Review: Morbidly Yours - Book #1 Love In Galway Series - Ivy Fairbanks - July 2023 There are books you pick up because someone raves about them, and then there are books that simply reach out and grab you from across the shelf. Morbidly Yours was firmly the latter for me. Something about that title paired with that cover had me utterly charmed before I'd read a single word  and I'm so glad I followed that instinct, because this one turned out to be a real gem. At the heart of the story is Callum Flannelly, an introverted mortician with a deadline that has nothing to do with death certificates: marry before his 35th birthday or lose his undertaking business.  Enter Lark Thompson, a vivacious American animator who has come to Galway to embrace life and who is absolutely not thrilled about finding herself next door to a funeral home. Their odd-couple dynamic is delightful from the very first page. Now, I have to talk about Callum, because honestly? He stole my whole heart. He...

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...

Here's a thought that keeps me up at night and trust me, it takes a lot to keep a book devourer like me from her beloved reading time. Somewhere out there, a group of people decided that you shouldn't be allowed to read certain books. That someone, somewhere, sat down and said: "No. That story is too dangerous. That idea is too powerful. That truth is too uncomfortable." And honestly? That's exactly why you need to read them. Banned books aren't banned because they're bad. They're banned because they're brilliant. They ask hard questions. They hold up mirrors we'd rather not look into. They give voices to people who have been told, repeatedly, to stay quiet. And the moment someone tries to take a book off a shelf, it becomes the most important book in the room. The American Library Association reported that in 2025 alone, over 5,600 books were banned from libraries across the United States,  the highest number ever recorded since tracking be...

Book Spotlight: Keep Her Close - Brian O'Rourke - May 2026 This little town seems perfect. Until you start digging… When twelve-year-old Sienna Voss vanishes without trace, three women are pulled into the desperate search for the missing girl. Sienna's mother, Roxanne, will tear up this quiet creek-side town to find her daughter. She felt at home here, trusted her neighbors but has one of them done something unspeakable? Chief of Police Tamsin Drake needs to find Sienna quickly. And not just because she’s a good cop. She’s beginning to suspect the girl’s disappearance is connected to a dark secret she thought she’d buried years ago. Cam-girl Cleo Monroe has a hunch she knows who took Sienna and why. If she’s right, that information could buy her a ticket to a better life. As the search parties fan out and the clock runs down, the three women inexorably close in on the horrifying truth. A truth that only one of them will survive. Keep Her Close,  the chilling psychol...

Review: The Striker - Book #1 Gods of the Game Series - Ana Huang - October 2024 I'll be honest with you Ana Huang and I have had quite the complicated relationship. Her books have been a bit of a mixed bag for me over the years, landing anywhere from absolute favourites to DNFs (did-not-finishes, for those not deep in the bookish rabbit hole). So when I packed my bags for our Readers Retreat in Taupō last week, I finally decided it was time to give The Striker a proper chance. It had been sitting on my shelf since release, quietly judging me every time I walked past. You know that feeling. We've all been there. And oh my goodness  how did it take me this long? I'm so glad I finally cracked the spine on this one, because The Striker completely won me over. At its heart, it's a football romance and when I say football, I do mean soccer, just so we're all on the same page! Our hero, Asher Donovan, is an absolute dreamboat of a soccer champion who has just switched ...

Review: Games Untold - Short Stories - An Inheritance Games Collection - Jennifer Lynn Barnes - November 2024 I've been a Jennifer Lynn Barnes fan for longer than I care to admit it all started back in the early 2000s when I picked up Tattoo and was completely swept away. Since then I've devoured everything she's written, but it's The Inheritance Games universe that truly has my heart. And honestly? Choosing a favourite Hawthorne brother is impossible. Xander's humour has me snorting with laughter, Nash's old-fashioned gentlemanly ways make me swoon, Grayson's fierce loyalty makes me feel so safe, and Jameson oh, Jameson with those romantic gestures and that deliciously mysterious streak. They each hold a little piece of my reader's heart. So when I took  Games Untold off my bookshelf  for the Readers Retreat I attended in Taupo last weekend, I knew exactly how I'd be spending my downtime. Curled up, cup of tea in hand, utterly lost in the Hawthorne...