Unapologetic Reviews

I read Nowhere Girl: Life as a Member of ADHD’s Lost Generation by Carla Ciccone for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge prompt number 28, “A book about debt”, as people with ADHD are often in debt. Though ironically, she doesn’t really get into debt, even though she talks about her boyfriend taking her money, but we never hear about how that got resolved. This book is part memoir, part exploration of ADHD research, and part personal reckoning. Diagnosed at thirty nine after having a child, Ciccone revisits her entire life through the lens of ADHD, examining how it shaped her identity, her relationships, her work, and her sense of self. Alongside her story, she engages with scientific literature, especially around how ADHD presents in girls and women . Very early in the book, she lists the labels many girls hear: lazy, careless, head in the clouds, gives up too easily. Those words felt painfully familiar to me. I heard them too. The idea that boys externalise their struggles while g...

Death by Dumpling by Vivien Chien was my pick for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge prompt number 7, “A book about a granny hobby.” I genuinely could not remember why I had chosen it for that category. My guess is that I thought this would involve cooking, but it doesn’t. I wasn’t sure if the book would fit, but then I realised it did have a granny hobby. Gossip. And an entire supporting cast of aunties and granny aged women who treat information as currency and sport. That counts. I think. I am still reserving the right to revisit the prompt at the end of the year. This is the first book in the Noodle Shop Mystery series , set in Asia Village in Cleveland, a small shopping plaza filled with Asian owned businesses. Herbal shops, restaurants, gift stores. It is, without question, the strongest element of the novel. You can see it clearly. Fluorescent lit corridors. Steam rising from bamboo baskets. Aunties standing in doorways, commenting on everything and everyone. The community...

I read It’s Not Her by Mary Kubica as my February 2026 pick of the month. Each month I choose a new release and read it straight away, and this was my February selection. It also ended up being one of those books that made me film not just one video, but two. One spoiler free review, and one full discussion of the ending. That alone says something. The story centres on two families vacationing together at a mountain resort. Pine trees crowd the cabins. There is a still lake nearby that looks peaceful in the sun and threatening after dark. Courtney and Nolan are brother and sister. Nolan’s wife, Emily, was Courtney’s childhood best friend. Their lives are tightly woven together. Then Courtney walks into Nolan and Emily’s cabin and finds them bludgeoned to death. Their eldest daughter, Reese, is missing. From that moment on, the novel becomes a race against time. Courtney wants to find her niece. She also wants to get her own family out of that place as quickly as possible. The quiet r...

I read The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea by Axie Oh for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge , prompt 32, “A book with an underwater civilization .” It is written in first person, and I’m not a fan. On the page it can feel like I am reading a teenager’s diary. In audio format, though, it becomes someone telling me a story about her life. That shift makes it much easier for me to tolerate it. The story follows Mina , who is fifteen or sixteen. Her exact age matters because she is deliberately not yet eighteen. Every year a girl is sacrificed as the Sea God ’s bride in the hope that he will calm the deadly storms ravaging their homeland. When her brother’s beloved is chosen, Mina throws herself into the sea instead. She wakes in a hidden spirit realm and has thirty days to wake the Sea God, uncover the truth behind a curse, and save both the human world and the spirit world. There is a clear ticking clock. You would expect urgency. And yet part of this novel is surprisingly domestic. M...

I read Mrs McGinty's Dead by Agatha Christie as the February pick for my 2026 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge , and I was genuinely excited going in. It is a Poirot novel, and unlike some of the earlier ones, he is present from the very beginning and remains at the centre of the story. No dramatic last chapter entrance. No five minute cameo. This is Poirot throughout. And yet… it left me oddly unmoved. The premise is simple and strong. An elderly charwoman, Mrs McGinty, is brutally murdered in a small English village. Her lodger has already been tried and sentenced to death. The case is, officially, closed. But Superintendent Spence, the very man who oversaw the investigation, is uneasy. Not because of a missing clue or a procedural mistake, but simply because he does not believe the condemned man is a killer. That instinct alone sends Poirot, bored and restless in retirement, into the village to dig up the truth. It is a classic Christie setup: a tight community, polite façad...

Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas was a book I very much wanted to love. I didn’t hate it. I didn’t even dislike it. But in the end, it left me curiously unsatisfied, not because of what it is, but because of what it almost becomes and never quite commits to. The story follows Yadriel , a trans boy from a Latinx brujo community , who accidentally summons the ghost of Julian instead of the spirit he intended to raise. Julian cannot be released. His body is missing. He does not remember how he died. On paper, this promises a supernatural mystery . In practice, the novel is something else entirely: a character driven, slice of life story that uses a mystery more as a framing device than as a narrative engine. There is a lot to admire here. The world building is rich and lovingly constructed. The brujx traditions , rituals, beliefs, and mythology feel grounded and coherent, giving the book a strong sense of place and cultural specificity. This is a world with weight behind it, not a thin ae...

Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy was marketed in a way that makes you expect something almost salacious. A teenage girl. An affair with her teacher. It sounds like the setup for a dark romance, or at least a scandal-driven story. This is not that book. I read it expecting drama, exposure, fallout. What I got instead was a quiet, uncomfortable, and very honest portrait of a girl who is trying to grow up while still desperately wanting to be a daughter. Waldo is seventeen at the beginning and eighteen by the end. She is raising herself. Her mother drifts from job to job, boyfriend to boyfriend, and her father has been absent for years. She waits to be seen. To be chosen. To be loved. And although at first it seems like she has given up on that hope, she really hasn’t. She still lives for it. She goes to school. She works. She manages her own life. But there is a constant emptiness under everything she does, a kind of hopelessness she never quite names. Then she meets her new creative ...

