Review: Hana - Book #1.5 Delirium Series - Lauren Oliver - December 2011 I have a confession to make. This book had been sitting on my Kindle since January 2012, quietly waiting, until now. Sometimes a story finds you exactly when it's meant to, and picking up Hana after all these years felt less like reading a novella and more like stepping back through a door I didn't know I'd left open. Reading it transported me straight back to 2010–2012, that golden era when dystopian YA ruled every bookshelf and every teenage heart. It also brought back a memory I treasure, organising a Zoom call with Lauren Oliver herself for a teen reading finale at Tauranga Libraries, right here in little ol' New Zealand. Talk about full circle. Hana gives us the summer before the cure, told from the other side of the friendship at the heart of Delirium. While Lena is pulling away from the noise and risk of the underground world, Hana is doing the opposite  chasing every last taste of freed...

Review: Lumberjanes - Book #5 - Various Contributors - June 2026 There's a particular kind of comfort in opening a Lumberjanes book  it's the comic equivalent of walking into your childhood bedroom and finding everything exactly where you left it, except somehow even more delightful than you remembered. Volume 5 (collecting issues #49–60) is no exception, and honestly, it might be one of my favorite helpings of camp chaos yet. April, Jo, Mal, Molly, and Ripley are back, and as always, the world refuses to let them have a normal week. Between navigating underground labyrinths, getting swept up in a board game with actual magical stakes, and accidentally waking up an ancient Greek goddess (you know, typical Tuesday stuff), this volume packs in enough adventure for three ordinary book series. And yet nothing ever feels rushed or overstuffed ,  it all unfolds with that easy, breathless energy the series has perfected, where the absurd and the heartfelt sit side by side without m...

Review: The Boarding School Experiment - Book #1 Experiment Series - Emily Evans - September 2012 There's a particular kind of joy in curling up with a new Emily Evans book, and I'll admit I went into this one already grinning before I'd even cracked the spine. Emily is one of those authors whose name on a cover is basically a promise.  I know I'm in for something fun, fast, and full of heart and pair that with a boarding school setting, my absolute weakness as a reader, and this felt like it was written just for me. The premise had me hooked immediately. There are three steps to taking revenge on the most popular, hottest guy in your senior class: stealth, planning, and execution. Poor Elena manages precisely none of them, and instead of getting her satisfying payback, she ends up shipped off to a government-run boarding school out in the wilds of Alaska. And because the universe has a sense of humour, Thane Trallwyn  her sworn enemy and the very target of her failed...

Review: The Roommate Subtest - Elia Winters - September 2026 I'll be honest with you, dear reader: there was a moment, somewhere in the middle of this book, where I set it down on the arm of the couch and genuinely considered not picking it back up. That's not a great sign for a review, I know. But stick with me, because something pulled me back in, and I think it's worth talking about why. The Roommate Subtext gives us Maggie St. Claire, a freelance journalist who's perfectly content admiring her roommate Blake from a respectable distance,  hot, nerdy, surrounded by an absurd jungle of houseplants he clearly loves more than is reasonable. It's cozy. It's domestic. It's the kind of set-up that makes you want to put the kettle on. Then Maggie lands an assignment to expose an anonymous online kinkster called The Scarlet Pimpernel, and suddenly sitting across the breakfast table from sweet, wholesome Blake gets a lot more complicated. Because Blake, botanist ...

Review: The Last Eight Hours - S.C Shannon - September 2026 There's something deliciously unsettling about a book that opens with blood already spilled and a mind already blank, and The Last Eight Hours wastes no time pulling you into that unease. I curled up with this one expecting a straightforward thriller, and instead got tangled in a web I'm still thinking about days later  the kind of read that makes you want to text a friend at midnight just to say "you HAVE to read this." We meet Tessa in the worst possible moment of her life: sore, disoriented, and standing over the bodies of her husband and his business partner. She can't remember the last eight hours. She doesn't know if she did this. Honestly, neither do we, and that shared confusion is what makes the opening so gripping , we're figuring it out right alongside her. From there, we read as Tessa returns home to Cascade Bay, falling into a whirlwind romance with the charming Grayson, and meet...