly making a point about neurodivergence, the way humans interact with a known dialect and jargon that doesn’t always reach the people who might stand on the fringes or feel as though they can never quite get a foothold in with those who so easily adapt. There’s a profound message of accessibility and acceptance within this storyline, but there’s also a lot left to be desired when it comes to unfolding the story outward into an ending that makes sense.

*Spoilers Ahead* As the book begins to really unravel at the end, so much comes to light about the Roost and the community of people who live there – really driving the point home that Cassie has simply never felt as though she belong, that in wearing a mask she’s as wooden as the dolls who surround the compound. The masks neurodivergent people are often forced to wear are ill fitting and a source of tremendous discomfort and I think Grothe does so well in addressing this concept with simultaneously creating a super creepy drama through which it might unfold. It’s how things come apart at the end that really left me struggling for answers; as Cassie finally starts to put the pieces of the Roost’s strangeness together, she realizes (too late) that Kaleb is actually her good childhood friend, Blake. Yet, in all the time she’s spent at the Roost – and this is another issue I find with the actual storytelling of the book, as the time she’s spent there seems to range from a week to several months with zero explanation beyond perhaps some kind of magic?? – she never once recognizes Kaleb as Blake, literally one of the friends on her camping trip. And not only that, somehow Kaleb / Blake is supposed to have created the entire Roost on his own, carved all the members of the community, and also kidnapped several hikers? Over the course of how long? The time frame, the inexplicable inability to recognize even Blake’s voice or mannerisms or scent (which she mentions multiple times), and the complete lack of explanation for all of the above lead the ending of the book to ultimately fall to pieces on top of a well written few hundred pages. I think there’s a singular moment early on where Cassie mentions briefly that she’s been diagnosed with face blindness, which I think might explain being unable to recognize Blake as Kaleb on it’s most base level, but it’s never mentioned again and without working a little harder to tie things together, it feels loose and confusing at best.

The unknown language spoken in the Roost and the unfamiliar written language in the books are never really explained, and while I can appreciate that the spoken language serves as an analogy for how Cassie feels disconnected from neuro-normative folks, the written language being something totally foreign to her feels like an aspect of the book that was written initially and then forgotten about when it came time to wrap things up. The ending of the book is unclear, deeply confusing, and left me with more questions than answers, which is an unsatisfying way to end a suspenseful, magical novel. I really do appreciate the parallels Grothe draws between those who stand on the fringes of the world and Cassie’s experience at the Roost, I love that Cassie was written to give neurodivergent individuals a place to be the hero, but I don’t know that it was completely successful when everything was all said and done. Cassie spends a lot of time back-and-forthing between staying in the Roost and leaving, even when her friends are dying around her, so much so that it felt as though the point was being made, mistakenly, over and over and over again. It felt like Grothe was hammering it home a little too hard, and in doing so neglected wrapping up crucial elements of the plot. I wanted to give this book 5 stars so badly! I wanted the ending to be better than it was, to make more sense than it did, and to give more of a feeling of completion than I was left with. Sadly, the ending spoiled most the book for me and I had to go with 3 stars. I think there’s room to figure things out and make it make more sense, but I also think it’s not super likely to happen at this stage and I’m sad for that and for Cassie’s story.

Advice : I think this book had a lot of potential – if you like crows, if you like something vaguely sinister, if you want to see a neurodivergent person be the hero, wow! You’ll definitely have something to dive into with Hollow. However, I want to recommend that you don’t get your hopes up for the puzzle pieces to fit together at the end – they don’t. This one might be best checked out from your local library first.

Undead and Unwed Review

Book: Undead and Unwed
Author: Sam Tschida
Publisher: Quirk Books
Year: 2025
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “Tiffenie may be three hundred years old, but she’s still a hot mess. The vampire is tragically single, works a dead-end job at a blood bank, and spends her nights marathoning Hallmark Channel moves with her cat.
When Tiffenie inherits a fixer-upper home in Valentine, Vermont, thanks to a case of mistaken (okay, stolen!) identity, she seizes the chance to get her life back on track. With her newly undead neighbor (it was an accident!) in tow, Tiffenie is determined to live out her holiday rom-com dreams in this picture-perfect town.
But between the mystery of her stolen identity, small-town drama, and the arrival of her insufferable vampire ex-boyfriend Vlad, getting her happily ever after with a smoking-hot Christmas tree farmer won’t be easy. Tiffenie must embark on a journey of self-acceptance – with the help of a few therapy sessions – for the first time in her immortal life.”

