Here you’ll find all of my long-form book reviews. For shorter-form reviews, check out my weekly roundups. For booklists and essays check the navigation bar!
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
ARC Review – (Mostly) Human Resources by Grace Viall
Alexys works in the Human Resources department for Entity a company that catalogues, studies, and contains cryptids, attempting to honor the legacy of her father who worked in the field as a Warden and died as a result. Now, one of the Wardens she’s meant to oversee goes missing chasing an undiscovered creature called the…
ARC Review – Kitten by Stacey Yu
It’s not that Katie’s life is terrible, but she just can’t seem to do things right—to move through the world with the ease that everyone else does. Everyone, including her boyfriend James, who is sweet enough to take a break from work to whisk Katie away to his family’s seaside house. Joining them is Silver,…
ARC Review – The Missed Connection by Tia Williams
Sasha is a casting director, and no man has ever so perfectly fit the role of her love interest as the man in seat F she meets on a long flight. Somehow, the two lose track of each other in the airport and she realizes they didn’t exchange any information that could lead her to…
ARC Review – Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim
Every time a person crosses a boundary, there’s a chance that they might split into two ‘instances’, with one moving on to live their life in a new place and the other being left behind. Soyoung, a young woman living in South Korea, barely knows her instance Rose in America. They split when she was…
ARC Review – The Children by Melissa Albert
The God of Endings meets Immaculate Conception in this adult gothic fantasy about the two adult children of an immensely famous children’s book series, forced to face the reality that their childhood was not as idyllic as the stories their mother wrote them into. After decades without a word to each other, Guinevere’s idealized memoir…
ARC Review – It Came From Neverland by Cynthia Pelayo
Wendy Darling is all grown up, working in a children’s home in the midst of the first World War. Largely estranged from her brothers, Wendy is desperate to move on from her traumatic childhood and escape the media circus that ensued upon their return. But twelve years after Wendy’s first taste of magic, Neverland is…
ARC Review – Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, family vlogging channels, manosphere podcasts, and traditional values. Read this book before you take the exit onto that road. Natalie Heller Mills has a beautiful, perfect life on a charming farm with a boisterous family and extremely successful Instagram account. Or at least she had all…
ARC Review – The Brides by Charlotte Cross
Through letters and journal entries, the story of Lucy, Malfalda, Alice, and Eliza unfolds. In the face of illness and turmoil they make their way to Castle Dracula, but what promises to aid them soon becomes a living nightmare and their secrets and fears might just come back to bite them. There’s something to be…
ARC Review – Dreamland by Olivie Blake
In the dry, oppressive heat of the summer in LA girls are showing up dead, arranged into macabre displays that horrify and fascinate the public. However, Anya Morris–an aspiring actress made claustrophobic by her circumstances–is not focused on dead girls. Running on cunning and ambition, Anya receives a mysterious but promising opportunity to work for…
ARC Review – Everybody’s Perfect by Jo Walton
In the wondrous city of Serenissima, a strange shadow of Venice, time evades understanding and many species live in not-so-perfect harmony. A laborer’s dream unmasks a prophesy that promises to change a world that seems to defy change. Hm, okay, how do I feel. Well, first of all, I’m absolutely obsessed with the premise of…
ARC Review – Fruit Fly by Josh Silver
Mallory’s debut novel was a massive success, but seven years of writer’s block have taken their toll and she’s desperate for a fresh story to tell. In an attempt to escape the crushing hold of her life, Mallory has a chance encounter with Leo, a young gay man in the throes of addiction. Inspired by…
ARC Review – Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt by Ben Reeves
My 5-star Slump – 215 days, 157 books Meet Death. He goes by Travis at the moment and when he isn’t sitting beside people in their final moments he likes to wander or sit in his apartment restoring old photos. His life of peaceful detachment is interrupted when Layla, the little girl in the apartment…
