I hate to say this, because it feels incredibly disrespectful to Robert Jordan (who died after the previous book in the series, Knife of Dreams, was published) but I feel like Brandon Sanderson is the breath of fresh air that the series needed. This is the twelfth book in the series, and by the eleventh instalment I had gotten so bored of the plot seeming to meander endlessly and all the ridiculous excuses he could come up with to have the women being naked or spanked – and Brandon Sanderson avoids all of Jordan’s pitfalls while actually moving things on meaningfully.

As soon as I started the first chapter (which deals with ordinary people in the series’ world responding to the enormous changes they’re encountering) I knew something was different. I felt more invested. Everything seemed to have more value and significance, and consequently, I ended up enjoying the entire book a great deal more. I think it’s really lucky that it was a writer of Brandon Sanderson’s calibre who ended up picking up the torch and carrying it over the finish line.

He also does a fantastic job of helping to make the portrayals of certain characters make sense. For instance, Rand. Before now he’d just seemed arrogant, petulant and annoying. I liked him in the first few books, but once he embraces being the Dragon Reborn, he was really boring – but in this book, it became clear to me that we the audience are not supposed to side with Rand and, in fact, a scene that he shares with Tam towards the end of this book is, in my opinion one of the most meaningful moments in the entire series. After this, I finally get why anyone would be invested in the character.

Meanwhile, the continued story of Egwene (still under captivity with the White Tower Aes Sedai) puts her ascension to Amyrlin into a new context – you really get a look at how that would make her feel (especially considering that it was so unusual) and this novel has her prove herself to the rebels she’s leading in a way that makes it make sense that anyone would following her. I think in the older books, characters just accepted new developments without much thought, but here we really get a look into their heads and see what they think and feel about things, which makes everything feel more believable.

Plot threads that have dangling for a long time (e.g. Aes Sedai politics) are finally resolved, some characters are killed, and every chapter of the book feels like it brings the story forward in a way that I really couldn’t say about the earlier books – especially some of the later ones, so The Gathering Storm made me excited for the rest of the series in a way I hadn’t done for a while.

Rating: 9.2/10

Buy it here.

Despite what the title might make you think, this is actually the penultimate Sherlock Holmes short story collection. While it is often said that Arthur Conan Doyle lost his enthusiasm for these stories as the series went on, I think there are a lot of really good ones here, and His Last Bow itself is one of my overall favourite Sherlock Holmes stories. Here are my thoughts on each one:

The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge
One of the more gothic Sherlock Holmes stories that sees Holmes and Watson heading to a home in the countryside to investigate a brutal murder. It all ends up being tied to some shady secrets in the past and altogether, I thought it was pretty engaging.

The Adventure of the Cardboard Box
The title of this story makes it seem like it’ll be a really boring one, but it’s actually quite an unusual and intriguing one. It’s about some mysterious deaths, ones that can’t even be easily explained – of course, Holmes soon gets to the bottom of it, and it’s pretty bleak.

The Adventure of the Red Circle
A landlady comes to see Holmes because she has a suspicious lodger who she never sees. It might not sound like there’s much to this one, which is also what Holmes thinks, but there are lots of unexpected twists and turns that I quite enjoyed. Lots of moments where it looks like one thing is happening, but actually another is happening.

The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans
This is a pretty cool one, because it is obviously set in the looming shadow of the First World War and features Mycroft Holmes coming to his brother to investigate the loss of plans for a new type of submarine. It’s one of those cool, international affair sort of Holmes stories, and one of my favourites in this collection.

The Adventure of the Dying Detective
Another classic and one of my overall favourites. The story starts with Holmes horribly, horribly ill and seemingly on the brink of death. It’s interesting to see a seemingly more vulnerable Holmes, but that’s all I’ll say because I don’t want to spoil anything.

The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax
What makes this story quite interesting is that it gives Watson quite a lot to do while he heads off Holmes-lessly to investigate the disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax. It feels quite different from most others with a lot of travelling around,

The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot
This is one of those stories that has Holmes investigating something seemingly supernatural, which, of course, is ultimately not as it seems. Nonetheless, everything is very creepy at first, and I enjoyed the slow debunking process.

His Last Bow
The grand finale of the collection! At the furthest point in the timeline, we get a story set during the First World War. Unlike most of the others, it isn’t narrated by Watson and for the longest time, it isn’t even clear how it ties into the earlier stories at all – but it all comes together to create a brilliant epilogue to the Holmes canon.

It’s a really high quality selection of stories and is sure to delight anyone who has enjoyed the earlier Holmes adventures and, with His Last Bow being “the end” for series, I strongly recommend this as essential reading for Sherlock Holmes fans.

