Unapologetic Reviews

I read The Villa by Rachel Hawkins for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, for prompt #38 “A book with any type of fruit on the cover or in the title”. The cover is full of bright lemons and Italian sunshine, but the story underneath is much darker. This is a thriller about murder, complicated female friendships, creative ambition, ownership, and the way a story can become more powerful than the truth behind it. The novel is told across two timelines, both centred on the same villa near Orvieto, Italy. In the present day, Emily is a writer whose life has stalled. Her marriage is ending, she has spent much of the previous year suffering from a mysterious illness, and she is struggling to finish the tenth book in her long running cosy mystery series. Emily is not a huge bestselling author, but she has built a real and dependable career. Her books sell consistently and provide her with a decent living, yet her soon to be ex-husband Matt now believes he deserves a share of that income be...

I read The Housewife by Natalie Barelli as the final book in my Trad Wife Reading Project, and it turned out to be something of an outlier. Most of the books in this project dealt directly with tradwife influencers. Yesteryear , Trad Wife: A Novel , The Trad Wife , and Everyone Is Lying to You all explored women constructing some version of traditional femininity for an online audience. Their homes, marriages, pregnancies, recipes, and carefully chosen dresses became part of a public performance. The Stepford Wives obviously predates social media, but it examines the darker fantasy beneath the same ideal. The Housewife is different. There are no influencers, no social media empire, and no ideological community built around traditional gender roles. Its protagonist simply enjoys being a housewife. Jodie loves cooking, cleaning, and maintaining an immaculate home. Cleaning genuinely calms her. She is meticulous about everything, from the arrangement of the house to the meals she prep...

As part of my Trad Wife Reading Project, I picked up Everyone Is Lying to You by Jo Piazza. This was the fifth book in the project, and it turned out to be quite different from the others. Rather than leaning into psychological horror or domestic suspense, this one is first and foremost a murder mystery set in the world of trad wife influencers. It uses that setting to explore power, control, religion, and the carefully curated lives people present online. The story follows two former college friends whose lives have taken completely different paths. Lizzie is a journalist whose career has been steadily declining, while Bex has become one of the internet's biggest trad wife influencers with six children and millions of followers. After years without speaking, Bex suddenly reaches out to Lizzie and offers her an exclusive interview. They arrange to meet at a convention for mom influencers, but before they ever get the chance, Bex's husband is found murdered. From there the nove...

I read The Trad Wife by Carrie Hughes as part of my Trad Wife Reading Project. This was the fourth book in the project, and it ended up being one of the stranger entries. It blends domestic thriller, cult fiction, and religious manipulation into a story that is less about the idealized trad wife lifestyle itself and more about the systems of control hiding behind it. Melissa is a single mother living in New York with her seven year old daughter, Willow. She works in social media and hosts a podcast, and she has become fascinated by Faith, a wildly successful trad wife influencer whose perfect family life is broadcast from a picturesque ranch. When Faith unexpectedly offers Melissa a job as her social media manager, the opportunity seems impossible to refuse. Housing is included, the pay is good, and it also gives Willow a chance to escape the relentless bullying she has been experiencing at school. The catch is that Faith and the entire community are Mormon. Melissa grew up in the chu...

I read Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke for the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, for prompt number 25, “A book that explores influencer culture”. This book is marketed all wrong. Interestingly, this is not the first book I have encountered recently that was sold almost entirely through trendy buzzwords. A romantasy that is not really a romantasy. A humorous fantasy that is barely funny. Now a novel advertised as being about a trad wife and time travel that is actually about something much more interesting. On the surface, Natalie seems to be exactly what social media celebrates. She is a successful trad wife influencer living on a ranch with her growing family, baking bread, raising children, and presenting the image of the perfect conservative Christian wife. When strange events suddenly disrupt her life, the story splits into two timelines. One follows her present, while the other gradually reveals the path that brought her to this point. The book spends far more time exploring Natali...

