Unapologetic Reviews

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 This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone for prompt #47 of the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, "A book told entirely through letters". And I really, really hated this book. Mercifully, it was short. The premise sounds considerably more interesting than I found the actual book. Red and Blue are two agents fighting on opposite sides of a war that stretches across time, with both sides manipulating different timelines in an attempt to create their preferred version of the future. One works for the Garden, an organic, natural society, while the other works for the Agency, a technological collective that reminded me vaguely of something like the Borg. Which one was Red and which one was Blue? I genuinely could not remember for most of the book, and even now I would have to look it up. The two agents begin as enemies. One of them discovers a letter left by the other on a battlefield, and from there they begin exchanging increasingly elaborate m...

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...

Symbiosis by Nicky Drayden is the sequel to Escaping Exodus, which I read for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge . As this is a duology , I continued straight on to finish the story. I rated this book four stars, and this review will include spoilers for both books. SPOILERS AHEAD!!! The novel takes place three years after the events of the first instalment. Seske now has an almost complete family unit, structured around the same multi-partner system established earlier, though her triad remains incomplete. The narrative perspective shifts noticeably. Adala is no longer a point of view character, while Doka becomes the second POV character. This change moves the focus away from the worker class perspective that was important in the first book. That layer of society is largely absent here. Instead, the book centres on the evolving relationship between the humans and the Zenzee , the living space organisms they inhabit. The core idea is an attempt at true symbiosis. The inhabitants ha...

I read Escaping Exodus by Nicky Drayden for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, prompt number 50, “A book about Afrofuturism .” The label fits, as the author herself describes it that way, but the book is more complex than a simple “Black people in space” premise. I gave it four and a half stars, which I round up to five in most places. The story is set in a society that lives inside large space creatures called beasts . These creatures travel in herds, and humans attach themselves to one, enter its body, and modify its internal structure to create a functioning habitat. The setting is very concrete. Biological structures are repurposed into living spaces, corridors, and systems that support daily life Each beast lasts approximately twelve years. When it dies, the society moves on to another and rebuilds everything. The key distinction is how different social classes experience this process. The elite class recreates their previous environment in exact detail, including layout and ...

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...

Moonstorm by Yoon Ha Lee is a young adult space adventure that I wanted to love. I really did. I started it back in April, stalled hard, eventually finished it months later, and in the end settled on a reluctant two stars. The premise hooked me immediately. A girl growing up in a marginal colony, outside the reach of a vast empire; an attack that destroys her life; an orphaned survivor who reinvents herself and aims for something dangerous and prestigious. Mecha pilots . Imperial power. Rebellion simmering at the edges. On paper, this is exactly my kind of book. And the early chapters deliver. The opening has momentum, emotional stakes, and a sense of place. I was invested. Then the book shifts. Once the story moves into training and institutional life, the tension drains away. The plot becomes rigid and predictable, and there is one extended section where you can see the outcome from kilometres away. It drags. It really drags. Page after page of waiting for the inevitable, wishing t...

I first came across this book decades ago, in the late 80s or early 90s, in Hungarian translation. I borrowed it from my aunt, read halfway, and returned it unfinished. Even so, it stayed with me. I forgot the title and the author, yet I remembered the cover and fragments of the story: a ruined city on a distant planet, explorers dying and returning in new bodies. It was strange and unsettling, far beyond what I could fully grasp as a child. Recently, I finally tracked it down. The book was The Orchid Cage by Herbert W. Franke , first published in 1961. I read it in English translation this time, and it felt like closing a circle that had been open for thirty years. The story is set far in Earth’s future, around the year 112,000 . Two groups of explorers are sent to investigate a distant, abandoned planet. They do not travel physically. Instead, they project themselves into artificial “pseudo-bodies” created on the planet itself. The challenge is to discover who once lived there. The ...