What disappointed me about Running Like a Girl by Alexandra Heminsley is that it never really tells the story it promises. I read it for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge prompt number 39 “a book with a character who runs a marathon,” and it frames itself as a journey from non runner to runner, but Heminsley never feels like someone who truly was someone who didn’t like to run. She does like her sofa, she just needed the external motivation to leave it. This book was not for me. Running Like a Girl is structured in two halves. The first is biographical, following Heminsley’s journey into long distance running and marathon culture . The second is a practical section, offering advice on training, mindset, practical aspects of running, and charity fundraising . In theory, this split should work. In practice, neither half engaged me. The biographical section is extremely repetitive in its structure. She trains for a marathon. She runs a marathon. She trains for another marathon. Sh...

Death in a Strange Country by Donna Leon was published in 1993 and is the second novel in the Commissario Brunetti series . I read it as part of the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge , for the prompt “A book that makes you want to travel to Italy” though whether any book needs to convince me of that feels almost beside the point. In retrospect, it’s an unusual choice for the prompt. This is not a romantic or sun-drenched novel of Italy, rather a sombre, politically charged, and often quite bleak. Yet Venice is present in every page, not as a postcard backdrop but as a lived-in city of canals, offices, homes, and compromises. That, in its own way, still counts. The novel opens with Brunetti being called to a body pulled from a Venetian canal , later identified as a young American soldier. His investigation leads him beyond Venice to the American base in Vicenza , and from there into a widening web of secrecy, institutional power, and corruption. At first, the story feels slightly unmo...

The Maid by Nita Prose was my first read of the year written in this millennium. I listened to it as an audiobook , and I can recommend it, as Lauren Ambrose does an excellent job, giving Molly a distinct, consistent voice that carries the listener through even the slower sections. The story follows Molly Gray , a hotel maid who is clearly neurodivergent . While autism is never named outright, it is strongly implied. The novel is framed as a mystery, but in practice, it is much more a portrait of Molly’s life than a conventional whodunnit . Roughly eighty percent of the book is spent inside her routines, her memories of being raised by her grandmother, and her often painfully literal way of navigating the world. That “painfully” is doing a lot of work here. As a neurodivergent reader myself, I struggled with how Molly is portrayed. Her naivety goes beyond social awkwardness and drifts into something that feels infantilising. She is in her twenties, yet often written as if she has t...

Danny the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl was my second read for the 2026 Popsugar Challenge , for the prompt “ A book with a dad as the primary caregiver .” Although written as a children’s book, it works just as well for adult readers; it is simple on the surface, but pointed in what it chooses to show. The book was published in the UK in 1976, and it very much belongs to its place and time. This is an unmistakably British story. Danny lives with his father in a gypsy caravan , which for non-British readers is essentially a mobile home without electricity, plumbing, or gas. They are poor, they run a small petrol station, and they live on the edges of society in more ways than one. When Danny discovers that his father once poached pheasants from the nearby woods, the story begins to open up. The woods belong to the local landowner, Mr Hazell , a man who is enormously wealthy and deeply unpleasant. On the surface, the novel is about poaching and the small adventures that come wi...

The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie was the January pick for the Read Christie 2026 challenge , and I listened to it as an audiobook. Written in 1942, right in the middle of the Second World War , it is quietly interesting that both major television adaptations relocate the story to the post-war period. I have seen the Agatha Christie's Marple adaptation and loved the bold change it makes, even though it is unmistakably a change. I will not spoil it here, but it works better than one might expect. This has long been one of my favourite Miss Marple adaptations, and the challenge conveniently nudged me into finally reading it, even though this was not a year I originally planned to commit to another Christie challenge. The novel itself is short and tightly constructed, which means very little was lost in adaptation. In fact, this is one of those rare Christie stories where the screen versions stay remarkably close to the book. Aside from that one substantial alteration in ...

I have always thought of Persuasion as a slightly sad book, even before I started reading it. It is Jane Austen ’s last completed novel, and it carries that quiet finality with it. There is a story I once heard, and I think about it every time. None of her books were published under her name while she was alive. First it was “By a Lady”, then “By the Author of Sense and Sensibility”. Her name never appeared. When Persuasion was finally published, together with Northanger Abbey , there was a foreword explaining that the author had died, written by her brother, Henry. I always imagine a reader at the time, happily buying a new book by their favourite writer, opening it with excitement, and then learning in that moment that she was gone. That was also the moment when they learned her name. That image never quite leaves me. The book itself is one of Austen’s shorter works. The audiobook runs about eight hours in full, which makes it feel almost slight next to something like Emma . Yet des...

Emma by Jane Austen is the fourth novel I have started for my self imposed Year of Austen . A year that was meant to be 2025 and is very clearly bleeding into 2026.  After abandoning Mansfield Park out of sheer boredom, I decided to change tactics. I listened to Emma as a full cast audio drama , complete with background music and sound design, and that decision made all the difference. I wanted to enjoy myself again. At its core, Emma is a social comedy about confidence curdling into arrogance. Emma Woodhouse is twenty one, wealthy, clever, and comfortably installed as the centre of her small community. She is unmarried, not particularly interested in changing that, and sees herself as a benevolent organiser of other people’s lives. She holds court. People defer to her. She assumes she understands everyone better than they understand themselves. It is the perfect setup for mistakes, and Austen wastes no time letting Emma make them. Emma’s self appointed role as matchmaker give...