Review: Finders Keepers - Jessica Huntley - September 2026 Some books have you reaching for a cuppa and settling into the couch. This one had me reaching for a cuppa and glancing nervously at the door. Finders Keepers opens with Mel, Liv and Jennie, three lifelong friends who would do anything for each other. When Mel's mum passes away, a hidden key leads them to a storage unit. Inside they find more than £100,000 in cash, and a body. And because the girls are in desperate need of money, they make a decision that will haunt them: keep the cash, say nothing. Reading that opening, I couldn't help thinking of the true New Zealand case from a few years back, when an Auckland family bought an old storage shed at auction, opened it up, and found two suitcases with human remains inside. They stumbled on a fortune too, and they've been paying the price ever since. It gave me a proper shiver. Real life, it turns out, can be every bit as unsettling as fiction, and it made Jessica H...

VBT# Review- Nourish - Laura Baggaley - July 2026 Imagine a world where nobody eats. No Sunday roasts, no warm toast, no biscuit dunked in tea. Instead there are liquid injections and vitamin pills, and a generation of people who wouldn't know what taste is. That's the world of Laura Baggaley's Nourish, and I haven't stopped thinking about it since. Our hero is Cal, who lives in a post-food society where people receive what's known as Nutritional Provision. It's tidy and efficient, and everyone accepts it as simply how things are. Then Cal's father dies, and he's sent to a fancy boarding school. It's there that he finds a rare edible substance, something that shouldn't exist, and it makes him question everything he's ever been told about nourishment. What I loved most is how the book gets you thinking about the small, ordinary things we take for granted. The smell of something baking, the way a meal brings people to a table, the comfort of ...

Review: Dead Girls - Girls Just Wanna Get Even - Beck Kubrick - September 2026 I'll be honest, I picked this one up expecting a fun, gory romp through slasher tropes, and while I absolutely got that, I wasn't prepared for how much this graphic novel would sneak up on me emotionally. Dead Girls is exactly what it promises on the tin  a love letter to slasher films but it's the friendship at its center that really got under my skin. Clossdale is the kind of small town that horror fans will recognize instantly: pretty on the surface, rotten underneath, and apparently cursed with an alarming body count of teenage girls. When a fifth victim turns up, suspicion immediately falls on Ash, the daughter of a notorious serial killer. There's something so viscerally unfair about watching Ash carry the weight of her mother's crimes, and I found myself rooting for her from page one  not because she's a perfect heroine, but because she's angry, and she has every right to ...

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: Venomous - Book #2 Monstrous Series - Nicole M. Rubino - October 2024 Some books sit on your Kindle for years before the right moment finally comes along to read them. Venomous by Nicole M. Rubino was one of those books for me. I’d had this one sitting on my Kindle for a couple of years, but it was an August reading challenge that finally gave me the push I needed. One of the prompts was for a mythology retelling, and I immediately knew this was going to be the perfect choice. Sometimes a reading challenge really does know what you need to pick up next! After surviving her first year at Alystair University, Rhiannon is barely holding things together. She is plagued by nightmares that blur the boundaries between dreams and reality, while the guilt of the friends she failed to protect continues to weigh heavily on her. Then there is Nick. Believing that letting him go was the only way to keep him safe, Rhiannon soon discovers that her plan has spectacularly backfired as Nick’s o...

Review: Tragedy Girl - Christine Hurley Deriso - April 2016  There are some books that feel like they would be right at home on a quiet afternoon, curled up on the sofa with a cuppa and a blanket, and Tragedy Girl was one of those reads for me. What makes this one particularly interesting is that it was originally published a decade ago, back in 2016 . Picking it up in 2026, I found myself enjoying this little trip back to a style of YA mystery that feels both familiar and refreshingly uncomplicated. Anne has already been through more heartbreak than anyone her age should have to endure. Her parents have died in a car accident, leaving her trying to find her way through life while carrying that enormous loss with her. Then she meets Blake. He’s good looking, friendly and, perhaps most importantly, he understands grief. His girlfriend, Cara, drowned, although her body was never recovered. It seems almost inevitable that Anne would be drawn to him. After all, they have something in ...

Review: Connected - Rori K. Pierce - March 2021 There’s something wonderfully familiar about Connected . It feels like the kind of story that could be happening quietly in the house next door,  behind a bedroom door, in late-night messages, and in the complicated world of a teenager trying to figure out who she really is. Bethany  is a high school wallflower who has found herself caught in a relationship that has slowly become anything but healthy. Trevor started out as someone she fell for hard and fast, but his controlling behaviour gradually strips away pieces of the girl she used to be. He encourages her to distance herself from friends, experiment with drugs and make choices that leave her increasingly isolated. With Homecoming approaching, Bethany knows something has to change before she loses herself completely. What I particularly loved about Bethany is that her journey doesn’t feel magically easy. Breaking away from someone who has manipulated and cont...

Review: I Dare You - Book #1 Ruin Me Duet - Monica James - July 2026 I have to be honest  I was hooked before I even opened the first page. That blurb alone had me convinced this was going to be a 5-star read, and honestly? I love it when a book actually lives up to that kind of hype, because it doesn't always happen. This one did, and then some. The story kicks off with a bang (quite literally)  a popular cheerleader turns up dead, and from there we're pulled into this gripping dual timeline of past and present as we piece together not just who killed her, but who Hallie Holiday really is. We get her before, the girl she used to be, and her after ,  the version of herself she built from the ashes of one brutal night that changed everything. Watching that transformation unfold, layer by layer, was honestly one of my favourite parts of the whole book. Three years on, Hallie is living under a new name, tucked away in a town where nobody knows her history, just trying to s...

Review: Slice - Angie Caedis - September 2023 There's something so satisfying about judging a book by its cover and having it actually pay off, and that's exactly what happened with Slice. I had absolutely no idea what this story was about when I picked it up , I just knew I loved the cover and had to click in. Sometimes that's all it takes, isn't it? What I got was one of my all-time favourite tropes: a group of people stranded on a secluded island, being picked off one by one. There's just something so deliciously tense about that setup, and Caedis leans right into it. The story follows Bec, celebrating her thirtieth birthday (which, funnily enough, feels extra fitting to be reading about on my own birthday today) with a trip her boyfriend Tyler has organised a private mansion, a secluded island, and their whole friend group along for the week. It starts off exactly how these trips always do in books like this: sun, drinks, laughter... and then the cracks start ...

Review: Sounds Like Love - Ashley Poston - June 2025 You know how there are just some authors you will always read, no matter what they write next? For me, Ashley Poston is one of those authors. Every single one of her books feels like it was written to be a movie, and honestly, I'd give anything to see them on the big screen one day. This little gem found its way to me as a bookstagram birthday gift from the lovely @nzbookfae, and what a gift it turned out to be. If I had to describe the vibe, I'd say it's a cosy mash-up of What Women Want crossed with Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist equal parts magic, music, and heart. We meet Joni Lark and Sebastian McKellan, two people who couldn't be more different. Joni's a songwriter quietly battling writer's block, and Sebastian's a singer with the whole world watching him. They're polar opposites, right up until a surprise Kiss Cam moment throws a spark between them that neither of them sees coming. Suddenl...