Unapologetic Reviews

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 Knave and the Moon by Rachel Gillig as my September 2026 Pick of the Month. I chose it because it is the second and final book in the Stonewater Kingdom duology, following The Knight and the Moth , which I read last year. I gave that first book three stars. It was fine, but I found Sybil frustrating, particularly because so much of the story revolved around a quest whose eventual destination seemed obvious to me long before it became obvious to her. She kept insisting on things that I was already fairly certain were wrong, and after a while, watching her slowly catch up became more irritating than suspenseful. So I went into The Knave and the Moon with some trepidation. I wanted to know how the story ended, but I was not particularly confident that I was going to enjoy getting there. Surprisingly, I liked this one considerably more. I gave it four stars. It is not quite in my five star, I am going to think about this forever and recommend it to everybody category, but it d...

This is a comparison of Agatha Christie’s Endless Night , the 1972 film adaptation, and the Agatha Christie’s Marple adaptation. And obviously, this is going to contain major spoilers for all three versions , because there is really no way to compare these adaptations properly without talking about what Michael actually does and how each version handles the ending. Interestingly, I think the best adaptation is the Marple version, even though it is by far the least faithful to the book. The 1972 film follows Christie’s story much more closely, but unfortunately it also manages to be almost as slow and boring as some of the weaker parts of the novel. Christie herself apparently did not like the film, and having watched it, I can see why. The 1972 adaptation keeps the basic structure of Endless Night largely intact. Michael is still the young man drifting through life who meets the wealthy Ellie, marries her, and builds his dream house on Gipsy’s Acre. The house is still supposed to be st...