Unapologetic Reviews

I read Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie for the Read Christie 2026 Reading Challenge. This year’s overall theme is “Biggest, Best and Beloved,” and the October prompt was “Best Cold Case,” which is an extremely appropriate category for this book because the murder at the centre of the story has been sleeping for almost twenty years. There is also something a little sad about reading Sleeping Murder because it was the final Miss Marple novel to be published. It came out posthumously in 1976, although Christie had actually written it decades earlier, during the Second World War, and deliberately kept it back for later publication. So it is not really an elderly Christie saying goodbye to Miss Marple. Still, knowing that this was the last Miss Marple novel readers received gives it a strange sense of finality, particularly when the book itself contains some lovely references to her earlier cases. The story begins with Gwenda Reed, a young woman who has recently arrived in England fr...

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...

One woman's utopia is another man's dystopia. I read Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman after hearing about it while I was reading The Yellow Wallpaper , and I was immediately intrigued by the idea of a feminist utopia written in 1915. I'm actually much more familiar with dystopias than utopias. Dystopia is one of my favourite genres, even though I don't read it that often anymore, and I've read most of the classics. So I was curious. What would a feminist writing more than a hundred years ago consider an ideal society for women? At first, Herland sounds pretty great. The story follows three American men who are exploring a remote part of South America when they hear rumours about a mysterious country inhabited entirely by women. They eventually manage to enter this isolated land and discover an advanced civilisation that has existed without men for about two thousand years. And, obviously, the first question is: if there are no men, where are all these women c...

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...