Review: The Girls Before - Kate Alice Marshall - February 2026 I've been a fan of Kate Alice Marshall for a while now , she has a real knack for that unsettling, atmospheric tension that makes you want to keep reading with all the lights on so when The Girls Before popped up on the Libby app, I didn't hesitate. Into my queue it went, and I settled in with a cuppa and high hopes. The premise is genuinely gripping. A girl called Stranger, trapped alone in a dark basement, rationing her last scraps of food and water, with only the desperate scrawlings of girls who came before her scratched into the walls for company. Meanwhile, Audrey, a search and rescue expert carrying the weight of her best friend Janie's long-ago disappearance  stumbles onto evidence in the forest that pulls her into decades of buried secrets tied to the town's most powerful family. There's even a local legend woven through it all: a forest witch who saves girls from bad men - this gave me Urban L...

Review: The Second First Chance - Blakely Bennett - March 2016 We all have those months, don't we? The ones where nothing on your shelf seems to call to you, where you find yourself scrolling endlessly through your Kindle at midnight, jabbing hopefully at titles and praying something sticks. That was very much my life lately,  a proper reading slump that had me wondering if the magic had gone out of it entirely. And then a title caught my eye, and something just said yes. That's how I stumbled into The Second First Chance by Blakely Bennett, and I am ever so glad I did. This book pressed on a question I suspect many of us carry quietly in our hearts: what if you could have just a little more time with the person you love? Jayden's husband Callahan is killed in a car accident on their twentieth wedding anniversary, an ordinary crossing of a road that changes everything, forever. It is the kind of loss that hits you right in the chest as a reader, because it is...

Review: Monstrous Souls - Rebecca Kelly - June 2020 You know those moments where you're curled up on the sofa, scrolling through your Kindle with a cup of tea going cold beside you, just searching for something that grabs you? That was me when I stumbled across Monstrous Souls by Rebecca Kelly. Honestly, the title had me thinking I was about to dive into something dark and gothic  maybe even a YA horror. I was very much picturing brooding teenagers and supernatural beasties. Oh, how wrong I was, and oh, how pleasantly surprised I turned out to be! Monstrous Souls opens with a gut punch. Heidi wakes up in hospital as a teenager to discover that her best friend has been murdered and her sister has been kidnapped. As if that weren't devastating enough, Heidi herself  assumed dead has survived, but not unscathed. She's left with amnesia, the memories of that terrible night completely out of reach. It's the kind of opening that makes you sit up straighter and forget your te...

Review: Spend the Night - Episode #1 - The Hotel Collection -  Elizabeth Lee - March 2015 Oh, friends can I be honest with you for a moment? This past month has been an absolute whirlwind. Work has been chaotic with a capital C, and my beloved reading time has taken the hit in a big way. You know that feeling when you sit down with a book and your brain just… won't? Everything felt flat. Nothing was clicking. I'd pick something up, read a few pages, and put it right back down again. It was that kind of month. So I did what any self-respecting bookworm does in times of reading drought ,I went rummaging through my Kindle. And tucked away in there, gathering digital dust, was a little stash of serial novels from way back when they were absolutely the thing. You remember that era, right? Those delicious bite-sized instalments that kept you coming back for more? I had a handful saved precisely for moments like this, and Spend the Night by Elizabeth Lee was exactly what I needed to ...

Review: Me and Her - Kaelin Wennerberg - May 2026 I have to be honest with you when this one landed on my radar as part of Zooloo's Book Tours, I was already sold before I'd even turned the first page. A small town with a serial killer, someone going missing every single year, and a protagonist who has completely reinvented herself? That is exactly my kind of read. Curl up on the sofa with a blanket and a strong cup of tea kind of read. And I am so glad I said yes to this one. Devil's Paradise is the sort of small town that sounds idyllic until you scratch the surface, and Wennerberg does a brilliant job of building that uneasy, suffocating atmosphere. You know the feeling,  the kind of place where everyone knows everyone, and that's not always a comfort. Our protagonist Charlie or Reagan, as we come to learn  fled this town the moment she could, leaving behind not just her address but her entire identity. New name, new appearance, new life. She has worked so hard to ...

Here in New Zealand, Thanksgiving doesn't exist. There are no turkeys on supermarket shelves in November, no Black Friday frenzy (well, mostly), and absolutely no cultural pressure to go around a table listing the things you're grateful for. The Fourth of July is just a Wednesday, or whatever day it lands on, and Memorial Day passes without so much as a barbecue in sight. I've always watched American holidays from the outside, the way you watch a parade through a rainy window  aware of the noise and colour, but not quite part of it. That changed when I went down the Ancestry.com rabbit hole. It started innocently enough, the way all great reading adventures do. One link led to another, one census record to a ship manifest, one name to a date that made my jaw drop. Because there, nestled in my family tree like a well-worn bookmark, was a name I recognised from every American history textbook I'd ever read as a book nerd obsessed with the colonial era: Edward Doty. Th...