Unapologetic Reviews

Moonstorm by Yoon Ha Lee is a young adult space adventure that I wanted to love. I really did. I started it back in April, stalled hard, eventually finished it months later, and in the end settled on a reluctant two stars. The premise hooked me immediately. A girl growing up in a marginal colony, outside the reach of a vast empire; an attack that destroys her life; an orphaned survivor who reinvents herself and aims for something dangerous and prestigious. Mecha pilots . Imperial power. Rebellion simmering at the edges. On paper, this is exactly my kind of book. And the early chapters deliver. The opening has momentum, emotional stakes, and a sense of place. I was invested. Then the book shifts. Once the story moves into training and institutional life, the tension drains away. The plot becomes rigid and predictable, and there is one extended section where you can see the outcome from kilometres away. It drags. It really drags. Page after page of waiting for the inevitable, wishing t...

Mistletoe Murder by Leslie Meier is a small-town Christmas mystery . First published in 1991, it comes from a world without mobile phones , and that matters more than you might expect. There are moments where the modern reader instinctively thinks, just call someone, just text, just check, only to remember that none of that exists yet.  I experienced this as an audiobook, and unfortunately that had a noticeable impact on my enjoyment. The narration is by Karen White , and it is not very good. At first I genuinely wondered whether I was listening to a poorly edited AI recording, because the delivery is full of awkward pauses in the middle of sentences. Words are separated strangely, and then I realised the narrator just had to jump to the next line on the page, resulting in readings like blue… sweater. The rhythm never quite settles, and it repeatedly pulls you out of the story. That issue is compounded by a recurring structural choice in the book itself. Each chapter opens with a...

Doctor Who: 10 Days of Christmas is a festive anthology of short Doctor Who stories, all set around Christmas in one way or another. I listened to this as an audiobook , which comes in at around six hours, making it an easy, compact listen. The kind of thing you can dip into over a few evenings in December without any commitment stress. The structure is straightforward. Ten short stories, quick to establish their premise and quick to resolve it. That pacing works well in audio form. None of the stories overstay their welcome, and there is a nice variety of settings. Alien planets , spaceships , strange workplaces, including one story centred around a Christmas factory . On paper, that variety sounds ideal, and in terms of pure Doctor Who flavour, it largely works. The problem is the Christmas element itself. While every story technically includes Christmas, the level of integration varies wildly. In some cases, Christmas is central to the mood and the events. In others, it barely exi...

Murder, She Wrote: A Killer Christmas is one of those books I picked up with a very clear purpose. I wanted something seasonal, something Christmassy, and definitely not a romance. I tend to gravitate towards Christmas mysteries in December, and this seemed like a safe bet. After all, it stars Jessica Fletcher , the beloved amateur sleuth from the long-running TV series Murder, She Wrote, and it promises murder in Cabot Cove at Christmas. On paper, this should have been perfect. The story is set in Cabot Cove during the holiday season, but here is the first odd choice. It does not begin at Christmas. It begins at Thanksgiving . From there, the book spends an extraordinary amount of time on preparations for a large, multi-day Christmas festival . Committees are formed. Meetings are held. People sign up for tasks. Schedules are discussed. Decorations are planned. You are there for all of it. Every step. Every organisational detail. At first, this is actually quite pleasant. There is s...

The Sittaford Mystery ( 1931 ) was my final December pick for the 2025 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge . This one was chosen by vote, and I did vote for it, even though at the time I had slightly the wrong idea about what kind of book it was. For some reason, I was convinced it was a Poirot mystery . When I realised it wasn’t, I briefly wondered whether it had at least been adapted as a Poirot story, but as far as I can tell, it has been adapted as a Miss Marple episode instead. Or perhaps I was mixing it up with something else entirely. Either way, it wasn’t what I expected, but that didn’t end up being the main issue. What makes this novel stand out in Christie’s body of work is its protagonist. The character we mainly follow is Emily Trefusis , a woman determined to prove the innocence of her fiancé, who has been arrested for murder. Rather than waiting passively for events to unfold, Emily actively investigates, travelling, questioning people, and pushing the case forward. I a...

