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: Across The Vanishing Sky - Book #1 Starlight Grove - Catherine Cowles - March 2026 I recently received this book as part of a bookstagram birthday group I belong to, and I have to say what a gift. It had been sitting on my wishlist and my want-to-read list for a while, so seeing it show up felt like fate finally giving me a nudge. I didn't know much going in, just that it was a small-town novel with a romantic suspense edge, and honestly, that was the perfect amount of mystery to start with. The story opens with our main character, Braedyn, hiking with her best friend Nova. They get separated for just a moment  and Nova vanishes without a trace. The police chalk it up to a bear attack or the river sweeping her away, but Braedyn knows in her gut that someone took her. My heart broke for her right from those first pages. Fast forward one year, and Braedyn has packed up her life and her son to move to Starlight Grove, determined to return to the spot where Nova disappeare...

Review: Inventing Mr. Darcy - Susanna Craig - September 2026 Confession time: I picked this one up because I, too, am the kind of person who would name a cat after Mr. Bingley. So when I met Elle a grad student whose entire dissertation, reading life, and general worldview orbit Jane Austen  I felt instantly, embarrassingly seen. Elle's world is a cozy, familiar one. She's deep in her research on Pride and Prejudice, her cat Bing Bong (no relation to the sweet elephant from Inside Out ,  though I did have to do a double take) is curled up nearby, and Austen is basically the sun her whole life orbits. Then, one late night in the university archives, working on the AUSTEN-C database, a geomagnetic storm rips through the sky. Flash. Bang. And Elle wakes up in a world where Jane Austen never existed at all. This is where the book really won me over. It's not just "no Austen" as a throwaway premise Susanna Craig actually follows the ripple effects. No Hallmark Chan...

Review: The Pick Up - Sadie Ryan - September 2026 I'll be honest, when I sat down with this one this morning, I really didn't know what I was walking into. Something about a bar, a meet-cute, maybe a slow-burn romance? That was about the extent of my guess. What I got instead was so much richer, and honestly, a little more heart-stopping than I expected. We meet Melissa, freshly out of a ten-year relationship and staring down forty with the sinking feeling that love might have left the building for good. I think anyone who's ever felt that particular kind of post-breakup dread will recognise themselves in her immediately. Then comes one night out with her friends, and suddenly she's swept into the orbit of Ralph Darling. And swept really is the word. The whirlwind romance moves fast, with a wedding on the horizon just two months in. But here's the thing that had me gripping the pages: Ralph is too good to be true, in the most unsettling sense possible. He's a ...

Review: The River Runs Black - Book #2 North Country Novel - Tessa Wegert - October 2026 The River Runs Black drops us into the deceptively peaceful town of Alexandria Bay, nestled in New York's Thousand Islands region,  the kind of small town where everyone knows everyone, and nothing bad is supposed to happen. But when a teenager dies of a drug overdose around the same time as a record-breaking cocaine bust along the Canadian border, Investigator Tim Wellington and his team think they've caught a lucky break. Case closed, right? Wrong. The lab results throw everything sideways ,  the cocaine that killed that teenager doesn't match the cocaine from the bust. Which means there's a second, far more dangerous supply still moving through town, run by people willing to protect it at any cost. Suddenly Investigator Tim Wellington isn't just solving a crime  he's racing against a ticking clock, knowing the next casualty could be another local kid caught in the crossf...

VBT# We Will Find You - Ian Blackwood - August 2026 I read this one curled up on the sofa with a cup of tea going cold beside me, because I genuinely could not put it down long enough to reheat it. There's something about a good con-artist thriller that feels like being let in on a secret, and Ian Blackwood hands you that secret slowly, deliciously, one uncomfortable truth at a time. The setup is deceptively simple: three women, one man, and a lie so well constructed it takes years to unravel. Serena is swept off her feet by Tod  yacht, diamond ring, all the trimmings of a fairy tale proposal. As a reader, you know from the title alone that something's off.  That fall comes when Serena shows a photo of her fiancé to her friend Chloe, a gym owner with a past she's never quite spoken about. The colour drains from Chloe's face, and just like that, the floor drops out from under the story. Tod is Tam. The ring is fake. The yacht was never his. Every soft, romantic detai...