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...