Unapologetic Reviews

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...