Review : Over the last few years of writing ARC reviews, I believe I’ve only given two other books a star rating lower than 2. I give a truly low review only when it feels absolutely necessary – sparingly, you might even say. While my reviews are always honest and truthful and they may be, at times, scathing, I’m always hesitant to give someone a low rating for something they’ve crafted. It feels deeply embarrassing to me that Undead and Unwed has garnered as high a review as 3.5 stars on GoodReads, which is really all I need to say when I tell you that I do not use or read GoodReads reviews. Having read over 100 advanced reader copies (sorry, only 90 of those have made it here), I can honestly tell you that I have never received an advanced copy as unfinished and unpolished as this book was. It’s not a surprise to find small errors in an advanced copy, some grammatical mistakes, misspellings, an unfinished sentence here or there – it is a surprise to find a book with so many glaring mistakes as Undead and Unwed, and to be completely frank, that’s not even what scored this book 1.5 stars for me. It’s just part of the chaos and nonsense of the entire experience.

This is the first time I’ve wanted to say this : I read Undead and Unwed so you don’t have to. Please. Take my word for it. You don’t have to put yourself through this. The most frustrating aspect of this entire journey through such an incredibly poorly written book and nearly unreadable premise is that I actually liked the initial idea behind the plot. It could have been so much better, it could have been something readable. Execution, however, has failed. We find Tiffenie, a 300 year old vampire, living and working in L.A. at a blood bank – okay, expected, at least to some degree. She’s depressed, doesn’t know how to stand up for herself, and has little will to live beyond caring for her cat, Cat. We learn fairly early on that for a vampire to continue to exist in the world in any kind of feasible manner, they need to take on someone else’s identity in order to rent an apartment or buy a car or work a job – you know, they need a social security number and a real life name. Tiffenie is currently living under the stolen / bought name Tiffany Amanda Blair, an identity she purchased via the “black market” (I’m using quotes here as there’s no real explanation for this and it’s glossed over, so one can really only assume). When she receives a letter in the mail informing her of an inheritance in her namesake’s hometown of Valentine, Vermont, she hops in a hearse (yes, really) and heads out of town. Of course, I’m glossing over a lot of the minutiae here, but this is how things unfold : girl assumes identity, girl receives inheritance meant for the person whose identity she assumed, girl moves to claim the inheritance. Meanwhile, Tiffenie has accidentally drained her neighbor within an inch of her life and is forced to turn her into a vampire and take her on the road to Vermont because…well, just because. There are so many instances where things happen in the book without a good reason, the reader is forced to go along with what’s happening just for funzies because Tschida said so and it makes for poor storytelling.

Evidently, it’s been just ten years since the real Tiffany has moved away from her hometown of Valentine, yet even though Valentine is a tiny, rural town and Tiffany lived there for her entire life as a child and adult, ten years is somehow enough for Tiffenie to show up as a totally different person under the assumed identity of Tiffany and pass for this other person with an entire backstory and history in the town. And no-one blinks an eye. This was the first (of many) glaring issues I took with Undead and Unwed, as an assumed identity does not mean you also look like the person whose identity you stole! We only get a small explanation by way of Tiffenie dying her hair blonde because Tiffany was also a blonde. Yes, you read that correctly. In all other accounts, everyone Tiffenie runs into, be they old flames, friends from high school, or people who knew her family, all really, truly believe that Tiffenie is actually Tiffany. It is as asinine as it sounds. Next, we encounter the trouble with Tiffenie’s bank account – namely, she was dirt poor in L.A., working a job for peanuts, somehow living alone, and yet when she moves to Vermont without a job, she has enough money to start paying thousand dollar fines for living in a condemned building. There’s no explanation for this change in circumstances beyond the inheritance of a condemned property. There hasn’t been some grand windfall, no change in her lifestyle, only that she’s gone from L.A. to Vermont.