I read Her Last Christmas by Claire McGowan because I was in the mood for something seasonal but not romantic. A Christmas murder mystery felt like a safe bet, and this one delivers exactly that: snow , isolation, wealth, discomfort, and a body in the hot tub before the mulled wine has time to cool. The story follows Emma, a barrister from a working class background, who joins her boyfriend Michael and his circle of extremely wealthy friends for Christmas in an Alpine chalet . They have been dating for six months, which matters more than it first appears. Emma expected a quiet holiday for two; instead, she finds herself stranded on a mountain with people who have known each other forever, who ski effortlessly, who move through luxury as if it were air. She cannot ski. She does not belong. She knows it, and they know it too. When one of the group is murdered, suspicion falls neatly and conveniently on the outsider. The plot unfolds through a compact series of twists, none of them wi...

Cat Among the Pigeons (1959) is officially a Poirot novel, but only just. This is one of those books where Poirot exists more in name than in presence. For most of the story, he is completely absent, and when he finally appears, it feels as if he has simply dropped in to tidy everything up. I’ve heard people say that quite a few Poirot novels work like this, and this one is a perfect example. The opening of the book doesn’t even feel like a murder mystery. It starts with international politics, revolution, and stolen jewels, edging into spy novel territory. That part dragged for me, partly because it felt disconnected from what the book eventually becomes. Only later does the story settle into its main setting, a girls’ boarding school , which is where most of the novel actually takes place. Once we arrive at the school, the cast expands rapidly. There are teachers, students, staff, and police officers, and I struggled to identify clear main characters. Two schoolgirls stand out mor...

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino is my fourth encounter with this author, and once again, it confirms why his books linger long after the final chapter. I came to this one in a slightly roundabout way. I listened to it as an audiobook, largely because it is one of the few Higashino novels translated into Hungarian. Unfortunately, it is now out of print, which makes it impossible to gift or easily recommend locally. That is a shame, because this is one of his most distinctive and unsettling novels. The story centres on Ishigami , a quiet, deeply introverted mathematics professor, and his neighbour Yasuko , a single mother living a restrained, anxious life with her daughter. When a murder occurs early on, the book does something unexpected: it shows you far more than a traditional mystery would. This is not a question of who did it, at least not in the usual sense. Instead, the tension comes from how and why, and whether intelligence, devotion, and guilt can ever truly outm...

You Wanna Be on Top? by Sarah Hartshorne is a sharp, funny, and at times, disturbing memoir about her time on America’s Next Top Model , specifically cycle 9 . I came to this book with surprisingly little memory of that season. I watched Top Model as it aired, over a decade ago. Living outside the US now means there is no easy, legal way to revisit it; the show exists mostly as cultural residue, Tyra quotes and vague recollections. Sarah is a great storyteller. I listened to the audiobook, just over seven and a half hours long, and finished it in about three days because I kept finding excuses to press play. Sarah narrates it herself, and her stand up background shows immediately. The timing is precise; the delivery casual but deliberate; the jokes land cleanly. At times it feels less like an audiobook and more like a very long, very personal stand up set. I laughed out loud more than once. But this is not just a funny book. That is where it gets interesting. There is a recurring t...

I read Towards Zero (1944) as part of the 2025 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge , and I listened to it as an audiobook narrated by Hugh Fraser. Going in, I remembered this story as a Miss Marple mystery, which turned out to be misleading. That version comes from the television adaptation. In its original form, Towards Zero does not feature Miss Marple at all. Instead, this is a Superintendent Battle novel, one of Christie’s lesser-known recurring detectives. Knowing that helped recalibrate my expectations, but it also highlighted how much my memory of the story was shaped by the adaptation. Certain beats were familiar, others felt different, and at times I wasn’t sure whether I was remembering the book or the television version. The setup itself is solid. A group of people gathers in a coastal setting, old relationships resurface, tensions simmer, and everything builds towards an inevitable act of violence. Christie’s idea here is that murder does not begin at the moment of the cri...

At Bertram’s Hotel ( 1965 ) is a Miss Marple novel that I read as part of the 2025 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge , and in several ways it felt quite unique compared to the other books I read this year. This is very firmly a Miss Marple story. She is present from the beginning to the end, and that alone made it feel refreshing after so many novels where the detective appears late or feels almost incidental. This is also one of Christie’s later novels, and you can feel that immediately. The book is steeped in a quiet sense of unease about modernity. It looks back at an older London , an older way of life, and contrasts it with a world that is changing fast and not always for the better. That sense of nostalgia, mixed with suspicion, runs through the entire story and gives it a very distinct atmosphere. I knew this story quite well going in, because it is one of my favourite episodes from the Miss Marple television series . That actually helped, because the novel itself is very diff...