Rating: 9.4/10

I’ve always liked Harley Quinn as a character and when recently looking for a comic to read during a flight, I spotted this on the shelf and thought that it would be the perfect choice. If you don’t know anything about Harley or Batman comics at large, you don’t need to worry at all – although it takes the basic ideas behind certain characters, it’s largely a completely original storyline that has no real connections to past iterations of Gotham City.

Here you’ve got a teenage Harley who is being raised by a single drag queen father who goes by the name Mama. Harley is a weird girl and something of a perpetual outcast, and though her grasps of right and wrong don’t seem very well-defined, you feel for her as a dumb kid who’s just trying to find her way – and I’m sure we can all remember a time when our young teenage selves had slightly wonky values.

You get to see her making friends with a young Poison Ivy – though this is very much a story that is rooted in reality, and in this version of events Ivy is just another girl in the school who is into environmental activism. Harley immediately latches onto her and thinks she’s really cool, though the two of them occasionally clash because of Harley’s less keenly developed sense of morality.

It’s a story of our times, dealing with wealth inequality and the disregard for ordinary working class people that is often displayed by rich property owners. It illustrates how someone like Harley, who is not particularly motivated by social causes, could end up being forced onto a side in a “political” debate, just by existing.

Also, I particularly liked how this graphic novel handled The Joker. At fist, I really didn’t want him to be in it, as I didn’t want him over-shadowing Harley and Ivy, but in the end I was very pleased with how he was portrayed. I don’t want to spoil anything, but it felt like he was intentionally written to highlight that it is really not a good idea to put the character on a pedestal and celebrate him as someone who challenges the hypocrisy of society, illustrating that his attitudes just reinforce the status quo in harmful ways.

I thought it was a really beautiful story, and although it seemed to end a little abruptly, I enjoyed every second that I spent in its world. I loved the positive focus on drag queens and the way that so many of he characters felt so real. It was gritty and it was engaging, and the art by Steve Pugh helps make it even more beautiful. I strongly recommend it to anyone, whether you’re a DC fan or not.

Rating: 9.6/10

Buy it here.

This is Dandy Smith’s third novel and the third thing I’ve read by her. For the most part, I’ve enjoyed all of them so far, but this one has been my favourite overall. With the other two, my feelings were slightly mixed because of the fact that practically every character had a pretty mean, toxic streak – but this time, while the characters did have flaws, they all felt a lot more sympathetic to me.

So the story is about these two sisters who are the best friends in the whole world (a common theme in these books). Sadly, in the middle of the night one of them is kidnapped and never seen again… well, until about fifteen years later when she suddenly turns up again. The only problem is, she acts kind of off and refuses to share much information about what exactly happened during her time away. As more time goes by, more and more fishy things start happening.

The concept of a child abductee coming back as an adult and being very guarded about what happened in the interim is one I think is pretty cool for the premise of a novel. Meanwhile, the central “mystery” was one I felt quite invested in, and enjoyed getting extra little pieces of information and trying to figure out exactly what was going on.

There are actually two narratives happening at once though – the other deals with a brother-sister duo who are strongly implied to be incestuous and who live in a large family home under the thumb of an oppressive uncle. As I’m sure you can imagine, the two stories eventually intertwine (and not in the way I expected), but for a lot of the novel I was disappointed whenever it jumped back to this thread – especially as there’d be an interesting cliff-hanger in the other plotline, and then we’d have to return to these two. These sections are also written in the third person, rather than first (like the rest) which is mildly disorientating. They are good, for sure, but less good than the main bits.

Overall, any issues I have with the secondary storyline are relatively minor because the pay-off with how they fit together is pretty cool. I did find the incestuous insinuations to be a little gratuitous though. There were also bits along the way where I thought “Hang on, that doesn’t make any sense” only for it later to be revealed that I was absolutely right to notice that, and it was part of the story – which felt like problems at the time, but in the end, it was just clever writing.

If you liked One Small Mistake and The Perfect Match, then chances are you’ll probably like this one too. It’s a decent thriller novel and one where you’ll find yourself keen to pick up and more clues and pieces of information in each chapter. It’s a slower novel than the other two, but it feels more carefully thought out and developed. I think it’s the author’s best work yet, and I hope that this upward trajectory continues into the next book.

Rating: 8.4/10

Buy it here.

This is the eleventh Wheel of Time novel, and one with the sad distinction of being the last one to be published during Robert Jordan’s life, and therefore the last one that he wrote by himself before Brandon Sanderson finished the series. It’s also has the sad distinction of being a real low point for the series.