If this isn’t enough, Tiffenie is written just as the synopsis describes, as a hot mess. She’s flaky, irresponsible, somehow and for some unknown and never fleshed-out reason, she’s obsessed with not drinking blood, and she has a shopping problem. I don’t love this characterization, but I can get on board with it if it’s how she’s written, unfortunately, Tschida goes back and forth between our modern-day Tiffenie and the Tiffenie of the past who had children, knew how to bake for her family, and lived a real life with big ideas and plans. It’s a stark contrast and the jumping back and forth between these two versions of the self is stilted, as though Tschida threw them in at random without any planning or thought. Further, the conversations are so choppy and robotic, they’re nearly impossible to read. When it comes to story writing, Tschida has landed so far from the mark it’s almost laughable. There are so many instances where someone’s speaking and the only response will be “Yes.” that it became impossible to read with any semblance of seriousness. At one point I actively questioned whether this book was even written or whether it was dictated based on the glaring errors staring back at me from the page. There were multiple instances throughout where the paragraph was re-written but the original was never taken out, so I was presented with multiple directions in which this ARC might go, unsure of which would eventually be chosen for the final copy, and one instance where an entire paragraph was broke up with bullet points. These kinds of errors are not commonplace in an advanced copy, they’re sloppy and lazy and do the author a tremendous disservice – in this instance, Tschida needed all the help she could get and her publishing house did her dirty.

Undead and Unwed is an unreadable mess. I can only hope that by the time it’s actually ready for print it will look dramatically different than it does in it’s advanced copy form, but from my experience this is rarely the case. I suspect this book will be slightly more readable, but I don’t believe it will have improved by much at that point. The concept of a Hallmark Channel-ish story where a vampire moves to Vermont and restores a property, finds a chosen family, and eventually love is actually such a cute idea and I’m actively upset that this book ended up being as poorly written as it was. It needs a significant amount of work, perhaps it would even be worth scrapping the whole thing and starting over, or maybe it would be better to never have started in the first place.

Advice : Don’t. Just, don’t. Don’t fall for the 3.5 GoodReads score. Don’t spend your money. If you really feel drawn to this book, request it at your local library and save your money for something else.

The Housekeeper’s Secret Review

Book: The Housekeeper’s Secret
Author: Sandra Schnakenburg
Publisher: She Writes Press
Year: 2025
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “A catholic family in 1960s Chicago headed by a narcissistic and demanding father takes on Lee, a housekeeper with a mysterious past. Lee becomes like a second mother to the Krilich children, especially Sandy. After Lee’s death, Sandy begins a determined quest to find out her dear friend’s backstory – and proceeds to uncover one shocking fact after another, even as the story of her own family drama, and the heartwarming role Lee played in the Krilich’s lives, unfolds.”

Review : While this book’s title and synopsis might lead you to believe the entirety of the novel will be spent uncovering a housekeeper’s secret(s), the truth is only about 20% of the book was spent actually delving into Lee’s past. While I don’t particularly think the information Schnakenburg was able to gather about Lee, her beloved housekeeper, is broad enough to fill an entire book, I do find it hard to wrap my head around how little of the book was actually devoted to Lee’s life and how much of it was devoted instead to our writer. I don’t find this problematic as far as storytelling goes, Schnakenburg, nee Krilich, had an extraordinary childhood filled with trauma, neglect, abuse, and a near fatal accident – but the title of the book is The Housekeeper’s Secret and we didn’t begin to dive into Lee’s secret until the book was nearly over. The title and the content didn’t match up.