I first came across this book decades ago, in the late 80s or early 90s, in Hungarian translation. I borrowed it from my aunt, read halfway, and returned it unfinished. Even so, it stayed with me. I forgot the title and the author, yet I remembered the cover and fragments of the story: a ruined city on a distant planet, explorers dying and returning in new bodies. It was strange and unsettling, far beyond what I could fully grasp as a child. Recently, I finally tracked it down. The book was The Orchid Cage by Herbert W. Franke , first published in 1961. I read it in English translation this time, and it felt like closing a circle that had been open for thirty years. The story is set far in Earth’s future, around the year 112,000 . Two groups of explorers are sent to investigate a distant, abandoned planet. They do not travel physically. Instead, they project themselves into artificial “pseudo-bodies” created on the planet itself. The challenge is to discover who once lived there. The ...

To Touch a Silent Fury is the first book in R.A. Sandpiper ’s brand-new duology, The Bride of Eavenfold . I was lucky enough to receive an ARC of this one, so thank you to the author for the chance to dive in early. This is probably her longest book yet, and it’s set in a fresh new universe, separate from her previous series. The world is built around the number five— five seasons , lives measured in five cycles , five kingdoms tied to the five senses. It’s an imaginative, intricate system that feels coherent and alive. The main character, Tani , is born Moontouched . She looks a bit like an albino; her skin is pale, hair white, but her eyes are completely white. Children like her are sent away around the age of ten to an isolated island , but she is special: she’s the only girl on an island full of men. When we meet her she awaits her Fate, they key to unlocking the full potential of her powers. Lang’s chapters balance out Tani’s isolation perfectly. Where she is cut off and vulnera...

I read One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940) as part of the 2025 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge , and this time it really was a Poirot novel in the fullest sense. Poirot is present for most of the story, which genuinely surprised me. After reading so many books where he appears only at the very end, it was refreshing to have him involved from early on. This is also one of the novels that features Inspector Japp as a proper character. In the television series, Japp replaces a rotating cast of inspectors from the books. Here, though, he is exactly where he belongs, working alongside Poirot in a way that feels natural and familiar. This is the story I always think of as “the dentist one”. The murder of a dentist is the central event, and interestingly, the Hungarian title reflects that directly. The English nursery rhyme does not translate well, so the Hungarian edition went with The Dentist’s Chair , which honestly makes a lot of sense. I realised while reading that I had encountered this...

The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig is the first book in the Stonewater Kingdom series , and it sits firmly in that popular romantasy space that I usually approach with caution. I am not a big romance reader. I did read a few this year, mostly by my current favourite fantasy author, R.A. Sandpiper , but romantasy as a genre often loses me. This book, however, intrigued me for one specific reason: its focus on religion and belief. The story takes place in a fully imagined fantasy world with an established religious system at its core. The main character, Sybil, is “ the moth ”. She is a Diviner who repeatedly drowns in ritualistic ceremonies, experiences visions, and has those visions interpreted for others. Through this, she functions as a mouthpiece for prophecy. She also happens to be living inside what is very clearly a cult. A large part of the book can be read as a slow realisation of that fact, and a painful disentangling from it. Enter Roderick, the knight. He is scepti...

I read Come, Tell Me How You Live (1946) as part of my 2025 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge, and it came as a genuine surprise. This is not a novel, but a memoir . In it, Agatha Christie writes about her life in the Middle East with her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan , during the 1930s. You might expect a book focused on archaeology, but that is not really what this is. While archaeological work forms part of the background, the book feels more like a snapshot of a region and a time that no longer exists. Much of it takes place in Syria and surrounding areas between the two world wars. Christie does not analyse cultures in depth. Instead, she records moments, people, and stories, and in doing so captures a world that feels astonishingly distant now. What struck me most was her attitude. This is a woman born in the nineteenth century, raised in England, suddenly dealing with dust, heat, illness, and a near-total lack of comfort. And yet she adapts far better than...

This is the first book of a series, and that matters. I do not plan to review every volume, because with a story like this it would very quickly become impossible to say anything meaningful without drifting into spoilers. Instead, this feels like the right place to talk about what the series is, what kind of reading experience it offers, and whether it is worth starting at all. I picked up The Apothecary Diaries because I watched the anime first. I loved it. Loved it enough that it firmly landed among my favourite anime of all time, and strong enough to pull me back into anime after a long break. I have been watching anime since childhood; the original Sailor Moon was my first obsession. I did not want to wait years to see where it was going, so I went back to the source and started reading from the beginning rather than jumping ahead. If you are coming from the anime, there is no shock waiting for you here. The adaptation is remarkably faithful. Scene by scene, beat by beat, this i...