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

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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

The book presents an historic narrative that details the events that lead up to the Cuban Missile crisis. Aside from the American slaughter in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this is the closest the world has ever really come to all-out nuclear war, and hopefully that will always remain the case. It’s an important lesson from history, and one that I think it’s important for everyone to be conscious of.

What I really admired about Max Hastings’ work is the way in which he was able to write fairly detached portraits of every figure he detailed. He doesn’t portray history as good guys and bad guys, but with different groups of flawed people with conflicting interests. He is just as quick to raise criticisms of Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev as he is to raise those of John F Kennedy – and he offers praise where praise is due too. In doing so, he does a fantastic of job of helping you to get into the mindsets of the ordinary people who supported them.

What’s more is that he does an excellent job of doing an historic portrait of the era in which these events took place. Obviously, this can never be truly comprehensive, because there’s no way to accurately wrap up a whole nation and culture in a short book, but he makes it really easy to understand the mindsets of the people in Russia, America, and Cuba as they went into this crisis, which of course makes everything easier to understand.

I also thought that it was really valuable for him to include a lot of contemporary media perspectives on the situation as it unfolded. It’s interesting to compare the ways in which the media continues to work to this day, and it’s a useful reminder of the ways in which reports at the time try to mould a narrative, and often without all the facts. It’s also useful to see how it sways public opinion, and consequently, how governments respond, and often not in the best ways.

Of course, the most interesting part details the crisis itself, but this would have been nowhere near as impactful without all of the context that Hastings provides before it. Altogether, it was a rather extraordinary sequence of events, and the most profound thing, I felt, was that two countries almost initiated a nuclear war, despite neither nation actually wanting to do so. This will always be the case and we must never lose sight of that. Our world leaders in particular must remember that nobody ever wants a nuclear war, and because that feeling is universal nobody will ever do it… but with extreme stresses and misunderstanding, somebody could do so without truly understanding what is happening or what they have done.

Once again, I want to reiterate that this is a very important lesson from history – one that illustrates that no nation really has its hands clean, despite how it might present itself, and how ordinary people will be the ones that end up paying the price as a consequence of governments trying to exert their power and influence too far. It’s a sad sequence of events, but also a very lucky and positive one in the long run.

Rating: 9.5/10

Buy it here.

This comic imagines how things would have gone if Spider-Man’s story started in 1962 and continued through to the modern day. So often we see fantastical characters like this in just a small window of time, experiencing adventures in the prime of their life, so I absolutely loved the idea of portraying him as a much more “real” person passing through time and growing old.

Peter Parker is one of my favourite Marvel characters, and what I really appreciated about this story was how it showed exactly how much of a toll going through all of these adventures would take on a person as they grew older. Admittedly, I didn’t recognise the source material for all of the adventures you see him going through, but I did certainly appreciate it when I understood the reference. Even when I didn’t, I felt that this was written in such a way that you don’t need to be intimately familiar with the older comics if you want to enjoy this story.

In the earlier parts of the story, I really appreciated the extent to which it was tied into history and Peter grappling with the ethics of the Vietnam War and whether or not he had a responsibility to get involved with it was really cool to see. The original comics from the ’60s don’t really tie into current affairs, so it’s really cool to see them kind of recontextualised as a piece of historic fiction. It was a shame that this was missing from the later chapters though, but at the same time, I did also really like reading about older Spider-Man, so it balanced out.

Another thing that I really liked about this was Peter’s relationships with other characters. Mary Jane, Harry Osborn, Gwen Stacy, Reed Richards, and various others. You really feel the weight of many years behind them as Peter ages and moves through time – and seeing them all growing and aging too gives the whole thing quite a sentimental sort of feeling. I felt quite invested in all his different relationships and it made the whole thing feel a lot more real.

In summary, I’d describe this as a celebration of Spider-Man – and a fairly bittersweet one at that. It’s filled to the brim with references and cameos that are sure to delight Marvel fans, and even if you’re level of Spider-Man fandom isn’t super deep, I think you’ll still be able to get a lot out of this comic. The art by Mark Bagley is great too.

Rating: 9/10

Buy it here.

I love food, I love detective fiction, and I love sentimental things – no wonder I also love The Kamogawa Food Detectives. In this Japanese novel (translated by Jesse Kirkwood) you get the story of an old chef who helps people to identify food that they had many years previously. They’ll paint a vivid picture for him and describe the context in which they had the long-lost meal – usually attached to some distant, cherished memory.

One aspect of it that I loved was it’s absolutely delicious descriptions of lots of meals. Even as a vegetarian I was able to enjoy and appreciate every single one of the descriptions. Perhaps it was because I listened to this as an audiobook at times when I was either eagerly anticipating my lunch break, or my dinner after work, but honestly I think I’d feel hungry at any time that I might have read this book. It feels very obvious to me that it was written by somebody who appreciates a good meal.

Besides this, I also felt quite invested in the stories of each of the customers who comes in. I don’t know if this is a widespread feeling or not, but I associate different foods with different memories all the time, and by combining these two senses, it helped to make me feel more strongly rooted in the memories and experiences of each person. Each one was usually connected to a lost love, or to a lost aspect of their childhood – and I’m sure we have such memories as these.

Having said that, if you take a step back from the narrative for a moment – it is kind of funny to think that all these people have unsolved emotional anguish in their past and that they’re only able to move on from when they eat a meal at this food detective place ten or twenty years later. It is a bit silly when you think of it like that, but not enough that it takes anything from the experience for me.

Some readers may also be disappointed that there isn’t really an over-arching storyline. You just get to spend some time with these characters and get to see a few of the cases they get involved with. There are a few little glimpses about their history and backstory, but it’s not really about the main characters (in the same way that Sherlock Holmes stories aren’t really about Sherlock Holmes). It feels a little closer to a short story collection than a novel, even though it is very much still a novel.

It definitely fits the definition of a “cosy read” and I am happy to have read it. It was a very wholesome experience – and one that is unashamedly so. During difficult times, I think it’s exactly the kind of story we need more of, and I strongly recommend giving it a read.

Score: 8.3/10

Buy it here.