Here you’ll find all of my posts, including book reviews, weekly roundups, essays, booklists, etc.
ARC Review – Monsters of Ohio by John Scalzi
Have you ever felt so much at once—so angry, so happy, so scared, so excited—that you could just…explode? Well, in the small town of Richland, Ohio, under the looming threat of the town’s largest employer shutting down, peoples’ fears and frustrations are mounting, ready to erupt. It starts with a cow named Cassie, but soon…
ARC Review – As You Wake, Break the Shell by Becky Chambers
“Why do you love, Colibri?It is necessary?How so?It is the only logical response.To what?To existence.” The people of Fortune are only one of many colony ships sent off by OCTA with the tools and instructions to establish human civilizations throughout the galaxy, but Fortune is a particularly challenging planet to live on, and even with…
Weekly Roundup – What I Read / Listened to 9/28/26-10/4/26
I’m still getting over the cold I mentioned last week, but I’m definitely feeling better, so small victories. It was a really good reading week, so maybe I should be sick more often! That being said, I’m swamped as always so we’ll keep this quick and to-the-point. We have one ARC, one backlist title, one…
ARC Review – Solace House by Will Maclean
It’s the summer of 1993, and university student Alex Lane has no job, nowhere to live, and no plan. In a strange twist of fate, he ends up joining a team of students tasked with clearing out an abandoned hospital for development by the university, and the nearby manor, Solace House. What they find in…
Weekly Roundup – What I Read / Listened to 9/21/26-9/27/26
Well, wishing for Fall bit me in the ass because we literally had like two days that were a little chilly and I was immediately struck down by plague (by which I mean I have a very mild cough). So, forgive me if this roundup is a little more chaotic than usual because I’m a…
Weekly Roundup – What I Read / Listened to 9/14/26-9/20/26
I hope everyone is enjoying the last bits of sunshine unless you’re a cave-dweller like me and are eagerly awaiting chillier weather. I didn’t get through a ton of books this week by my standards but I really enjoyed all three of them so this was actually a great reading week! Thankfully, I’m still able…
ARC Review – Strange Lights by Mira González
Sometimes a family is just a genderfluid paranormal investigator, a chupacabra in the shape of a human toddler, and a sentient magical Winnebago—Reggie makes it work, or at least she’s trying to until her friend Calvin, a skeptic and podcaster, gets turn into a werewolf and there’s a sudden uptick in UFO sightings. Their weird…
Weekly Roundup – What I Read / Listened to 9/7/26-9/13/26
Classes are settling in and fall is on the horizon (I say, hopefully, looking at the 80 degree weather forecast for later this week)! This week was hectic but I managed to get a good amount of reading done, in addition to stocking up the Blind Date with a Book display I’ve been working on…
ARC Review – Buzzard by Inez Ray
Seven years after her arrest and six years after her escape, the last midwife with the training to perform an abortion has the opportunity to take down the para-military organization that imprisoned her and committed horrific crimes, and potentially the opportunity to reunite with the sons she was separated from years before. Mae Bastet’s story…
Weekly Roundup – What I Read / Listened to 8/31/26-9/6/26
There’s nothing like the first week of classes to just knock you flat on your ass (in the best way possible). No, but genuinely I’m very happy that the school year has started. Somehow over breaks I always manage to forget that I function best when I’m busy, and then I start classes and suddenly…
ARC Review – Bodies of Magic by Freya Marske
At a magical academy for mage-healers, scholar complete their final exam in a group, solving five cases over the course of five days. Estiene, Alys, Clement, Moyna, and Jehan enter the hall for their first case, only to find the most accomplished scholar in their cohort dead on the floor. After completing the first case,…
ARC Review – The Henchperson’s Guide to Unionizing by Marshall J. Moore
On the run from yet another peasant mob after their latest attempt to create new life from corpse parts, Doctor and his faithful assistant Igor end up in the isolated Ravenwald Manor, only to find out that they are not alone there. Increasingly disillusioned with the Doctor’s quest, Igor befriends Grimalkin, a witch’s familiar, and…
Weekly Roundup – What I Read / Listened to 8/24/26-8/30/26
By the time you’re reading this I’ll have started classes, so I’m both very excited and also slightly terrified as I’m writing this. Weirdly, I feel like I usually read more during the school year because it feels like more of an escape than it does while I’m on break. That being said, I didn’t…
Weekly Roundup – What I Read / Listened to 8/17/26-8/23/26
It looks like it’s finally cooling off in Portland and the school year is just around the corner so I have lots to look forward to! That being said, this was another pretty awful reading week, and I’ll try to keep this roundup fairly short for both of our sakes. The book-related highlight of the…
ARC Review – Trad Wife by Sarah Langan
With her career on a sudden downturn, journalist Jenny Kaplan accepts an assignment to write about Mia Wright, a trad wife influencer living on an isolated farm with her beautiful husband and seven children.Jenny goes in expecting to write a critical article exposing the disparity between Mia’s actual life and the life she show on…