Like I said, though, I found the story of Schnakenburg’s upbringing to be enough to keep me turning pages, wanting to know how things would evolve in the lives of Sandy’s family members, forced to endure a grueling childhood with a demanding and demeaning father with a roiling anger problem and no regard for the wellbeing of anyone in his path. I found Schnakenburg’s portrayal of her father to be quite interesting – in fact, I believe her storytelling of his abuse throughout her childhood to be far too lenient and more forgiving than I would hope. We spend, as I mentioned, about 80% of The Housekeeper’s Secret growing up with Sandy in a hellish nightmare world of a home, growing with her from the time she’s no more than a toddler until she’s an adult with children of her own. It’s throughout this memoir-like progression that we come to find Sandy’s relationship with her father, and the relationship he shares with her 5 additional siblings and mother, is strained at best. He is, to put it bluntly, a menace. Demanding 7 different types of juice each morning, forcing Schnakenburg’s mother into situations that endanger her life (more than once), forcing a six-year-old to utilize hedge-trimmers with zero supervision, and having a second family are only some of the stories we read in this book – it is well and truly a nightmare. And yet, Schakenburg attempts to humanize her father, explaining that he suffered the loss of a childhood friend in a drowning accident, as if this singular trauma might explain the evil that he unleashed upon his family; it’s particularly glaring when you consider that Schakenburg’s mother suffered from a terrible fear of drowning, so much so that she never learned to swim, and her husband forced her onto multiple boating trips, one in which the threat of drowning was quite real when their boat suffered damage and began to take on water.

*Spoilers Ahead*

When we do finally make our way to Lee’s story, a story she told the children for years she wanted to write (but spent no time actually writing down, nor telling to anyone to transcribe), the story we end up with is one of tremendous tragedy, horror, and loss. It is hard to endure, yet necessary to read. Lee, a Black woman growing up in the 1940s, was brutally attacked, beaten, and sexually assaulted by multiple men while walking to the bus after work. She was left for dead. Because it was winter and there was snow on the ground, she managed to survive the night, but suffered incredibly bodily damage as well as a traumatic brain injury. Being unable to fully recover and in a family that was enduring their own physical ailments and diagnoses, Lee was sent to a sanatorium for care. While there’s significantly more to Lee’s story, I’d like to leave it here and encourage you to read this book if for no other reason than the necessity of hearing a story like Lee’s – a story that deserves to be heard and told. The history of women’s medical treatment is one we should never take lightly, especially as we find ourselves simply not all that far removed from the most egregious “treatment” and experiments performed – often for diagnoses that are now easily managed with medication, therapy, and simple kindness. Women of color, even more so.

I sobbed through Lee’s story, wishing so much that there was more information available, that we could see retribution for the actions of the men in her life who treated her with such unimaginable disregard, wishing Schnakenburg could have dug up and revealed names so we might know them for who they were. It’s the human response, I believe, to reading a story like Lee’s. You want to see justice done, you want to see more come from it than 20% of a book about an abusive father, you just want more. I think it’s commendable that Schnakenburg took up the mantle of this task, but I wish there was less about Schnakenburg herself (perhaps saving it for a separate memoir) and more about Lee. As we meet Lee’s children toward the end of the book, Schnakenburg and her siblings share stories about Lee that were never mentioned at any other point in the book and I can’t help but think this book would have better served Lee’s memory had it included more stories of Lee’s life, even on where she was an employee of a family that was not her own. Schnakenburg dips her toes into the realm of white saviorism at the end, when she learns one of Lee’s children fell victim to the system as an orphaned child born in a sanatorium, suggesting that this child would have been better off in Schnakenburg’s home where her horrifically abusive father ruled with an iron fist of unpredictability. In fairness, I think her intentions were noble in this moment, believing the child would have been better off with Lee, and I agree, but again, I feel she’s been far too forgiving of her father and a bit short sighted, considering how deeply she had previously detailed his abuses. There were moments that left me gasping for air for the sheer horror of it all, moments where I sobbed, and moments where I cringed. Lee’s story is a tragedy that deserves to be heard.

Advice : It’s worth noting that if you choose to read this book it does speak about verbal abuse, emotional abuse, manipulation, gang rape, power dynamics, torture, water torture, sexual assault, traumatic brain injury, a car accident / bicycle accident, and drowning. This book is not for the faint of heart, but if you’re a woman I think it’s a deeply important and impactful story to read.

