Unapologetic Reviews

I read The Witches of Cambridge by Alice Hoffman as part of the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, for prompt number 33, "a book about college". I also made it the first book of my October 2026 Read Witch-a-Thon, so I was killing two birds with one stone. Unfortunately, this was not the strongest start to my witchy reading month. I think this is another case where the blurb gave me a very different idea of the book I was going to read. Based on the description, I imagined two young witches arriving at Radcliffe College in 1950s Cambridge, joining Lilith House, essentially a sorority house for witches, and then realizing that girls from the society were disappearing. Naturally, I assumed Ava and Lauren would team up to figure out what was happening. This was my first Alice Hoffman novel, although of course I knew her as the author of Practical Magic , and it is immediately obvious why she has had such a long career. Her prose is gorgeous. The descriptions of Cambridge, the c...

I read Jackaby by William Ritter as part of the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge. This was for prompt number 19, "a book about teen angst", and I think seventeen year old Abigail Rook running away from home, joining a dinosaur dig in Eastern Europe, and then deciding on impulse to sail to America rather than return to her parents definitely qualifies. The book takes place in 1892, which I found particularly funny because I recently read The Yellow Wallpaper, which was published in 1892. What are the chances? Apparently I am accidentally spending quite a lot of time in 1892 at the moment. Our POV character is Abigail Rook, a seventeen year old English girl who has recently arrived in New Fiddleham, New England. She comes from a fairly intellectual family, but she is frustrated by the limitations placed on her because she is a girl. She wants adventure. When she is prevented from joining her father on his travels, she eventually takes matters into her own hands and joins a pale...

I “read” The Arrival by Shaun Tan for the 2026 POPSUGAR Reading Challenge. This was for prompt number 41, "a book in a different format than your usual: physical, audio, eBook". And I am putting “read” in quotation marks here because The Arrival is a wordless picture book. There is no actual text to read. Instead, you move through the story entirely through the illustrations, looking at what is happening and inferring the meaning from the images. I gave it four stars. The book has a very distinctive visual style. Tan created the final illustrations primarily with graphite pencil and then digitally coloured them, drawing on the look of early photography, old pictorial archives, and family photo albums. That explains the sepia tones and slightly faded, historical quality of the images. At the same time, the world itself is surreal. The people and their emotions are rendered quite realistically, but the cities, animals, plants, machines, and everyday objects are just unfamilia...

I read The Yellow Wallpaper  by Charlotte Perkins Gilman as part of the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, for prompt #24, "a book about postpartum". This is one of those classics that I think I had encountered before, because I vaguely remember reading an excerpt from it at some point in my life. Either I read it at a point when I was too young to really understand what was happening, or the excerpt simply did not work very well on its own, because I definitely did not remember having much of a reaction to it. Reading the entire story now was a very different experience. And technically, this is not a book at all. It is a short story, first published in 1892, and it is told in the first person through the secret writings of a woman who has recently had a baby and appears to be suffering from what we would now recognise as postpartum depression. What makes the story particularly disturbing is that she is surrounded by people who supposedly know what is best for her. Her husband...

I read Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge. This was for prompt #29, "a book that takes place during harvesting season", and I think this one definitely counts. A large part of the novel takes place during the autumn harvests, including both the olive harvest and grape picking, although the story actually stretches from September all the way to Christmas. Weirdly enough, I also listened to it in September, and the book itself begins in September, so my timing was pretty much perfect. Villa Coco takes place at a slightly crumbling villa in rural Tuscany, where a young American named Geoffrey arrives to take a job working for a ninety two year old Baronessa. He has been hired as an archivist, or technically as an “adjutant,” and his supposed job is to catalogue the contents of the villa before Christmas. There is art, furniture, books, antiques, and all sorts of other things accumulated over a very long and rather eventful life. Geoffrey com...

I read The Woman in Me by Britney Spears as part of the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge. This was for prompt #37, "a book about a pop star", and I had actually been wanting to read this memoir ever since it came out. I listened to the audiobook, which came with a special treat because Britney herself reads the introduction before Michelle Williams takes over the narration for the rest of the book. Britney explains that recording the entire memoir would simply have been too emotionally difficult considering everything she had to revisit while writing it. Hearing her actual voice at the beginning therefore felt particularly meaningful, especially before handing the story over to somebody else. This was also a strangely emotional book for me for reasons that have very little to do with the actual quality of the memoir. Between Britney Spears and I there are only about seven months in age, which means that when Britney became one of the most famous teenagers in the world, I was ...

