Review: A Beginner's Guide to Leveling Up - Elizabeth Agyemang - September 2026 I'll admit it I picked this one up expecting a fun, low-stakes gaming story. What I got instead was a graphic novel that quietly snuck up on me and left me a little misty-eyed on my couch, coffee gone cold beside me. A Beginner's Guide to Leveling Up follows Lexie, a sixth grader who had big plans for this school year: new clubs, the ideal lunch table, and after-school gaming sessions with her best friends. Instead, she's dealing with shifting friendships and the very real, very heavy grief of losing her grandfather. If you've ever watched a kid try to hold it together while everything around them changes at once, you'll recognize that ache immediately. Here's where the story does something special. Lexie finds a journal hidden among her grandfather's belongings .  full of cryptic notes and cheat codes for an unfinished video game he'd been building called Warrior...

  Review: The Weekend Guests - Liza North - January 2025 There's a particular kind of dread that comes from watching old friends reunite while knowing, as the reader, that not everyone is who they claim to be anymore. Liza North taps straight into that feeling in The Weekend Guests, and honestly, I was hooked from the very first postcard. Five old university friends - Aline, Sienna, Rob, Michael, and Brandon  haven't all been in a room together for years. Now they're gathering at Aline's stunning clifftop house in Dorset, the kind of setting that practically begs to be photographed for an estate agent's brochure, right up until you remember someone in this group might be capable of murder. There's wine, there's the slightly awkward business of meeting each other's partners for the first time, there's a sitter minding the kids so the grown-ups can relax. It should be idyllic. It is not idyllic. Because underneath the reunion warmth sits somethi...

Review: Lumberjanes: Volume Three - Various Contributors - February 2026 Oh friends, gather round because I have the most wonderful thing to share with you today, and I am barely containing my excitement as I type this! When the postie knocked on my door with a review copy from the absolute legends over at Boom Studios, I may have done a little happy dance in my hallway. Boom Studios honestly publishes some of the most joyful, imaginative, and downright brilliant comics and graphic novels out there, and being trusted with one of their titles for review genuinely made my day. But here's the thing  this wasn't just any title. This was Lumberjanes. My Lumberjanes. I fell in love with April, Jo, Mal, Molly, and Ripley over ten years ago when this gorgeous series first burst onto the scene, and that love has never once wavered. They feel like old friends at this point, the kind you'd want sitting round your kitchen table with a mug of tea and a warm biscuit. Book Three collect...

Review: What Waits in the Woods - Book #2 Detective Rita Myers - Terri Parlato - December 2023 You know that feeling when you spot a book cover across the library app and just know you have to read it? That was me with What Waits in the Woods. Total cover crush, and bonus points for discovering a new-to-me author! I devoured this one as a Libby ebook on my phone during my commute and late-night reading sessions. Terri Parlato weaves a solid small-town thriller that had me genuinely creeped out at times. Esmé's return to Graybridge after her ballet career ends should have been a quiet homecoming, but instead she's thrust into investigating her childhood friend's murder in her own backyard , possibly at the hands of the same man who threatened her years ago. The atmospheric New England setting absolutely worked for me, all those woods and whispered secrets. What I loved was The dual timeline structure kept me engaged, and Detective Rita Myers was a refreshing perspective.  ...