Unapologetic Reviews

A Song to Drown Rivers by Ann Liang was my pick for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge for prompt #18 “A love story that defies social boundaries”. The novel is marketed as fantasy, but that description is a little misleading. The story is primarily historical fiction with a central romance; the fantasy element appears only briefly at the very end. The book is based on the ancient Chinese legend of Xi Shi , one of the Four Beauties of China . In the story, Xi Shi is recruited by the strategist Fan Li and trained to become a weapon disguised as a woman. Her task is simple in theory and terrifying in practice: she will be sent to the rival kingdom of Wu as a concubine to its king, where her beauty and influence are meant to help bring the kingdom down from within.  The premise is excellent. A young woman turned into a political weapon, trapped between two rival kingdoms locked in a struggle amidst loyalty, love, and manipulation tangled together. It has all the ingredients of ...

I read Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite in preparation for the second book in the series, which is being published in March and which I chose as my March pick of the month. This first instalment is very short, a little over one hundred pages, so I read it quickly; essentially in a single sitting. It works almost like an introduction to the setting and the main character, but it still manages to tell a complete little mystery. The story follows Dorothy Gentleman , a detective aboard a massive generation ship carrying around ten thousand people from Earth to a distant new planet. The journey will take centuries, far longer than a human lifespan, so the inhabitants have developed ways to survive the passage. Their consciousness can be stored and transferred into new bodies , allowing people to live through multiple physical lives. The idea itself is not new. Anyone familiar with Altered Carbon will recognise the concept immediately. What I liked here is not the novelty of the technolo...

I read Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie for the Read Christie 2026 Challenge , where it was the book for March. What makes this read slightly unusual for me is that I already knew the story very well before opening the novel. I had seen the television adaptation with David Suchet several times, and that version remains one of my favourite interpretations of the detective. I had also seen the classic 1970s film adaptation and the more recent modern version, which unfortunately stripped Poirot of what makes him unique and made an action movie. Even so, I had somehow never actually read the book itself. The novel opens slightly earlier than most screen adaptations. Poirot is travelling through the Middle East and boards a train from Aleppo before eventually arriving in Istanbul. Those early scenes were a small pleasure for me because they mention real places I know well, such as the Galata Bridge , which I have walked across many times. Christie also references the famo...

I read Nowhere Girl: Life as a Member of ADHD’s Lost Generation by Carla Ciccone for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge prompt number 28, “A book about debt”, as people with ADHD are often in debt. Though ironically, she doesn’t really get into debt, even though she talks about her boyfriend taking her money, but we never hear about how that got resolved. This book is part memoir, part exploration of ADHD research, and part personal reckoning. Diagnosed at thirty nine after having a child, Ciccone revisits her entire life through the lens of ADHD, examining how it shaped her identity, her relationships, her work, and her sense of self. Alongside her story, she engages with scientific literature, especially around how ADHD presents in girls and women . Very early in the book, she lists the labels many girls hear: lazy, careless, head in the clouds, gives up too easily. Those words felt painfully familiar to me. I heard them too. The idea that boys externalise their struggles while g...