Unapologetic Reviews

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 Unknown by Riley Sager as my Pick of the Month for August 2026, and I gave it four stars. For me, four stars is already a very good rating. Five stars is reserved for those exceptional books that I know I will keep thinking about and recommending for years. The Unknown did not quite reach that level, but it came close enough that on sites that allow half stars, I would probably give it 4.5. It was an atmospheric, genuinely engaging thriller that kept me guessing, and the final reveals were strong enough that I immediately put Riley Sager on my author watch list. The story takes place on an isolated island in Vermont, called New Avalon, where a film crew has arrived to make a movie about a mystery that occurred there exactly one hundred years earlier. Back then, five women were staying on the island. One morning, when supplies were brought over, all five women had vanished. Their clothes were found hanging from a tree, but the women themselves were nowhere to be found. What ...

I read By the Pricking of My Thumbs for the August theme of the 2026 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge, which was Best Duo. I have read some of their earlier adventures and I generally enjoy them as a pair, so I was happy to return to them here. Unfortunately, while I still liked spending time with Tommy and Tuppence, the mystery itself ended up being one of the weaker Agatha Christie stories I have read. This is a later Tommy and Tuppence novel, with the couple now considerably older. The story begins when they visit Tommy’s elderly Aunt Ada at the nursing home where she lives. While there, Tuppence meets another resident, Mrs Lancaster, who asks her a very strange question about whether she has lost a child. It is one of those wonderfully unsettling little moments that immediately suggests something much darker is hiding underneath the perfectly ordinary surroundings. Not long afterwards, Aunt Ada dies, and Tommy and Tuppence discover that Mrs Lancaster had given her a painting befo...

SPOILERS FOR BOTH THE BOOK AND THE MOVIE! I loved The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, so after finishing the book I immediately watched the 2018 film adaptation. I was particularly curious about how they were going to adapt an epistolary novel because such a large part of the first half consists entirely of Juliet exchanging letters with people she has never met. The film's solution is understandable. It gets Juliet to Guernsey much faster. Unfortunately, that one decision changes almost everything about the emotional structure of the story. The film is not a bad movie. On its own, it is a beautifully made historical romantic drama with a lovely cast, and there are elements I enjoyed. As an adaptation, though, I think it loses a lot of what made the novel special because it shifts the focus away from the occupation, the Literary Society and Juliet's gradual discovery of a family. Instead, it builds the story much more strong...

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...

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...