Boudicca’s Daughter Review

Book: Boudicca’s Daughter
Author: Elodie Harper
Publisher: Union Square & Co
Year: 2025
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “Boudicca was an infamous warrior, queen of the British Iceni tribe, and mastermind of one of history’s greatest revolts. Her defeat in c. 60 CE by the conquering forces of the Roman Empire spelled ruin for her people, yet still Boudicca’s name was enough to strike fear into the hearts of her enemies.
But what of the woman who grew up in her shadow – her daughter Solina – who has her mother’s looks and cunning and her father’s druidic gifts, but a spirit all her own? Solina’s desperate bid for survival takes her from Britain’s battlefields and sacred marshlands to the glittering facades and treacherous politics of Nero’s Rome, where she must decide what it truly means to be Boudicca’s daughter.”

Review : Boudicca’s Daughter is an intense, 400+ page work of historical fiction that left me crying at times, enraged at others, and sent me down a google rabbit hole to find the truth. In all honesty, I’m not sure where I sit on the fence of historical fiction, and in all likelihood it’s probably closer to the “I’m not sure this is something we should do” side of things than not. In this instance, so little is known about Boudicca’s actual daughters – yes, plural – that the story could be filled in however Harper chose to see fit. It’s an interesting conundrum that a woman who held such a role in history, whose two daughters were deeded the rights to rule the Iceni tribe once their ruling father passed, made so little a mark as to have left two nameless daughters to the annals of time. I appreciate Harper’s work here in bringing these very real people back to life, even if created purely from imagination. We might suppose that some of what came to pass in this book could have been real, truthfully, Harper put in a great deal of work to get the historical facts correct; the rest, however, is mere speculation. While Harper suggests in her letter to the reader that humanity is largely the same even spanning across thousands of years, I suspect she’s written the characters we find here with more grace, humility, and kindness than might necessarily be warranted them.

Boudicca’s Daughter breaches the real world and enters into a historical fiction narrative complete with love, betrayal, and blood sacrifices that play out into the real world. I grew to love Solina, our protagonist, as we encountered her throughout four dramatic stages of her life. My biggest complaint about our time spent with Solina in the Iceni tribe is that so little of the book is spent in such a broad, wild place and so little time is truly spent on Boudicca’s actual assault on the British Empire. Much time passed during this first quarter of the book, yet the way it was written lead me to believe it was short-lived and perhaps even not so wide of a battle – history informs me that by the time the battles were over, nearly 100,000 people had been killed, British and Roman alike. Harper addresses the grey area that a war inevitably brings with it and asks the reader to critically think about who might bear the weight of the word guilty in a time when cultures are combining, the Roman Empire is conquering multiple people groups, and the masses are doing what they must do to survive. Where does the line get drawn and who holds the weight of responsibility for such a line? Can anyone be truly blameless in war or is everyone at equal rights to blame for the bloodshed? Harper weaves a thread of guilt and shame throughout the entirety of this novel, reminding us that the manner of human life is such that nuance is a necessity and survival is often the only option even in a world like Rome.

*Spoilers Ahead* We are drawn through time with Solina following the death of her mother, carrying the belief that she is truly the last remaining Iceni alive in the world; witnessing her ultimate defeat at the hands of a Roman General, Paulinus; watching her eventual enslavement to Poppaea Sabina, Nero’s wife; and finally her escape and eventual marriage to none other than Paulinus himself – her very captor. I struggle a bit to find the nuance between true devotional love and stockholm syndrome, but I do think Harper does the work necessary to convince the reader that Solina is truly in a headspace to care for the man who ultimately enslaved her, sold her to Nero, and murdered her entire bloodline. It’s hefty to put it all out there like that. This is ultimately why I find myself hemming and hawing on the fence of historical fiction, wondering if there’s truly a place for this genre when the pillage and mass murder of an entire people group at the hands of a brutal colonial empire is tamed to such a degree that we find ourselves in a love story between captor and captive. Does this do justice to the reality of the world? Or are we finding ourselves in an idealized version of history that makes people out to be much kinder, gentler, and more loving than the truth of history might reveal? It’s impossible to know, as we may only speculate upon the truth.

