Unapologetic Reviews

I first came across this book decades ago, in the late 80s or early 90s, in Hungarian translation. I borrowed it from my aunt, read halfway, and returned it unfinished. Even so, it stayed with me. I forgot the title and the author, yet I remembered the cover and fragments of the story: a ruined city on a distant planet, explorers dying and returning in new bodies. It was strange and unsettling, far beyond what I could fully grasp as a child. Recently, I finally tracked it down. The book was The Orchid Cage by Herbert W. Franke , first published in 1961. I read it in English translation this time, and it felt like closing a circle that had been open for thirty years. The story is set far in Earth’s future, around the year 112,000 . Two groups of explorers are sent to investigate a distant, abandoned planet. They do not travel physically. Instead, they project themselves into artificial “pseudo-bodies” created on the planet itself. The challenge is to discover who once lived there. The ...

To Touch a Silent Fury is the first book in R.A. Sandpiper ’s brand-new duology, The Bride of Eavenfold . I was lucky enough to receive an ARC of this one, so thank you to the author for the chance to dive in early. This is probably her longest book yet, and it’s set in a fresh new universe, separate from her previous series. The world is built around the number five— five seasons , lives measured in five cycles , five kingdoms tied to the five senses. It’s an imaginative, intricate system that feels coherent and alive. The main character, Tani , is born Moontouched . She looks a bit like an albino; her skin is pale, hair white, but her eyes are completely white. Children like her are sent away around the age of ten to an isolated island , but she is special: she’s the only girl on an island full of men. When we meet her she awaits her Fate, they key to unlocking the full potential of her powers. Lang’s chapters balance out Tani’s isolation perfectly. Where she is cut off and vulnera...

I read One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940) as part of the 2025 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge , and this time it really was a Poirot novel in the fullest sense. Poirot is present for most of the story, which genuinely surprised me. After reading so many books where he appears only at the very end, it was refreshing to have him involved from early on. This is also one of the novels that features Inspector Japp as a proper character. In the television series, Japp replaces a rotating cast of inspectors from the books. Here, though, he is exactly where he belongs, working alongside Poirot in a way that feels natural and familiar. This is the story I always think of as “the dentist one”. The murder of a dentist is the central event, and interestingly, the Hungarian title reflects that directly. The English nursery rhyme does not translate well, so the Hungarian edition went with The Dentist’s Chair , which honestly makes a lot of sense. I realised while reading that I had encountered this...

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...