Unapologetic Reviews

The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig is the first book in the Stonewater Kingdom series , and it sits firmly in that popular romantasy space that I usually approach with caution. I am not a big romance reader. I did read a few this year, mostly by my current favourite fantasy author, R.A. Sandpiper , but romantasy as a genre often loses me. This book, however, intrigued me for one specific reason: its focus on religion and belief. The story takes place in a fully imagined fantasy world with an established religious system at its core. The main character, Sybil, is “ the moth ”. She is a Diviner who repeatedly drowns in ritualistic ceremonies, experiences visions, and has those visions interpreted for others. Through this, she functions as a mouthpiece for prophecy. She also happens to be living inside what is very clearly a cult. A large part of the book can be read as a slow realisation of that fact, and a painful disentangling from it. Enter Roderick, the knight. He is scepti...

I read Come, Tell Me How You Live (1946) as part of my 2025 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge, and it came as a genuine surprise. This is not a novel, but a memoir . In it, Agatha Christie writes about her life in the Middle East with her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan , during the 1930s. You might expect a book focused on archaeology, but that is not really what this is. While archaeological work forms part of the background, the book feels more like a snapshot of a region and a time that no longer exists. Much of it takes place in Syria and surrounding areas between the two world wars. Christie does not analyse cultures in depth. Instead, she records moments, people, and stories, and in doing so captures a world that feels astonishingly distant now. What struck me most was her attitude. This is a woman born in the nineteenth century, raised in England, suddenly dealing with dust, heat, illness, and a near-total lack of comfort. And yet she adapts far better than...

This is the first book of a series, and that matters. I do not plan to review every volume, because with a story like this it would very quickly become impossible to say anything meaningful without drifting into spoilers. Instead, this feels like the right place to talk about what the series is, what kind of reading experience it offers, and whether it is worth starting at all. I picked up The Apothecary Diaries because I watched the anime first. I loved it. Loved it enough that it firmly landed among my favourite anime of all time, and strong enough to pull me back into anime after a long break. I have been watching anime since childhood; the original Sailor Moon was my first obsession. I did not want to wait years to see where it was going, so I went back to the source and started reading from the beginning rather than jumping ahead. If you are coming from the anime, there is no shock waiting for you here. The adaptation is remarkably faithful. Scene by scene, beat by beat, this i...

I read Crooked House (1949) as part of my 2025 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge , and I listened to it as an audiobook narrated by Hugh Fraser . That, oddly enough, turned out to be part of the problem for me. Fraser usually narrates Poirot novels, and since this is not a Poirot book, I kept mentally casting the narrator as Hastings . The story is told in the first person by Charles Hayward , and even knowing his name, the narration still felt oddly anonymous at times. Because Fraser’s voice is so closely tied to the Poirot series in my mind, it created a strange overlap that affected how I experienced the book. What surprised me was how familiar the story felt. I was convinced I remembered it as a Poirot case, even though it isn’t one. I’ve never seen the Crooked House film adaptation, so I’m still not entirely sure why certain scenes felt so vivid to me. It may be because the structure of the story would easily allow Poirot to be inserted into it, and perhaps that’s how my memory...

I finally started The Wheel of Time after the TV adaptation was cancelled. I had always meant to read it, in a vague someday sort of way, but fourteen enormous books is an intimidating commitment. Still, I was in the mood for high fantasy, and I was genuinely annoyed about the show. I liked it. I did not need it to be faithful in every detail; I am perfectly fine with adaptations changing things. Books and television work differently, especially when the source material is this sprawling. I tend to think of adaptations as alternate versions of the same story. The visuals were beautiful, the atmosphere worked, and yes, I am going to miss it. Screw Amazon . I listened to The Eye of the World as an audiobook, which turned out to be a serious undertaking. It runs over thirty hours, and it took me more than a month to finish. This is not a fast book. The plot is enormous, but the pace is glacial. Things happen, then the characters walk. Then they walk some more. Something interrupts them....

If you haven’t read the original The Hunger Games trilogy, stop here and go read it. You should read it anyway, but you absolutely should not start with this book. There are spoilers in this review for the original trilogy. Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins begins with a burden of knowledge. We already know how this ends. Haymitch Abernathy is reaped. He wins. Everyone he loves is killed in retaliation. The Games continue unchanged, and for the next twenty-five years he mentors children he knows will die, until Katniss and Peeta arrive. That is not a spoiler. That is the emotional framework you walk in with. So the question is not what happens, but why. Why Haymitch? Why this particular victory warranted such cruelty. What did he do that terrified the Capitol enough to break him so thoroughly, yet still fail to stop what was coming. This book is about prevailing when the odds are not merely against you, but mathematically impossible. It is about failing and still trying ...

I read Cards on the Table (1936) as part of my 2025 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge. The premise is wonderfully bold. Four detectives and four suspected murderers are invited to a dinner party by the eccentric Mr Shaitana . By the end of the night, the host is dead, and the real game begins. Christie herself once said this was one of her favourites, and it is easy to see why. The setup is unusual, even daring, because the mystery relies far less on physical clues and far more on psychology. Poirot is here, but he is not working alone. He is joined by Superintendent Battle , Colonel Race , and the sharp-witted Ariadne Oliver . Each approaches the suspects differently, and Christie uses those differences to explore four distinct ways of thinking about guilt. The suspects themselves are a study in possibility. Each has a dark shadow in their past, and each is capable of murder. At times, it truly feels as though it could have been anyone. That may be why I never remember the solution....