Not much of interest really happens, outside of the usual big bit of conflict that happens right at the end. It’s just all prepping for battle and talks about what needs to be done – very little that we haven’t already heard many times over in the books that lead up to this one. Yes, I mostly like the characters, aside from a few annoying traits, but it just starts to feel frustrating when most of the chapters lack any meaningful continuation of the plot, but are instead filled with spank scenes and the women getting naked for no reason.

It’s a real shame because the two novels before this one felt like a significant step up. Here you’ve just got allusions to the idea that something exciting will happen in the near future, and some characters getting married, but the romance was always the worst part of the Wheel of Time anyway, so that doesn’t do much for me.

Maybe Robert Jordan wasn’t really sure what to do with the series at this point, I don’t know. The best I can say is that things were better in the following novel, so you should read through this one so you can get to its sequel, which is a lot better and a return to form for the series.

Rating: 4.7/10

Buy it here.

Like many Jane Austen novels, Mansfield Park is a story about lots of different characters who social lives intersect in various ways. It really all centres around a young woman called Fanny Price, who comes to live with richer family members in Mansfield Park, because her immediate family is not in a position to support her as she requires. As you can imagine though, her presence is the catalyst for some drama.

We follow Fanny from being a little girl to being a young woman and she is a character I felt quite fond of. She didn’t endear herself to me in the same way that the overly confident Emma (from Emma) did, but nonetheless she does stand out as one of the more intriguing Austen protagonists. I admire the way that she stands up for herself and how she gently challenges the bad attitudes of the time. In particular, she seems to quietly challenge slavery, which is pretty cool as it’s not a subject I expected to see broached.

Something I found pretty sweet was Fanny’s relationship with he brother William. The two of them don’t get a huge amount of time together throughout the course of the novel, but I always enjoy seeing thm interact. I just find deep and unconditional love between adult siblings very moving – especially in work from this era. Meanwhile, and I won’t spoil anything about what happens, but I thought the romance in this novel evolved very naturally and felt very believable in a way that it often doesn’t in older novels, so that was pretty great.

Admittedly, it has its slow patches, and certain portions of the storyline are hard to relate to from a modern perspective. For instance, one part deals with a group of people planning to put on a small stage production, and the response from many of the characters, including Fanny herself, is that this is a really scandalous idea that should be avoided. It’s hard to empathise with them having such an extreme reaction to something that seems so benign.

These things aside, I still enjoyed this novel. Not as much as I enjoyed Emma, Pride and Prejudice, or Persuasion, but it was a decent reading experience and I think most fans of Austen or literature from this time will enjoy it.

Rating: 7.6/10

Buy it here.

After reading Gender Queer last year, Maia Kobabe immediately shot up as one of the writers for whom I had the most respect. Eir writing style is gentle, compassionate, and informative and I strive to capture those qualities in my own work. I was absolutely delighted when I found out that ey had written a piece about the fairly tangled web that is J. K. Rowling.

Like many people my age, I was once a big Harry Potter fan – though admittedly, I was quite late to the party. I finished reading (and reviewing) the books in 2019, which was pretty much the last point in time before J. K. Rowling became passionately transphobic. I now no longer feel comfortable buying books (or other products) that will help line Rowling’s pockets, because her position is an inherently hateful one.

There are some people out there who would undoubtedly take issue with what I have just said – after all, her stance is usually angled as sticking up for “biological truth” or as simply being the stance of somebody who wants to protect women. Unfortunately, this is not the case at all, and Kobabe does a fantastic job of illustrating her journey from someone who seemingly made some poorly considered comments accidentally, to someone who is openly and actively anti-trans.

It’s not a matter of opinion, it’s a matter of fact that that is what she does and it’s chronicled here perfectly, with beautiful illustrations in Kobabe’s usual style. These aren’t innocent mistakes, this is conscious and continuous misinformation and anti-trans propaganda. But it’s not all about the transphobia, this piece is also about the important role that Harry Potter played in many people’s childhoods, and how it was even a refuge for many of the queer people that Rowling now attacks. It’s such a sad turn of events – and that’s what Kobabe was documented her.

It’s like a journey. It starts with the nostalgic joy that Harry Potter and the Wizarding World provided for lots of people, and the sense of community that it created, and then moves on to show the very tangible harm that Rowling has done to the LGBTQ+ community. The bits which document Kobabe’s childhood Harry Potter fandom is actually quite beautiful, and for anyone who doesn’t really understand the situation, or who just wants to feel seen after feeling betrayed by Rowling, this is well worth a read.

Rating: 8/10