Fiction Review

Lady X Review

Book: Lady X
Author: Molly Fader
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Year: 2026
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “Los Angeles, 2024
Margot Cooper’s life explodes after she discovers that her A-list actor husband sent explicit photos to multiple girls on social media. Desperate to get away from the world – and the paparazzi – Margot flees to her childhood home, with her teenage daughter in tow.
But home isn’t the sanctuary Margot was hoping for. In a cardboard box in the corner of the attic, she and her sister find damning evidence about a mysterious vigilante named Lady X, including a blurry newspaper photo from the 1970s of a woman who looks an awful lot like their mother. It turns out that Margot’s husband isn’t the only family member harboring secrets.
New York City, 1977
Ginger Daughtry is living her best life with her two beloved roommates, until one of them is assaulted. Astounded by the lack of response from the police, the young women take things into their own hands and find themselves igniting a movement that suddenly takes New York City by storm.
Soon what began as a little bit of revenge against terrible men – vandalism here and there, singed collectively as Lady X – starts to take on a life of its own. Their enigmatic reputation spirals beyond their control with copycat criminals running amok under the guise of the enigmatic Lady X. When a body is found fallen – or pushed – from five stories high, the hunt reaches a boiling point.
But Lady X has vanished into thin air.”

Review : Lady X is not for everyone. Lady X is a novel full of thick, intoxicating, divine rage that fills your chest cavity, runs down your fingers, and sizzles off your skin as you recount the statistics of women who will be assaulted by men in their lifetimes; as you field yet another “you should smile”; as unwanted fingers run up your arms and legs to touch tattoos without consent; as you recall being asked, by a man, if you’re on your period. It’s the rage of thousands of years of patriarchy; the idea that feminism somehow has nothing to do with global atrocities, and being told that it’s worse somewhere else, so you should be grateful. Lady X is a heralding beacon in a bleak, dark, inky black night sky. It’s timely in a way that this subject will never not be timely without radical, dramatic, civilization altering change – it’s pointed, it’s aggressive, it’s feral, and yet it’s deeply soft, prodding the softness of your humanity and heart with fingers that gently turn your head and say “don’t look away”.

Lady X is a vigilante masterclass on how meekly our culture has shifted over the last fifty years, revealing the dark truth that while women have only had access to bank accounts and credit cards without their husband’s approval since 1974, the culture of men doing so much more than taking advantage of women has hardly changed in all that time. While the culture has certainly shifted, at least in part thanks to #metoo, the truth is that women still make a fraction of what men make in the workforce, are continuously being legislated against, often without exception for medical emergencies or anomalies, and still face the backroom absurdities and assaults that happened in the 70s. Only now, with a president who has openly spoken (and been found guilty of!!) about assaulting women; with younger generations of young men coming into the political field with open misogyny and a bloodlust for the voting rights and the bodily autonomy of women. Molly Fader has perfectly encapsulated the energy that sizzles and dances through every person who has ever been assaulted or harmed at the hands of men who have let their belief in male superiority take complete control. She’s written a novel that hits the button labeled “Rage” that sits in the very center of my chest and flung it right where it hurts. And it’s perfection.

Written between the perspective of Ginger Daughtry in 1977 and her daughter, Margot Cooper in 2024, Lady X jumps between narratives with ease, only ever leaving me frustrated at critical points in the story arc. The unfolding mystery of who Lady X is and what might have happened to her is a thread tying two generations of women together as they simultaneously navigate what it’s like to live in a world where men take and take and take. And before you get upset at how misandrist this sounds, Lady X is the perfect embodiment of the understanding that while not all men are the cause of assault, all women have been or know someone who has been assaulted by a man. Lady X became a folk hero, during a time when New York City was embroiled with the Son of Sam, labor shortages in the police force, and a rolling, city-wide blackout. Created perfectly to fit into our real world, Lady X could have easily come to fruition in real time in 1977, or 2024, or 2025. Lady X became a vigilante figure who gave entire groups of people, not just women, the sense that they could speak up, they could point the finger at their abusers, those who have continuously gotten away with cruelty, and that they could enact real change that might make the world a better, softer place for themselves and other marginalized folks.

Fader has created a world that feels so real, that speaks so pointedly to the time we’re living in and all that’s come before us to get us to where we are, that she goes so far as to write in a Lady X campaign that, fictionally, took place during Trump’s second inauguration. It was so pointed, so necessary, so perfectly, seamlessly correct for the time that I found myself weeping. This is not for everyone. It’s for those who have a belief that a better world could exist, those who dream of a matriarchy, of a third way forward, those who have been hurt and know people who are hurting, and those who wish, desperately, for there to be some small measure of justice in this world. Or, maybe not so small justice. Lady X is a guttural scream in the night, a shattering of that hard exterior shell that keeps you safe and looking the other way, it’s our survival instinct screaming, crying out that yes, this is how it changes.

Advice : I would be remiss not to mention content warnings before sending you to the bookshelves in May 2026. Lady X mentions sexual assault, rape, physical abuse, battery, police brutality, harassment, stalking, catcalling, solicitation of a minor, sexual exploitation, cheating, and vigilante violence. That being said, if you feel you can read the above list in a safe way, this book is an excellent read and perfect for anyone who would like to see the bad guys get what’s coming to them. I flew through this one and found it to be utterly unputdownable. I highly recommend pre-ordering it.

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.

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.