Boudicca’s Daughter held me captive for the entire 400+ pages, at no point did I find myself wanting to stop reading. I found myself roiling with rage over the injustices of the time, watching parallels between ancient Rome and our current world unfold, and simultaneously hoping for a happy ending in which captor and captive might live on forever. It’s well written and beautifully researched, weaving enough real history into the fiction that it feels as though it might as well be true, but again, we have to remember that it also, more than equally, is likely not. This is a struggle I seem to find impossible to ignore. At the end of the day, I enjoyed it for the entertainment value, but felt it could have possessed stronger anti-colonizer themes and less blurred lines between love and insufficient power. All told, it felt worth the week it took me to read it.

Advice : It’s worth mentioning that Boudicca’s Daughter talks extensively about blood, both in battle and in ritual, it discusses sexual assault, PTSD, captivity, forced castration, and suicide. I feel strongly that if you enjoy Outlander, you’ll enjoy this read.

From a Studio in Oakland California Review

Book: From a Studio in Oakland California : 180 Notes on Existence
Author: Enia Oaks
Publisher: Self Published
Year: 2025
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “This collection of poems and essays is for those who sit at the crossroads of past and future, wondering which way to turn. Those who have bravely restarted and are building new homes from within themselves. Those who believe in the grand experience of life and living it fully, even when it asks everything of them. Those hurting, healing, or transforming. For the ones who are seeking meaning or a deep exploration of the layers of existence.”

Review : Enia Oak’s debut book, From a Studio in Oakland California : 108 Notes on Existence is not to be read quickly, blown through, or breezed by; it’s made to be savored, slowly devoured, and meditated upon. It does not surprise me one bit to find this book of 108 missives to be a meditation – it’s spiritual in nature. Written in short blurbs, poems, and ideas, FASIOC is filled with logical life advice, imparted wisdom, and personal exploration. It is quite literally packed to the cover with information on how and why and when to grow, on the choices we make as humans, the way we stretch out for someone else to witness our lives, and how we might best look inward to see and gently tend our inner child as fully formed adults.

While Oaks’ synopsis / letter to the reader calls this book a “collection of poems and essays”, I would more likely call this an open letter to someone who’s going through therapy and doing the work to heal. Based on Oaks’ description, I was initially confused by the layout and conversive tone her poems and essays take. They don’t necessarily read as poems, certainly not so when you take the totality of the book under review, but they do read as essays directed toward the reader. Like I said, it reads like an open letter, not like a collection of poems. It really comes down to the naming of the thing, for me – if they weren’t named as poems, I wouldn’t take issue or feel surprised as a reader, but because I was expecting poetry, I found myself a bit taken aback and disconnected as I got into the meat of the book. I do feel that Oaks might have benefitted from a more formal editor / publisher rather than going the self-published route, it’s truly worth mentioning that I have dog eared this book from start to finish. While there are aspects that I feel read in a discordant way, small mistakes, and grammatical errors I wish weren’t included, Oaks has a distinctive point of view that has a place in this world. This book feels important for so many people.

I found Oaks’ work to be most successful in her most experimental forms, where we might call the style a poem (but again, I struggle to view most of these works as poetry), or where the style seems completely unique to the inner workings of Oaks’ mind. Most of the book is written in a direct way to “you”, perhaps at times the reader, perhaps at times the writer, perhaps at times our collective inner child. It’s less a work of interpretation for the reader, and more directions on how to live your life as told by a therapist – of whom Oaks is not, which is worth saying. I found so many pieces of this book aligning with my own lived experience, and while this did not feel profound, it did feel familiar. There were many reasons Oaks’ collection garnered 3.5 stars, but I want to remind you, reader, that that’s more than 50% and I did genuinely enjoy reading this one.

Advice : This book is already available to buy! If you’ve spent time in therapy I suspect you will enjoy this book. If you like a collection of small works that are quick and easy to read at your own pace with no deadline or need to speed your way through, I think you’ll enjoy this.