I read The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman as part of the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge. This was for prompt #20, "a book with a character who does Pilates or Lagree". One of the main characters does Pilates. We never actually see him doing it, but he mentions it a couple of times, so I’m counting it. The Thursday Murder Club is the first book in the Thursday Murder Club series, and it was also Osman’s debut novel. Before turning to fiction, he was primarily known for his work in television. I really wanted to love this book. It is incredibly popular, the premise sounded exactly like the sort of thing I should enjoy, and I generally like mysteries with unusual amateur detectives. Sadly, I ended up giving it three stars. There is nothing particularly wrong with it, and I wouldn’t call it a bad book at all. It was perfectly serviceable. I just didn’t find it particularly compelling, and for a murder mystery, I found it far too slow. The story takes place at Cooper’s C...

I read A Cup of Flour, A Pinch of Death by Valerie Burns for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, for prompt #49, "a book that mentions your zodiac sign". I’m a Dog in the Chinese zodiac, and this book has a very large and very memorable dog, so I’m counting it. A Cup of Flour, A Pinch of Death is the third book in the Baker Street Mystery series, and I gave it four stars. This book also brings the larger mystery that has been developing since the first book to a conclusion, which I found very satisfying. There is a fourth book in the series, so I’m curious about where the story goes from here now that this particular arc has been wrapped up. We are back in New Bison, Michigan, with Maddy Montgomery, who has now settled much more comfortably into the life she unexpectedly inherited along with Baby Cakes bakery and Baby, her enormous English mastiff. Most of the characters from the previous books return, along with a few new ones, and we also get more of Maddy’s father in thi...

I read The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge. This was for prompt #2, "A book that features a platonic friendship between a man and a woman". The Tainted Cup is the first book in the Shadow of the Leviathan series, now also called the Ana and Din Mysteries, and I gave it five stars. I actually hesitated between four and five for a while because I could not quite decide how much I had enjoyed it. In the end, though, I realised that I had enjoyed it a lot. The mystery kept me interested, the characters worked for me, and most importantly, I was completely fascinated by the world Bennett created. The easiest way to describe The Tainted Cup is Sherlock Holmes in a fantasy world built around biological engineering. The story takes place in the Empire of Khanum, which is protected from the sea by enormous walls. Every wet season, gigantic creatures called leviathans emerge from the ocean and approach these walls, and the Empire has bui...

I read the Medalist by Tsurumaikada for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, for prompt #17, “A book about your favorite event in the Winter Olympics.” I am not really a huge sports fan, but I do sometimes enjoy watching figure skating, so that was the obvious event for me. The problem was finding a book about figure skating that was not primarily a romance. There really are not that many. Then I happened upon Medalist, a manga that is actually about the skating itself, and it turned out to be exactly what I was looking for. Medalist follows eleven year old Inori Yuitsuka, who desperately wants to become a figure skater. There are two fairly major problems with this. The first is that her older sister used to skate and eventually gave it up, so their mother does not want Inori to go through the same thing. From her perspective, skating took up a huge part of her older daughter's childhood without ultimately leading anywhere, and she does not want to watch that happen again. The sec...

I read A Tempest of Tea by Hafsah Faizal for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, for prompt #13, "A book featuring a character with a hidden past". I ended up giving this one three stars, and I think “ambivalent” is probably the best word for how I feel about it. I enjoyed reading it, I liked the world, and I was interested in what was happening. But despite the fact that it contains vampires, and I absolutely love vampires, I was never particularly excited about it. A Tempest of Tea takes place in a fantasy world that has very obvious parallels to cultures and countries in our own. Our main character, Arthie Casimir, originally comes from Ceylan, which is based on Sri Lanka, while she now lives in the city of White Roaring in Ettenia. Ettenia has much more of an English feel to it, complete with its own history of colonialism. Arthie is young, ambitious, and already a fairly successful criminal. She runs Spindrift, a respectable tearoom during the day that becomes an ille...

I read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, for prompt #22, "A book about a book club", and I absolutely adored it. Five stars. I also cried an unreasonable amount, which is exactly why I usually avoid books about war. There were points when I was genuinely grateful that I was listening to the audiobook because at least I did not have to see the page through my tears. The novel takes place in 1946, shortly after the end of the Second World War, and follows writer Juliet Ashton. During the war, Juliet wrote a humorous newspaper column under the name Izzy Bickerstaff, which has since been collected into a successful book. Now that the war is over, however, she has no idea what she wants to write next. London is still visibly scarred by the Blitz. Her old flat overlooking the Thames was destroyed, along with almost everything she owned, and even though her book has been successful, money...