I read The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin as the first book in a small reading side quest I'm calling my "Trad Wives" project. I wanted to start with the book that shaped so much of the conversation around this topic, and there really isn't a better place to begin. Even though it was published in 1972, it feels surprisingly modern, and in some ways even more relevant today than it probably did when it first came out. The story follows Joanna Eberhart, a photographer from New York, who moves with her husband and children to the quiet suburban town of Stepford in search of a better life. Joanna is very much a modern woman for the early 1970s. She has a career, creative ambitions, and little interest in defining herself solely through marriage and housework. When she meets the local women, however, something immediately feels wrong. They seem almost entirely consumed by cleaning, cooking, and pleasing their husbands. Their personalities appear strangely flat, as though eve...

I read Obstetrix by Naomi Kritzer as my Pick of the Month for June 2026. What drew me to it was the premise. It was advertised as a story involving a cult and as part of the wider conversation around abortion rights and how legislation affects healthcare. Since I have read several memoirs by former cult members and watched many documentaries on the subject, that immediately caught my attention. In the end, I give this book three stars. It wasn't bad. It was competently written, easy to read, and fairly quick. The story moved along well enough and kept me turning the pages. But for me, it never became particularly interesting. The story follows a doctor who becomes trapped inside a religious community. The cult itself, however, felt very much like a cult by numbers. If you've watched a few documentaries or read books about groups like Scientology, FLDS, or other high-control communities, you can almost tick boxes as you go along. Isolation, manipulation, control, unquestioned a...

I read The Ending Writes Itself by Evelyn Clarke as my April pick of the month for 2026. This is a collaborative novel written by Cat Clarke and V. E. Schwab, which already sets up an interesting premise before the story even begins. The novel follows six mid-list authors who are invited to a remote Scottish island by a famous, reclusive writer. The setting is very contained. A single house on a small island, cut off from the outside world, no devices, no communication, just the writers and their work. Once they arrive and sign strict NDAs, they are given their task. The famous author whose house they are staying in is already dead, and they must each write the final chapter of his unfinished manuscript. They have 72 hours to do it, submitting their work to an editor who stays separately in a nearby cottage. The cast is deliberately varied. Each writer comes from a different genre, which shapes both their voice and their approach to the challenge. There is a thriller-writing duo, Malc...

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 Her Last Christmas by Claire McGowan because I was in the mood for something seasonal but not romantic. A Christmas murder mystery felt like a safe bet, and this one delivers exactly that: snow , isolation, wealth, discomfort, and a body in the hot tub before the mulled wine has time to cool. The story follows Emma, a barrister from a working class background, who joins her boyfriend Michael and his circle of extremely wealthy friends for Christmas in an Alpine chalet . They have been dating for six months, which matters more than it first appears. Emma expected a quiet holiday for two; instead, she finds herself stranded on a mountain with people who have known each other forever, who ski effortlessly, who move through luxury as if it were air. She cannot ski. She does not belong. She knows it, and they know it too. When one of the group is murdered, suspicion falls neatly and conveniently on the outsider. The plot unfolds through a compact series of twists, none of them wi...

My Saturday night movies are starting to develop a bad pattern. I seem to pick boring movies. This was supposed to be an action, crime, thriller. Well, the action was mostly at the end, there was a crime, and it didn't thrill me very much. It starts out as one of those gritty dramas. Or at least tries to. The colours are muted, mostly greys, and we quickly establish that the "good people" are a couple down on their luck. They have money troubles, fertility problems , so you can really feel that these people are just in a hole. Now this is where the predictability starts to happen. Generally bad things don't seem to happen to the good people who are well-off and happy. From then on, it feels like a generic thriller. It has the drugs , the single mum, the ageing cop with a personal beef against the evil guys. It was almost like watching one of those genre comedies, like it should be titled "Thriller Movie".  It's not the cast, reall...

Platina Data is a Japanese thriller / sci-fi / mystery. I mainly watched it because Kazunari Ninomiya was in it, but I also found the premise of the movie interesting. In the movie, Japan is developing a DNA database that has everyone in it. The main goal is to be able to solve crimes more easily. However, already at the beginning we can see that they have taken DNA profiling to the next level. When people closely related to the program die, a surprising series of events start. More would be spoilers. I found the movie interesting. The story had me glued to the screen. Though frankly, I knew who the killer was halfway through. It's usually the case with me. I probably watch too many crime shows. What did keep me watching was Nino's character, whose story was an integral part of the movie. The cinematography was excellent. Some pictures I was tempted to pause, because it spoke of so much. Silence is always more difficult than dialogue. The main character is ...