ARC Review – Strange Is the Light by Sarah Maria Griffin
Every summer while they were growing up, four friends converged on the island of Valentia to play a game of their own invention, the rules of which are defined only by the bounds of their imaginations. After a single night goes wrong and separates them, the game goes unplayed for many years until they are…
Weekly Roundup – What I Read / Listened to 8/10/26-8/16/26
Summer is wrapping up but the good news is that peak reading season (Fall, obviously) is nigh and I’m ready to be curling up with a book on a rainy day already! I read five books this week and the week started out pretty rough, but they got better as the week went on so…
ARC Review – She’s a Doll by Barbara Truelove
It’s bad enough being dead, but when Lucy McQuinn is murdered and wakes up in the body of antique doll, all she has on her mind is vengeance. She finds an unlikely ally in Nicola who has her own score to settle with Lucy’s killer and through some strange twist of fate is the only…
ARC Review – Adam, Mine. by K. Ancrum
Victor Frankenstein is a brilliant young man studying the alchemical arts, but the scorn and mockery of his classmates drives him to ambitiously pursue human reanimation, no matter the cost. Elias Hilfiker, the boy Victor chooses to remake into a monster, awakens in agony, covered in scars from Victor’s deranged experiments. Rejected by his family,…
Weekly Roundup – What I Read / Listened to 8/3/26-8/9/26
I hope everyone is enjoying summer as it’s wrapping up! Portland is pretty smoky at the moment which is no fun but I think it’s clearing up. I read six books this week and…I guess this was actually a pretty bad reading week. Before I started this blog, I never did weekly roundups so I…
ARC Review – Under Story by Chloe Benjamin
Running away from her failed marriage and the tragedy that caused it, Laurel leaves her job in academic mycology to work as a dishwasher at the isolated McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica.Looming over the station is a beautiful anomaly called the Arc which appeared recently out of nowhere and seems to defy physics. When Laurel’s…
ARC Review – Blacktail by Scott Hawkins
A lone wolf, Blacktail’s life is forever changed when he falls in love with a pet dog who soon dies at her owners’ hands. After taking his vengeance and going on the run to escape the humans hunting him, a mysteriously powerful feline witch sends him on a quest to wake the Forest God, whose…
ARC Review – She Haunts Me Still by De Elizabeth
After her mother’s tragic and violent death, Mallory was left with a broken heart and a lot of questions. As a freshman theater major at her mother’s alma mater, for the first time she has the chance to search for answers. After getting the lead role in the department’s production of Romeo & Juliet, Mallory…
Weekly Roundup – What I Read / Listened to 7/27/26-8/2/26
August is upon us! I read five books this week and I would say it was a pretty solid week overall, mostly just good with one real standout. I mostly stuck to the plan I laid out at the end of last week’s roundup with the exception of one book. We have one audiobook, one…
ARC Review – The Burn Line by Jonathan Sims
In a sweltering train car in the London Underground during the hottest summer on record, five strangers witness…something. They can’t remember it, but soon each of them find themselves stalked by pale creature that leaves them paralyzed in its proximity. Terrified, the strangers reconnect and piece out what happened, working together to escape the creature…
ARC Review – The Salt King by Natasha Pulley
At age sixteen, Avelyn fled his small isolated hometown of Hreodwater—home to a salt mine and a culture that lives, breathes, and speaks the mythology of their Salt King—and ran off to become a Jesuit priest at the Vatican in desperate search of guidance and the nurturing embrace of the God he left behind. Twelve…
ARC Review – You’ll Love it Here by Natalie Sue
After one bitter comment to the wrong person, Mona is forced to take a leave of absence, and she feels the precarious life she’s spent years building up crumbling around her. Unfortunately, her apartment building is literally crumbling around her. After her landlady falls and hurts herself, Mona agrees to watch over the building and…
Weekly Roundup – What I Read / Listened to 7/20/26-7/26/26
I hope everyone’s summer is going well! Another week has passed. I read four books this week but two of them were pretty long and I wasn’t doing much audiobook listening. This was actually a pretty good week—I really enjoyed three out of the four books. Shockingly, I actually stuck to the books I said…
Essay – In Defense of Anti-Intellectualism
I. Introduction Being in book spaces, you might have come across a TikTok, Reel, YouTube video, or blog post somberly declaring the rise of “anti-intellectualism.” Usually, this is paired with complaints about the oversaturation of romance/romantasy books and the plague of tropes. God, tropes! Never before 2020 were works of media based on or marketed…
ARC Review – Time Travel for Beginners by Jaclyn Moriarty
After being hit by a car, a series of events leads to Anna, a single mother, getting a job at the Time Travel Agency. Despite the name, the place is a cozy hole in the wall with few customers and a small staff led by an eccentric disgraced physicist. Anna is sure that it’s all…
