Unapologetic Reviews

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...