Unapologetic Reviews

The Christmas Clue by Nicola Upson is a short Christmas mystery, only 138 pages long, inspired by the real couple who invented the board game Cluedo , or Clue , as it is known in the United States. Interestingly, Upson actually spoke to the descendants of the couple while writing the book, which I thought was a lovely touch. I have never actually played Cluedo , though I have always wanted to. It wasn't a game that was available to me growing up in Hungary, and even though I love board games, I have never really had anyone to play them with. My mother absolutely hates board games, and no one else in my family or among my friends is particularly interested in them either. So, unfortunately, Cluedo remains one of those games I know about but have never had the opportunity to experience. That made the premise of this book especially interesting to me. The story takes place during the Second World War and follows Anthony and Elva Pratt, the couple who would eventually create Clue...

I read The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina by Zoraida Córdova as part of my October 2026 Read-Witch-a-Thon. This is another book featuring witches, although I would categorize it more as magical realism than traditional witchcraft. I gave it four stars because I really enjoyed the story, its characters, and its magical atmosphere, but I found the pacing extremely uneven. For a large portion of the book, very little happens, and then suddenly everything starts moving at lightning speed. The story revolves around the Montoya family, whose matriarch, Orquídea Divina, has lived a rather mysterious life. She has had several husbands and numerous children, resulting in an enormous family tree that I wouldn't even attempt to recreate. She lives in a place called Four Rivers, where she has created a home surrounded by fertile land and an abundance of plants. However, when she sends letters to her living children and grandchildren announcing that she is dying and inviting them to collect...

I read Witch Daughter by Tanaz Bhathena as part of my Read Witch-a-Thon, which I'm doing throughout October. I gave this book four stars, and I picked it because I was intrigued by the idea of reading about witches from a non-Western culture. The story takes place in pre-Islamic Persia and incorporates elements of Persian mythology and Zoroastrianism, a religion I knew practically nothing about. I was excited to explore a culture, a mythology, and a religious tradition that were completely outside my usual reading experience. The story takes place primarily in Samangan, a small kingdom ruled by a king whose daughter, Tahmineh, is considered a witch. However, she is not exactly the kind of witch we would usually imagine. Her mother is a daeva, a supernatural being who lives in a lake and can disguise herself as a human. She once took on human form, married the king, and gave birth to Tahmineh, but eventually had to return to the lake, leaving her daughter behind. At the beginning...

I have a confession. I don't like Edgar Allan Poe. I know he's considered one of the great masters of Gothic literature and psychological horror, but his writing has never appealed to me. Having now read The Black Cat and The Pit and the Pendulum , I think I'm beginning to understand exactly why. I read these two short stories as part of my Hungarian School Curriculum Project, in which I'm working my way through the mandatory and suggested literature for grades 5 to 12. Normally, I'm following the curriculum in order, but since it's October, I decided to jump ahead to something suitably spooky. Poe is covered in 10th grade, when students are around 15 or 16 years old, and both stories appear among the suggested readings. One interesting aspect of this project is that the official Hungarian school textbooks are freely available as PDFs, so I downloaded and printed out the section on Poe. It was only three pages long, and I found the biographical information ...

I read The Witch by Freida McFadden for two reasons. First, it was part of my October Read-Witch-a-Thon, and second, it was my October 2026 Pick of the Month. This was also my very first Freida McFadden book, which is rather surprising considering how enormously popular she is. I've heard plenty of opinions about her writing, both good and bad, but I'd never actually tried any of her books myself. I wasn't entirely sure what to expect, so I went into this one with an open mind, curious to see whether her writing would work for me. And I must say, I was impressed! I gave this book five stars, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The Witch is a mystery thriller told across two timelines, one set in the present day and the other in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. Both stories revolve around Pemberton Manor, an old house with a rather disturbing history, and the women whose lives become entangled with it. In the present-day timeline, we follow Julia Barlow, a young...

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...