Unapologetic Reviews

I received an ARC of The Fallen Faithful by R.A. Sandpiper in exchange for an honest review. I really loved this book, although that probably will not come as a huge surprise because I have read everything R.A. Sandpiper has published. She is actually one of my favourite authors, and rather wonderfully, I originally discovered her through TikTok. One of the things I have consistently loved about her books is her world building. She has an incredible imagination for creating worlds that feel distinctive and complex, and The Fallen Faithful absolutely did not disappoint. This time, we are in an Ancient Greek inspired world built around a pantheon of very real gods. I particularly loved the religion because the gods themselves are based around fairly familiar concepts. There are gods associated with things like love, death and pain, rather than every god having an incredibly elaborate and unusual domain. That actually made the pantheon feel more believable to me. Historically, polyt...

I read János vitéz by Sándor Petőfi as part of my project to read the mandatory and suggested literature taught in Hungarian schools from grades five to twelve. This was actually a reread for me because János vitéz is one of those books almost every Hungarian encounters at school. I first read it when I was about ten, so coming back to it as an adult was a very different experience. János vitéz , which can be translated as John the Valiant , is a narrative epic poem written by Petőfi in 1844, when he was only twenty one years old. Considering that Petőfi died at only twenty six, basically everything he ever wrote was written when he was ridiculously young, and this poem is a particularly good example of just how much he had already developed his distinctive voice. The story begins with a young shepherd called Kukorica Jancsi. His name is a little difficult to translate, although the traditional English translation calls him Johnny Corncob because he was found abandoned in a cornf...

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 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 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 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 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 received an ARC of Bloodstone by M.K. Deoradhán from the author in exchange for an honest review. I’m giving it three stars. I enjoyed the story, but there were enough issues that kept pulling me out of it. The novel follows Mel Hawkins, a 22-year-old American archaeologist, in 1936. It opens in Egypt and then moves through places, mainly in Italy. The premise is strong, and the beginning reflects that. There is no slow introduction. Things start happening immediately. You are dropped into movement, danger, and decisions from the first pages, and that sense of constant forward motion continues throughout the book. This is an adventure that keeps going. Mel is a first person present tense narrator, so we are fully inside her head at all times. That becomes one of the book’s biggest weaknesses. She constantly revisits earlier events, repeating what has already happened. It feels like the story does not trust the reader to remember. During action scenes, this becomes especially frustra...

I read My Lady's Choosing by Kitty Curran and Larissa Zageris, and this ended up being a much lighter, more playful read than I expected. I read it for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, prompt number 10, “A book about a horse or with a horse on the cover.” The premise is simple but immediately appealing. It is a Regency romance, but structured as a choose your own adventure. You step into the role of the heroine and make decisions that shape the story. Not just small choices, but major ones. You decide where to go, how to react, and most importantly, who to pursue romantically. There are four possible love interests, each leading to a different version of the story. What worked well for me is how naturally the format fits the genre. Regency romance already revolves around social choices. Who you speak to. Who you avoid. Which invitation you accept. Here, those choices are literal. You turn the page and commit to them. On Kindle, this works especially smoothly. You click, and th...

I read Nobody’s Baby by Olivia Waite as my March Pick of the Month, as it was released on March 10th. This is the second instalment in the Dorothy Gentleman series and a short novella at around 144 pages. I read it in a single day. The series is set aboard the HMS Fairweather , a generational spaceship carrying thousands of people to a new home. The central character, Dorothy “Dottie” Gentleman , works as a detective on board the ship. As in the first book, the story combines a mystery plot with science fiction elements, particularly around identity and consciousness . The premise of this instalment is simple but immediately intriguing. A baby is found left on the doorstep of Dorothy’s nephew and his partner. This should not be possible. The inhabitants of the ship live in manufactured bodies that are not supposed to be capable of reproduction. The mystery therefore begins with a clear question: how can a baby exist in this system at all? From there, the plot develops in two directi...

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...