Unapologetic Reviews

Death by Dumpling by Vivien Chien was my pick for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge prompt number 7, “A book about a granny hobby.” I genuinely could not remember why I had chosen it for that category. My guess is that I thought this would involve cooking, but it doesn’t. I wasn’t sure if the book would fit, but then I realised it did have a granny hobby. Gossip. And an entire supporting cast of aunties and granny aged women who treat information as currency and sport. That counts. I think. I am still reserving the right to revisit the prompt at the end of the year. This is the first book in the Noodle Shop Mystery series , set in Asia Village in Cleveland, a small shopping plaza filled with Asian owned businesses. Herbal shops, restaurants, gift stores. It is, without question, the strongest element of the novel. You can see it clearly. Fluorescent lit corridors. Steam rising from bamboo baskets. Aunties standing in doorways, commenting on everything and everyone. The community...

I read It’s Not Her by Mary Kubica as my February 2026 pick of the month. Each month I choose a new release and read it straight away, and this was my February selection. It also ended up being one of those books that made me film not just one video, but two. One spoiler free review, and one full discussion of the ending. That alone says something. The story centres on two families vacationing together at a mountain resort. Pine trees crowd the cabins. There is a still lake nearby that looks peaceful in the sun and threatening after dark. Courtney and Nolan are brother and sister. Nolan’s wife, Emily, was Courtney’s childhood best friend. Their lives are tightly woven together. Then Courtney walks into Nolan and Emily’s cabin and finds them bludgeoned to death. Their eldest daughter, Reese, is missing. From that moment on, the novel becomes a race against time. Courtney wants to find her niece. She also wants to get her own family out of that place as quickly as possible. The quiet r...

I read The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea by Axie Oh for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge , prompt 32, “A book with an underwater civilization .” It is written in first person, and I’m not a fan. On the page it can feel like I am reading a teenager’s diary. In audio format, though, it becomes someone telling me a story about her life. That shift makes it much easier for me to tolerate it. The story follows Mina , who is fifteen or sixteen. Her exact age matters because she is deliberately not yet eighteen. Every year a girl is sacrificed as the Sea God ’s bride in the hope that he will calm the deadly storms ravaging their homeland. When her brother’s beloved is chosen, Mina throws herself into the sea instead. She wakes in a hidden spirit realm and has thirty days to wake the Sea God, uncover the truth behind a curse, and save both the human world and the spirit world. There is a clear ticking clock. You would expect urgency. And yet part of this novel is surprisingly domestic. M...

I read Mrs McGinty's Dead by Agatha Christie as the February pick for my 2026 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge , and I was genuinely excited going in. It is a Poirot novel, and unlike some of the earlier ones, he is present from the very beginning and remains at the centre of the story. No dramatic last chapter entrance. No five minute cameo. This is Poirot throughout. And yet… it left me oddly unmoved. The premise is simple and strong. An elderly charwoman, Mrs McGinty, is brutally murdered in a small English village. Her lodger has already been tried and sentenced to death. The case is, officially, closed. But Superintendent Spence, the very man who oversaw the investigation, is uneasy. Not because of a missing clue or a procedural mistake, but simply because he does not believe the condemned man is a killer. That instinct alone sends Poirot, bored and restless in retirement, into the village to dig up the truth. It is a classic Christie setup: a tight community, polite façad...

Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas was a book I very much wanted to love. I didn’t hate it. I didn’t even dislike it. But in the end, it left me curiously unsatisfied, not because of what it is, but because of what it almost becomes and never quite commits to. The story follows Yadriel , a trans boy from a Latinx brujo community , who accidentally summons the ghost of Julian instead of the spirit he intended to raise. Julian cannot be released. His body is missing. He does not remember how he died. On paper, this promises a supernatural mystery . In practice, the novel is something else entirely: a character driven, slice of life story that uses a mystery more as a framing device than as a narrative engine. There is a lot to admire here. The world building is rich and lovingly constructed. The brujx traditions , rituals, beliefs, and mythology feel grounded and coherent, giving the book a strong sense of place and cultural specificity. This is a world with weight behind it, not a thin ae...

Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy was marketed in a way that makes you expect something almost salacious. A teenage girl. An affair with her teacher. It sounds like the setup for a dark romance, or at least a scandal-driven story. This is not that book. I read it expecting drama, exposure, fallout. What I got instead was a quiet, uncomfortable, and very honest portrait of a girl who is trying to grow up while still desperately wanting to be a daughter. Waldo is seventeen at the beginning and eighteen by the end. She is raising herself. Her mother drifts from job to job, boyfriend to boyfriend, and her father has been absent for years. She waits to be seen. To be chosen. To be loved. And although at first it seems like she has given up on that hope, she really hasn’t. She still lives for it. She goes to school. She works. She manages her own life. But there is a constant emptiness under everything she does, a kind of hopelessness she never quite names. Then she meets her new creative ...