Unapologetic Reviews

I received an ARC copy of Ivan and the Firebird by Alexandra Pugachevsky in exchange for an honest review. I always find reviews like this a little difficult to write because I genuinely like the author as a person and appreciate the opportunity to read the book. Unfortunately, this one simply wasn't for me. The story follows Ivan, a young man from the fairytale land of Zorya. After finding a feather from the legendary Firebird, he falls into the clutches of Baba Yaga, who offers him an impossible bargain. To gain his freedom, he must find the Firebird itself. His journey eventually takes him into our modern world, where he encounters magical creatures inspired by Slavic folklore and meets Lisa, a young woman with whom he falls in love. I love fairytale retellings and stories inspired by folklore, so this sounded like something I should have enjoyed. Sadly, I struggled almost from the beginning. My biggest issue was Ivan himself. For a significant part of the book, I assumed he wa...

I read Obstetrix by Naomi Kritzer as my Pick of the Month for June 2026. What drew me to it was the premise. It was advertised as a story involving a cult and as part of the wider conversation around abortion rights and how legislation affects healthcare. Since I have read several memoirs by former cult members and watched many documentaries on the subject, that immediately caught my attention. In the end, I give this book three stars. It wasn't bad. It was competently written, easy to read, and fairly quick. The story moved along well enough and kept me turning the pages. But for me, it never became particularly interesting. The story follows a doctor who becomes trapped inside a religious community. The cult itself, however, felt very much like a cult by numbers. If you've watched a few documentaries or read books about groups like Scientology, FLDS, or other high-control communities, you can almost tick boxes as you go along. Isolation, manipulation, control, unquestioned a...

I read The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, for prompt number 16, "A book less than 260 pages.” The story follows Chih, a cleric whose duty is to collect stories and preserve history. In a lonely palace beside a lake, they meet Rabbit, an elderly servant, and through seemingly ordinary objects scattered around the abandoned rooms, Rabbit slowly reveals the life of Empress In-yo and the events that changed an empire. Rather than telling the story in a straight line, the book unfolds piece by piece, with memories attached to embroidery, clothing, gifts, and other possessions. And that was both the book's greatest strength and my biggest problem with it. I appreciate what the book was trying to do. The structure is clever, and I can see why many readers love it. But my brain struggled with this style of storytelling. I am terrible with names, and because the story is revealed through fragments and memories rather than in a straightfo...

I read Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, for prompt number 42, "A book inspired by a real song, album, band, artist, or musical." Going into it, I expected it to be fine at best. Contemporary fiction is not usually my thing. I tend to gravitate towards fantasy, science fiction, and stories with larger than life stakes. Here, there are no quests, no alien worlds, no one trying to save humanity. There are only people. Messy, talented, selfish, loving, complicated people. And somehow, this became one of the biggest surprises of my reading year. I ended up giving it five stars. The story follows Daisy Jones and the members of The Six, a hugely successful rock band in the 1970s. But what makes the book stand out is its format. Rather than a traditional novel, it is presented as an oral history. The entire story unfolds through interviews, with each character recounting events years later. Because I listened to the audiobook,...

I watched the adaptation of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd , based on the novel by Agatha Christie, shortly after finishing the book. One thing became clear very quickly: this adaptation is far more dramatic than the source material. The novel is almost a cosy mystery. Despite the murder, much of the story revolves around village life, conversations, and the relationship between Poirot and Dr Sheppard. The adaptation shifts the focus firmly onto Poirot, which is actually something many Poirot adaptations do. Interestingly, a surprising number of the original novels are not really about Poirot at all. He often enters the story as an outsider and solves the mystery, while the narrative follows other characters. In the novel, Dr Sheppard narrates the story. Through his eyes, we meet Poirot, who is supposedly retired and spending his time growing vegetable marrows. One of my favourite moments in the book is when Dr Sheppard initially assumes that Poirot is a hairdresser because of his immacul...

I read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie for the 2026 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge. June’s theme was “Best to Read in One Sitting”, and this was the official pick for the month. Interestingly, I already knew who the murderer was before I started reading. Not because I remembered every detail, but because this book’s ending is so famous that it has become part of detective fiction history. So instead of trying to solve the mystery, I spent most of the book looking for clues and trying to see how Christie constructed the puzzle. And honestly, there are not that many obvious clues. Reading it felt a little like watching an episode of Columbo when you already know the culprit. You stop focusing on the question of who did it and start paying attention to all the little details, contradictions, and moments that feel slightly off. What surprised me was that while I remembered who the killer was, I did not really remember how everything worked. That part was still fun to unc...

