Review: Librarian Tales - William Ottens - September 2020 Some books arrive in your life at exactly the right moment. Librarian Tales by William Ottens was a birthday present, and it was the perfect one for a self-proclaimed bookworm and bibliophile like me. This book was written for librarians, by a librarian. It's part memoir, part behind-the-desk confessional, and it doesn't shy away from any side of the job. There's the fun, the ugly, and the endless parade of weird and wacky things we see and get asked. If you've ever worked a library desk, you'll be nodding along, laughing, and occasionally wincing in recognition. And if you haven't, it's a wonderful peek behind the curtain at what librarians really get up to (spoiler: it's a lot more than stamping books). It spoke to me because books and readers' advisory are my true passion. I was that librarian. I had the Dewey Decimal system memorised. I remembered what each customer read so I could h...

Review: Nightshade - Vanessa Edwards - July 2026 Nightshade by Vanessa Edwards begins with a heartbreak. Years ago, Mary fell head over heels for a man who treated her like she was the whole world. Then, just like that, he broke her heart by choosing someone else. That someone was Alice, who is now his wife. Fast forward to the present and Ed has Mary back in his life. She makes him feel wanted, and he's planning to divorce Alice and marry the woman he should have picked all those years ago. Alice, however, has other ideas. A divorce would leave her penniless, and that simply won't do for the lifestyle she's grown so fond of. So she gathers up a little "nightshade" (of course she does!) and poisons her husband. Alice is quite certain she's got away with it. But she's forgotten someone. Enter Lina, the nanny, who has seen more than Alice ever realised. When Alice tries to fire her, Lina has her ammunition ready, and things get deliciously tense from ther...

        Synopsis: Forever Relentless - Book #3 Fourth and Forever Series  - Eve L. Mitchell - September 2026 This is the darkest entry in the series so far, and I mean that as a warning as much as a promise. Noah Matthews is the one they call in when the Alabama Lions need control, not mercy -the enforcer, not the golden boy. He is not a soft landing. They call him the enforcer. The one the team unleashes when control matters more than mercy. I noticed him the second I set foot on campus. That one. Never that one. I should have listened. I didn't come to Wrighton to admire the golden boys. I came to drag their secrets into the light for what they did to my brother. I forged a new name, a new past and slipped inside their world. Except Noah Matthews saw through it all. He knows exactly who I am. What I'm hunting. One word from him would cost me everything. And he knows it. He should have turned me in. That he hasn't is so much worse. He just watches. Crowds ...

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: A Beginner's Guide to Leveling Up - Elizabeth Agyemang - September 2026 I'll admit it I picked this one up expecting a fun, low-stakes gaming story. What I got instead was a graphic novel that quietly snuck up on me and left me a little misty-eyed on my couch, coffee gone cold beside me. A Beginner's Guide to Leveling Up follows Lexie, a sixth grader who had big plans for this school year: new clubs, the ideal lunch table, and after-school gaming sessions with her best friends. Instead, she's dealing with shifting friendships and the very real, very heavy grief of losing her grandfather. If you've ever watched a kid try to hold it together while everything around them changes at once, you'll recognize that ache immediately. Here's where the story does something special. Lexie finds a journal hidden among her grandfather's belongings .  full of cryptic notes and cheat codes for an unfinished video game he'd been building called Warrior...

Review: Across The Vanishing Sky - Book #1 Starlight Grove - Catherine Cowles - March 2026 I recently received this book as part of a bookstagram birthday group I belong to, and I have to say what a gift. It had been sitting on my wishlist and my want-to-read list for a while, so seeing it show up felt like fate finally giving me a nudge. I didn't know much going in, just that it was a small-town novel with a romantic suspense edge, and honestly, that was the perfect amount of mystery to start with. The story opens with our main character, Braedyn, hiking with her best friend Nova. They get separated for just a moment  and Nova vanishes without a trace. The police chalk it up to a bear attack or the river sweeping her away, but Braedyn knows in her gut that someone took her. My heart broke for her right from those first pages. Fast forward one year, and Braedyn has packed up her life and her son to move to Starlight Grove, determined to return to the spot where Nova disappeare...

Review: Inventing Mr. Darcy - Susanna Craig - September 2026 Confession time: I picked this one up because I, too, am the kind of person who would name a cat after Mr. Bingley. So when I met Elle a grad student whose entire dissertation, reading life, and general worldview orbit Jane Austen  I felt instantly, embarrassingly seen. Elle's world is a cozy, familiar one. She's deep in her research on Pride and Prejudice, her cat Bing Bong (no relation to the sweet elephant from Inside Out ,  though I did have to do a double take) is curled up nearby, and Austen is basically the sun her whole life orbits. Then, one late night in the university archives, working on the AUSTEN-C database, a geomagnetic storm rips through the sky. Flash. Bang. And Elle wakes up in a world where Jane Austen never existed at all. This is where the book really won me over. It's not just "no Austen" as a throwaway premise Susanna Craig actually follows the ripple effects. No Hallmark Chan...