Review:  Junie B. Jones and Her Big Fat Mouth - Colleen AF Venable and Honie Beam -  May 2026 There are books you read, and then there are books that read you right back  cracking open a chapter of your childhood and handing it to you with a grin. Junie B. Jones and Her Big Fat Mouth, now reimagined as a full-colour graphic novel, did exactly that to me. Here's my confession: I was seven or eight years old when I first fell headlong into the world of Junie B. Jones. Barbara Park's junior fiction series was pure joy on a page ,  chaotic, hilarious, and narrated by a kindergartner with absolutely zero filter. I tore through those little chapter books like they were going out of fashion. Now, thirty-something years later, I find myself sitting down with the graphic novel adaptation and laughing just as loudly. Possibly louder. My family thinks I've lost the plot. Maybe I have, but I regret nothing. In this story, Junie B. has made one of her classic, spectacular blu...

Review: Chess for Babies - Levy Rozman - March 2026 I'll be honest with you: when this ARC landed in my hands, I laughed. Chess for Babies? My first thought was that it had to be a novelty gift , the kind of thing you buy for the chess-obsessed uncle who already has everything. But then I sat down with it, and I completely changed my tune. Levy Rozman  better known online as GothamChess, International Master and one of the most beloved chess educators on YouTube has done something genuinely clever here. He's taken a game that intimidates grown adults and distilled it into its purest, most joyful form. The board book walks tiny readers through the names of the pieces, the basics of how each one moves, and the concept of what it means to win. That's it. No openings, no tactics puzzles, no commentary about the Sicilian Defence. Just the beautiful bones of the game, served up in a format a baby can hold with both chubby fists. What makes this book work , really work  is the...

Review: Little Ghost's Summerween - Maggie Edkins Willis - April 2026  Little Ghost has attended his very first birthday party and decides he wants one of his own. His friend Anya gives him the most beautifully simple advice: the party should celebrate what Little Ghost loves most. And of course, what Little Ghost loves most is Halloween - bats, black cats, candy corn, pumpkins, the whole gloriously spooky lot. The small snag? It's the middle of summer. What unfolds is a genuinely delightful little story about identity, creativity, and the joy of refusing to be boxed in by expectations. Maggie Edkins Willis has a wonderful instinct for the interior logic of childhood like of course you can have Halloween in summer. Why wouldn't you? The solution Little Ghost lands on (a "Summerween" party) is exactly the kind of lateral thinking that picture books do best: it validates kids who feel like they don't quite fit the calendar of normal celebrations. The illustr...

Review: Our Last Resort - Clemence Michallon - July 2025 I'll be honest with you when I picked up Our Last Resort almost entirely because the blurb whispered Waco and Jonestown to me. A cult in upstate New York. A dramatic escape. Siblings carrying the weight of something unspeakable. I was practically already in my reading chair before I'd finished the synopsis. Sometimes a premise is just that good.  The flashback sequences to Frida and Gabriel's cloistered upbringing have that eerie, suffocating quality that makes cult narratives so compulsively readable , the kind of world where the walls feel like they're slowly closing in even when everything looks perfectly ordered from the outside. That tension is real, and it's the engine that kept me turning pages. The present-day setup has promise too. The Ara Hotel  a luxury desert retreat in Escalante, Utah is a gorgeous setting, all heat-shimmer and isolation. A dead woman. A powerful older husband. A brother with a ...

Synopsis: More Than This - Layla Emmerson - March 2026 At that moment, I wished I could be someone else. Someone who wasn’t scared to be touched by desire and feel the flames of passion burning through her. Bound by her past, Harper, a romance author, hides in the novel she now struggles to write. However, when a non-negotiable ultimatum brings Reid into her life, it changes everything. Not only is he a successful author, he’s also the ultimate alpha male. With an impenetrably dark demeanour, he appears emotionally detached... an enigma. Whilst embarking on a research venture of a more intimate nature, the pair become close and soon the line between fantasy and reality becomes blurred. They break the rules, and when unexpected feelings develop, Harper becomes the greatest weakness he never saw coming. Reid knows the secret he hides will break her all over again. As Harper struggles to let go of her past, Reid is forced to confront his. When past becomes present, they disco...

Review: The Mirror House Girls - Faith Gardner - January 2025 Winona is looking for somewhere to belong after her grandmother dies and the guy she was dating turned out to be married and have a family. When she meets Dakota at a grief group, she is invited to check out the eccentric Mirror House. Faith Gardner turns that achingly ordinary human need into the engine of a slow-burn cult thriller that gets under your skin long before it scares you. Simon Spellmeyer is  a charismatic psychologist whose self-improvement protocols feel plausible enough to make you uneasy about your own susceptibility. He stays dangerously reasonable for most of the novel, which is exactly what makes the story work. As someone who has read almost everything Faith Gardner has written, I recognised her signature move here: making you understand, page by page, how intelligent people end up somewhere they never intended to go. The first half of the novel is its strongest. The atmosphere of Mir...