I received an ARC of The Secret World of Briar Rose by Cindy Pham in exchange for an honest review. This is a difficult book to review, because I do not think I can say that I enjoyed it in the usual sense. It was not an easy or comforting reading experience. It was painful at times, and it felt messy in places, but it also touched something very real in me. At its heart, this is a book about depression, escape, grief, suicide, and the terrifying work of choosing to exist in the real world when the real world feels unbearable. That is why it affected me so much. Depression is something I have dealt with for much of my life, and the desire to escape is something I understand very deeply. For me, escape has often meant books, travel, and anything that could make ordinary life feel less heavy for a while. That is also one of the central ideas of this book. In the dream world, real life stops. You do not age. You do not move forward. Nothing changes outside the dream. And that image felt ...

I read How to Kill a Witch: The Patriarchy’s Guide to Silencing Women by Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, prompt number 43, “Two books written by real-life partners or spouses (1).” This book was written by the women behind the Witches of Scotland podcast, and that connection really shapes the whole book. It is not just a history of the Scottish witch trials. It is also part of a wider attempt to make people remember them properly. The book looks mainly at the Scottish witch trials, but it does not treat them as a vague dark chapter from the past. It explains how they happened. It looks at the religious atmosphere, the economic pressures, the legal structures, the books and ideas that fed the panic, and the way fear could be turned into accusation. It also goes into individual stories, which was important because the scale of the trials can make the victims blur together. When the book pauses on one accused woman, one community, one interroga...

I read The Astral Library by Kate Quinn for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, prompt number 31, “A book that makes you feel FOMO.” Sadly, this was a real disappointment for me. The premise sounded exactly like something I would love. There is a magical library where people can enter books, live inside stories, and move through literature as if the pages were real places. The library is also in danger somehow, which made me expect a fun, imaginative adventure through books, with mystery, magic, and a real sense of wonder. The idea is wonderful. The execution, for me, was not. The first problem was that the book felt very much like it was aimed at BookTok. I know the author has said that she chose books she personally loved, and that the public domain books included were ones she saw as great classics. But while reading, it felt like a roll call of the usual big titles and familiar references. Fourth Wing gets mentioned. George R. R. Martin gets mentioned. Oz, Narnia, and Tolkien co...

I read The Tea Dragon Tapestry by K. O’Neill, the third and final book in the Tea Dragon series. After The Tea Dragon Society and The Tea Dragon Festival, this book brings the characters and themes together in a way that feels like a gentle closing chapter. This one takes place after the events of The Tea Dragon Society , and it feels much more like a direct continuation of that first book than the second one did. The Tea Dragon Festival was more of a prequel or companion story, but The Tea Dragon Tapestry returns to Greta, Minette, Hesekiel, Erik, and the tea dragons. It also brings in Rinn and Aedhan from the second book, now visiting the village. Rinn is older, while Aedhan is basically the same, because he is a dragon and therefore lives on a very different timescale. I liked that sense of time passing differently for different characters. It fits a series that is so interested in memory, tradition, and the way people carry the past with them. Greta is still learning blacksmit...

I read The Tea Dragon Festival by K. O’Neill after reading The Tea Dragon Society , because I wanted to spend a little more time in this sweet, cosy world of tea dragons, memory, craft, and magical woodland creatures. This book is the second book in the series, but it actually takes place before The Tea Dragon Society . That was not immediately clear to me when I started reading. Maybe there was a foreword or note that I missed, but I only realised it properly later, when Erik and Hesekiel appeared and were clearly younger than they are in the first book. In this story, they are still travelling and adventuring, before they settle into the quieter life we see later. The main character here is Rinn, who lives in a small mountain village and works as a forager. They gather herbs, mushrooms, and other useful things from the woods for people in the village. One day, while out foraging, Rinn discovers a dragon called Aedhan, who has been asleep for a very long time. He was meant to be the ...

