Unapologetic Reviews

I read The Devil She Knows by Alexandria Bellefleur for prompt #40 of the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, “A book outside your comfort zone”. Romance is very much outside my usual reading preferences, so this was a good opportunity to try something different. The premise immediately caught my attention. It is essentially a queer twist on Bedazzled . Chef Samantha "Sam" Cooper meets the demon Daphne after the two become trapped in an elevator together. Daphne offers Sam six wishes, which she plans to use to win back her ex-girlfriend. It is a fun setup, and I was looking forward to seeing how the wishes would spiral out of control. Unfortunately, my biggest issue with the novel was the pacing. The story takes almost the first fifth of the book just to get to the actual deal. Sam and Daphne spend a long time chatting in the elevator, Sam slowly discovers that Daphne is a demon, refuses to believe it, asks questions, and only then do they finally reach the part the premise pro...

The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow was my pick for prompt #23 of the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, “A book you were hoping would fit into a prompt but doesn't”. It turned out to be one of my favourite reads of the year, and I ended up giving it five stars. On the surface, this could be described as a love story, but that barely scratches the surface of what the novel is actually doing. At its heart, The Everlasting is a story about national identity, history, myth making, and the stories countries tell about themselves. It asks how those stories shape not only the way we see the past, but also the future we create. It is a surprisingly ambitious novel, one that explores ideas much bigger than its central romance. The story begins with Owen Mallory, a historian who has spent years studying the legendary knight Una Everlasting, one of the founding heroes of the nation of Dominion. When his research draws him far closer to the legend than he ever expected, the novel gradually unfol...

Hot Girl Murder Club by Ashley Winstead was my Pick of the Month for July 2026, so I went into it with fairly high expectations. I listened to the audiobook, which may have influenced my experience, because this is a thriller that asks the reader to keep track of multiple timelines, several POV characters, and shifting points of view. While I ultimately enjoyed what the book was trying to do, I found the execution much messier than I had hoped. The story follows a group of women whose lives are connected by a traumatic event in both the past and the present. The novel moves back and forth between these timelines while using third person limited narration, with each chapter focusing on a different character. On paper, this is an interesting structure, but in practice I often found it difficult to remember who was who. Isabel was easy to keep straight, but many of the other characters blurred together, partly because they did not feel distinct enough from one another. Listening rather t...

I read Cursed Ever After by Andy C. Naranjo as a palate cleanser between two thrillers. It was one of my June 2026 recommendation picks, and it ended up being exactly the kind of light, adventurous fantasy I needed. While it's marketed as a fantasy romance, I actually wouldn't call it a romantasy. The romance is there, but it never overwhelms the story. As someone who isn't usually drawn to romance, I appreciated that the focus stayed firmly on the adventure, the characters, and the world itself. The story follows Risa Porto, a young woman who has spent her entire life believing she's cursed with bad luck simply because she was born on an unlucky day. When she finds herself escorting Prince Javi, the seventh son of the royal family, to his wedding in a neighbouring kingdom, what should have been a straightforward journey quickly turns into something far more complicated. Their quest becomes a road trip through a colourful magical world filled with witches, curses, stra...

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 Rose and the Yew Tree as the July selection for the 2026 Read Christie Challenge. The theme for the month was “Best Kept Secret,” referring to the novels Agatha Christie published under the name Mary Westmacott. Christie used the pseudonym because these books were very different from the detective fiction that had already made her famous, and her identity remained hidden for around fifteen years. That separation allowed the Westmacott novels to be read without everyone immediately comparing them to Poirot, Miss Marple, or the elaborate mysteries readers already associated with her name. The Rose and the Yew Tree is certainly a departure from the Agatha Christie books I normally read. Despite a synopsis that left me unsure about what kind of story I was entering, this is not a mystery. There is no murder to investigate, no collection of suspects, and no final scene in which every clue suddenly falls into place. Instead, it is a psychological character study, a political nove...

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...