Unapologetic Reviews

I read A Time of Witches by Madeline Martin as part of my Read-Witch-a-Thon 2026, and this turned out to be one of the better books I've read for the challenge. I really enjoyed the combination of historical fiction, witchcraft, mystery, and time travel, especially because the story follows two women living centuries apart whose fates are closely connected. The novel has two timelines. In the present day, we follow Lilith Legare, a young woman living in Savannah, Georgia, whose mother has recently died. While going through her mother's belongings, Lilith discovers research into their family history, which leads her to an old manor house in England called Brackenmere. She has also been experiencing strange dreams and visions, including a warning that she is going to disappear. Somehow, her family's past seems to be connected to whatever is happening to her, so she decides to travel to England to investigate. When Lilith arrives at Brackenmere, she discovers that the man...

I read Henry Tudor Must Die by Jillian Laine as part of the Read Witch-a-Thon 2026, which is my own witchy October reading challenge, and I gave it three stars. On paper, this should have been a five-star book for me. I love witches and magic, I love historical fiction, and the Tudor period is one of my favourite historical eras and one I know quite a lot about. Add Anne Boleyn and Catherine of Aragon teaming up to take revenge on Henry VIII, and really, what more could I ask for? Unfortunately, while I loved the premise, I never became emotionally invested in the people carrying it. The story begins shortly before Anne Boleyn's execution. Anne is a witch, and magic gives her a way to escape her fate, although it comes at a considerable physical cost. Catherine of Aragon has also faked her death, and the two former rivals find themselves working together. Both have lost almost everything because of Henry, and both are particularly concerned about their daughters, Mary and Eliz...

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 Witches of Cambridge by Alice Hoffman as part of the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, for prompt number 33, "a book about college". I also made it the first book of my October 2026 Read Witch-a-Thon, so I was killing two birds with one stone. Unfortunately, this was not the strongest start to my witchy reading month. I think this is another case where the blurb gave me a very different idea of the book I was going to read. Based on the description, I imagined two young witches arriving at Radcliffe College in 1950s Cambridge, joining Lilith House, essentially a sorority house for witches, and then realizing that girls from the society were disappearing. Naturally, I assumed Ava and Lauren would team up to figure out what was happening. This was my first Alice Hoffman novel, although of course I knew her as the author of Practical Magic , and it is immediately obvious why she has had such a long career. Her prose is gorgeous. The descriptions of Cambridge, the c...

After reading Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie, I watched two television adaptations of the novel. The first was the BBC Miss Marple adaptation starring Joan Hickson, originally broadcast in two parts in January 1987. The second was the 2006 adaptation from ITV’s Agatha Christie’s Marple , starring Geraldine McEwan. I enjoyed both of them, but they take almost completely opposite approaches to adapting the book. And from this point onwards, there are going to be spoilers for the book and both adaptations. The 1987 BBC version is by far the more faithful of the two. There are changes, but most of them are relatively minor and feel like the sort of changes you expect when adapting a novel for television. For example, Gwenda and Giles are already together when they are looking for their house, whereas in the novel Gwenda arrives in England ahead of Giles and finds the house by herself. The adaptation also condenses the gradual process through which Gwenda realizes that she somehow...