Columbus Day by Craig Alanson is a sci-fi novel that explores a sudden alien invasion and the subsequent alliance between humans and aliens. While the concept is intriguing, my feelings about the book are mixed. The story revolves around an unexpected alien invasion and humanity's efforts to ally with the aliens. This premise, as revealed in the book's synopsis, initially drew me in. However, certain parts, especially the detailed military descriptions , felt tedious and detracted from my overall enjoyment. These sections about procedures and preparations were uninteresting to me, perhaps because I don't have a particular interest in military topics. The characters are where I have the most mixed feelings. The protagonist, Joe, is an average American with a strong moral compass but otherwise quite ordinary. His nonchalant attitude towards many situations felt off and difficult to relate to. Additionally, there's a character named Skippy who, while a significant twist...

In the beginning I struggled with Abaddon's Gate by James S.A. Corey . It was slow to start, and some of the new characters I really didn’t like. Especially one of the villains. Those were hard to read. However, towards the end it really picked up, and I started to like it a lot. It’s very hard to write a review with no spoilers of the series. It’s the third book, so everything in the story is very connected to the events of the previous books. So regarding the story, humanity still faces a crisis, and the different groups in the solar system still can’t get along. There are those who try, but there are also those who are resistant. This is pretty much the same in all the books. Reading it can be very annoying, because you find yourself screaming at the book to just get along already. The good thing about that though is that it can be applied to real life. There is an increasing crisis right here, on Earth as well. If only everyone could just set aside their differences and...

After reading Caliban’s War , I realised what I missed from Leviathan Wakes . The excitement of not knowing what was going to be next! I’ve seen the TV show, so I knew what was going to happen. However, since the show stops at about half of the book, the rest was a mystery. I couldn’t put it down. Literally, I would walk home with my Kindle in my hand, and just letting my feet take me. The story went more into politics with the few new characters. One was Avasarala . Pretty high up in the UN food-chain, those who watch the show know her already. She only gets introduced in the second book, though they wrote her some parts in the first season. I’m really happy they did that, because she’s a great character. I love that she’s like a posh Indian lady, who curses like a sailor. It’s also very interesting to see the point of view of someone who is so politically savvy. Avasarala for President! She’d hate me for that. The other was Bobby . She’s a Martian , which can sound a ...

 A ny book about the future is always also about the present. Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey isn't Star Trek . Humans are still petty, after their own interest. So while the setting is space, people act the same way they would on Earth. I guess the old saying of the more things change ... works. I had this thought, but so did the author, that no matter what, we are just primates swinging poo at each other, or poking things with sticks. The story is about a period of humanity when we have left Earth, but took the problems with us, while staying in the Solar system. We have colonised Mars , some moons, even rocks in the asteroid belt . I loved how living, growing up in space had physically changed people. I also found the way they spoke interesting. A mixture of the different languages of the people who went there. However, the same way as when Europeans colonised the rest of the world, the colonies are treated just as badly. And they want to break away just as badly. Thr...

I haven't read a Doctor Who book in a while, and when I saw this at WHSmith , I had to grab it. Doctor Who: Royal Blood by Una McCormack  was a good book, but I felt it lacked in some ways. The story itself was intriguing with the mixture of medieval and modern equipment and surroundings. Trying to evade a war is never easy, but in a way the plot was given away from the start. The search for the artefact felt glossed over. Probably the biggest problem of the book was that the author was trying to keep it short, but by doing that was afraid to get into anything in detail. Most of the book was taken up by talking, plotting, without anything much actually happening. The Doctor seemed to play a minor character here, and I found that that must have been because the author didn't have a good grasp of him. It was a bit strange, because one of her other books,  The Way Through the Woods is actually one of my favourite Doctor Who books. Clara was more of a central cha...

Winter  by Marissa Meyer is the last novel in the Lunar Chronicles , which was kind of sad. I discovered the series a few years ago, and devoured the first two books. They had the perfect blend of adventure and romance, without the romance overpowering the adventure, as so often happens with books aimed at young adults. Frankly, I like some romance with my adventure, but if there is too much of it, I get bored. Then throw the book against the wall. This book I started with a mix of anticipation and sadness. I wanted to find out how Cinder would get her throne, since she obviously would, but I knew that once I turned the last page, that would be the end of my adventures with the girls. Yes, I did tear up in the end for these very reasons. The story itself is the longest, and the most complex of the series. There are times when I wonder how they're going to get out of the situation. All the girls have their roles to play, the end result could not be reached by the end. I a...