Unapologetic Reviews

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...