I read The Tea Dragon Society by K. O’Neill for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, for prompt number 46, “a sapphic comic.” This is definitely a comic, and it is sapphic in a very sweet, gentle, all ages way, so it fits the prompt nicely.  This is a short, whimsical fantasy story set in a world of magical creatures, blacksmiths, tea shops, dragons, and tiny tea dragons. The main character is Greta, a young blacksmith apprentice who is learning her family’s craft in a world where sword making seems to be fading into something more decorative than practical. I actually found that part interesting, because the story hints at a wider world without fully explaining it. We know swords are no longer needed in the same way, but we do not really know why. Maybe the world has moved on from them. Maybe it has become more peaceful. Maybe there is another explanation entirely. The book does not go very far into that, but it gives the setting a quiet sense of history. The story begins when Gr...

I read The Garden by Tomi Champion-Adeyemi for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, for prompt number 1, “a book where gardening or a garden is central to the plot”. This was not the most successful pick for me. I chose this because the obvious choice for this prompt would have been The Secret Garden , and I really did not want to read The Secret Garden . So I picked The Garden , which sounded like it might be mysterious, emotional, and a bit unusual. The story follows Lęina, a young woman whose mother disappeared when she was a child while searching for a mysterious garden in Brazil. Years later, Lęina feels drawn to that same garden. She has her mother’s journal, which is connected to the garden, and she travels to Brazil to look for the place that has been calling to her. On paper, that sounds exactly like something I should enjoy. A missing mother. A mysterious garden. A journey to Brazil. A young woman chasing something that might be memory, grief, inheritance, or obsession. Ther...

I watched The Labours of Hercules , season 13, episode 4 of Agatha Christie’s Poirot , after reading the original short story collection, and I think its placement in the series is one of its strongest choices. In the original book, Poirot is thinking about retirement. Before he leaves detective work behind, he decides to take on twelve final cases, each one loosely connected to one of the Labours of Hercules. Of course, the book was published in 1947, so Poirot does not actually retire, but the idea of him preparing for the end of his career is built into the premise. That makes this episode’s position in the television series feel very deliberate. It is the penultimate episode, coming just before Curtain, and that gives the adaptation a sense of finality that honours the original concept beautifully. The original book is a collection of twelve short stories. Each “labour” is its own case, and many of them are built around deception. People pretend to be what they are not. Identities ...

I read The Labours of Hercules by Agatha Christie as part of the 2026 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge. This was for May, and the theme was “Best Short Story Collection”. This is a collection of twelve short Hercule Poirot cases, built around a very fun premise. Poirot is thinking about retirement, but before he finally gives up detective work and settles down with his vegetable marrows, he decides to complete his own version of the Twelve Labours of Hercules. Since his name is Hercule, he chooses twelve cases that somehow connect to the famous mythological labours. I really liked this idea. It gives the collection a clear shape, so it does not feel like twelve random stories placed together. Some of the connections are quite direct, while others are more playful. A lion becomes a little Pekingese dog. A dangerous criminal becomes a wild boar. Cerberus becomes a large black dog at the entrance of a nightclub called Hell. It is Christie having fun with her own structure, and I enjoyed...

I read Platform Decay by Martha Wells as my May Pick of the Month book, and honestly, this was an easy five stars for me. The Murderbot Diaries is one of my favourite series of all time, so I was very excited to read this one. It did not disappoint. Before starting it, what I really wanted was another fun adventure with Murderbot, and that is exactly what I got. Fast pace, danger, sarcasm, strange humans, emotional growth, and a setting that felt genuinely interesting. This series means a lot to me because it is actually the series that got me back into reading a few years ago. Before that, I mainly read long books, but I found that nowadays I just could not get into those 500+ page stories anymore. Reading The Murderbot Diaries made me realise that a book does not have to be huge to have interesting worldbuilding, strong characters, and a complex story. These books are short, but they are never empty. They move quickly, but they still have emotional weight. That balance is something...

I read Child X by Jamie Mustard for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, for prompt number 36 “A book about a mob (fiction or nonfiction)”. I interpreted “mob” more loosely here, as a high control group rather than organised crime. Though honestly, when it comes to Scientology, the book could fit the original intent of the prompt as well. This book is Jamie Mustard’s memoir about being born into Scientology and eventually leaving the movement at nineteen. I ended up feeling quite ambivalent about it, because there were parts I genuinely loved, and parts that I found frustrating. One of the strongest aspects of the book is just how intelligent it feels. Mustard constantly references history, literature, films, music, philosophy, and cultural events. The narration itself is also extremely sharp. His use of language is thoughtful and deliberate, and there is a real sense that this is somebody who thinks deeply about everything around him. Even ordinary moments are layered with associatio...