Unapologetic Reviews

I received an ARC copy of Ivan and the Firebird by Alexandra Pugachevsky in exchange for an honest review. I always find reviews like this a little difficult to write because I genuinely like the author as a person and appreciate the opportunity to read the book. Unfortunately, this one simply wasn't for me. The story follows Ivan, a young man from the fairytale land of Zorya. After finding a feather from the legendary Firebird, he falls into the clutches of Baba Yaga, who offers him an impossible bargain. To gain his freedom, he must find the Firebird itself. His journey eventually takes him into our modern world, where he encounters magical creatures inspired by Slavic folklore and meets Lisa, a young woman with whom he falls in love. I love fairytale retellings and stories inspired by folklore, so this sounded like something I should have enjoyed. Sadly, I struggled almost from the beginning. My biggest issue was Ivan himself. For a significant part of the book, I assumed he wa...

I received an ARC of The Secret World of Briar Rose by Cindy Pham in exchange for an honest review. This is a difficult book to review, because I do not think I can say that I enjoyed it in the usual sense. It was not an easy or comforting reading experience. It was painful at times, and it felt messy in places, but it also touched something very real in me. At its heart, this is a book about depression, escape, grief, suicide, and the terrifying work of choosing to exist in the real world when the real world feels unbearable. That is why it affected me so much. Depression is something I have dealt with for much of my life, and the desire to escape is something I understand very deeply. For me, escape has often meant books, travel, and anything that could make ordinary life feel less heavy for a while. That is also one of the central ideas of this book. In the dream world, real life stops. You do not age. You do not move forward. Nothing changes outside the dream. And that image felt ...

A Song to Drown Rivers by Ann Liang was my pick for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge for prompt #18 “A love story that defies social boundaries”. The novel is marketed as fantasy, but that description is a little misleading. The story is primarily historical fiction with a central romance; the fantasy element appears only briefly at the very end. The book is based on the ancient Chinese legend of Xi Shi , one of the Four Beauties of China . In the story, Xi Shi is recruited by the strategist Fan Li and trained to become a weapon disguised as a woman. Her task is simple in theory and terrifying in practice: she will be sent to the rival kingdom of Wu as a concubine to its king, where her beauty and influence are meant to help bring the kingdom down from within.  The premise is excellent. A young woman turned into a political weapon, trapped between two rival kingdoms locked in a struggle amidst loyalty, love, and manipulation tangled together. It has all the ingredients of ...