Five Found Dead Review

Book: Five Found Dead
Author: Sulari Gentill
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Year: 2025
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “Crime fiction author Joe Penvale has won the most brutal battle of his life. Now that he has finished his intense medical treatment, he and his twin sister, Meredith, are boarding the glorious Orient Express in Paris, hoping for some much-needed rest and rejuvenation. Meredith also hopes that the literary ghosts on the train will nudge Joe’s muse awake and he’ll be inspired to write again. And he is; after their first eventing spent getting to know some of their fellow travelers, Joe pulls out his laptop and opens a new document. Seems like this trip is just what the doctor ordered…
And then some. The next morning, Joe and Meredith are shocked to witness that the cabin net door has become a crime scene, bathed in blood but with no body in sight. The pari soon find themselves caught up in an Agathy Cirstie-esque murder investigation. Without any help from the authorities and with the victim still not found, Joe and Meredith are asked to join a group of fellow passengers with law enforcement backgrounds to look into the mysterious disappearance of the man in Cabin 16G. But when the steward guarding the crime scene is murdered, it marks the beginning of a killing spree that leaves five found dead – and one still missing. Now Joe and Meredith must fight once again to preserve their newfound future and to catch a cunning killer before they reach the end of the line.”

Review : It takes a certain level of gumption to write a new take on a famously done murder mystery, possibly none as more culturally known as Murder on the Orient Express, and while I enjoyed much of Five Found Dead, it simply did not live up to Agatha Christie’s famous work. Gentill, to her credit, does much work to lay a foundation wherein her novel would not simply be a retelling, but a fairly meta mystery involving an author, a couple podcasters, and a whole host of law enforcement attempting to sold a crime all while existing within a world in which Murder on the Orient Express might cloud ones perspective of such an incident. It is from this perspective that the entirety of the book ultimately begins to unravel – there are far too many characters, at least a few of whom we rarely interact with; far too much extraneous story-telling happening, some of which does seem to be an attempt at red herring; and far too many details to make this a succinct murder mystery, or really anything that might ever stand up to Christie’s work. And while I think it might be a bit unfair to compare Five Found Dead with Murder on the Orient Express, it’s also exactly what one asks to be done when writing a book about a murder (nay, murders) upon the very Orient Express Christie herself wrote about.

Joe Penvale, a famous murder mystery writer, has undergone an intense period of cancer treatment and upon finding himself in remission, has taken himself and his sister on the trip of a lifetime : a train ride on the famous Orient Express. Gentill managed to set a perfectly cozy scene aboard the train, and after reading her acknowledgments I can clearly understand why, for she herself endured medical treatments and a ride upon the Orient Express. Her understanding of what sets a cozy scene does feel perfectly in line with what I’d like in a murder mystery, even what I’d like within a locked door mystery, but beyond this scene setting, I found the gross majority of the book to be a conundrum. To begin, while Joe and Meredith are twin siblings with a shared family trauma, I found their relationship to be odd and uncomfortable at times. I’m not sure if they were mirrored after a family relationship Gentill has or if they were simply conjured out of thin air, but I did not find believability within their world in the least. If we can look past the strangeness of their written relationship, we find ourselves enmeshed within a world where Covid still has a grip – I was unable to determine during what time frame this story was set and we are given no clues beyond the fact that Covid is still creating new variants. Is there a new variant ravaging the world? Perhaps this was set a few years ago? Or even 2020? It’s unclear and the answer is never given. ***Any further reading will reveal SPOILERS AHEAD*** There is an entire subplot in which we find several passengers have tested positive for a new and deadly variant, a small detour I believe Christie would have used in her own writing, but nonetheless, without more details I found it to be added confusion in a story that is already more confusing than I necessarily agree with.

Upon awakening after their first night aboard the train, Joe and Meredith find that the man in the cabin next to theirs has been murdered or has at least gone missing. What follows is a strange and chaotic 24-48 hours whereby multiple passengers test positive for Covid, five people are murdered, and at we discover that at least seven of the passengers aboard are members of varying international police forces. We encounter so many needless characters that it quickly begins to feel superfluous and needlessly confusing – I suspect in part at least to mimic Christie’s work, but it simply doesn’t play out in a way that lends any ease to the reader. There are so many side trails and intentional red herrings that by the time we do finally unmask our criminal(s) it feels strange, tangled, and frustrating (which, to my mind, is the exact opposite of what you want from a murder mystery reveal). I will say, I was able to determine fairly easily who the man in the cabin next to the Penvale’s actually was, though this does not mean I was able to determine who the killer was. I warned you, here be spoilers. While I won’t reveal the exact nature of the crimes and perpetrators, I will tell you that in the end, it was anticlimactic and disappointing to find the truth. Not to mention, the final chapter reveals an entire podcast episode whereby Gentill undoes much of the convoluted work she’d laid out for us, creating further confusion and disappointment in the ending. I did not find myself pleased with the end result.

Gentill has managed to create a cozy atmosphere aboard the Orient Express, allowing the reader to feel, truly, as if they were on board themselves. Beyond that, however, I found the work to be needlessly convoluted and had to return to past pages to reread sections that didn’t make much sense. It wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for. The ending left much to be desired, the second ending even more so, and with a cast of characters limited to those aboard a train, I suspect many readers will be able to sniff out at least one of our criminal elements prior to the “big reveal”. To her credit, Gentill, unlike Christie, has given the reader enough breadcrumbs to figure things out on their own (for the most part) and, even if I didn’t agree with how it all turned out, I do enjoy that aspect of things. All in all, it was fine, I felt cozy, but it wasn’t deeply satisfying or even tremendously challenging. Take that how you will.

Advice : You may find this to be a worthwhile and perhaps even enjoyable read if you love the genre and consume anything you can within it. However, I suspect you will be comparing it to Christie’s works along the way and in that respect, you may not enjoy it at all. It’s 50/50 – maybe check it out from the library before committing to buying. Happy sleuthing!