I have been meaning to read Chris Whitaker’s We Begin at the End since I read All the Colors of the Dark last year. Better late than never. I’ve had a hankering for another slow burn, character driven mystery ever since reading Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods, and this novel was exactly what I needed.
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katherena vermette’s most recent novel, real ones, is about a subject that I find intriguing, people who falsely identify as Indigenous (or who falsely identify as any race really). This novel came out about a year after it was revealed that American musician Buffy Sainte-Marie’s fabricated claims of Indigenous ancestry. Where do white people get the audacity to pass themselves off as another race that has been marginalized by white people? (It’s a rhetorical question). As interesting as I found real ones to be, though, I must admit that I do not love how vermette wrote this story.
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I must like stories about astronauts and space travel more than I thought, because I ended up enjoying Atmosphere considering my lackluster feelings towards Taylor Jenkins Reid.
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Untamed Shore is a noir novel featuring a questionable death and a shockingly cunning protagonist. I thought this was going to be another rote story about a good girl getting caught up with bad people, but I quite enjoyed the change in the protagonist’s character late in the story.
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The Burning God is the final book of The Poppy War trilogy. Although I liked this book better than The Dragon Republic, my favourite is the first book, before the story devolved into one long civil war. If you are a fan of the fantasy genre, and do not find war to be a tedious subject, then I think you will enjoy this trilogy.
Spoilers ahead for both The Poppy War and The Dragon Republic, just in case you plan on reading them.
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Two in one review! Honestly, I probably would have never bothered with reading these sequels to Nita Prose’s The Maid if I had not come across them on Book Outlet. As it is, I did not read the novella set between The Mystery Guest and The Maid’s Secret. Both of these novels are as cutesy as the first novel in the series, but I do not think they are good mystery novels.
Spoilers ahead for The Maid in case you plan on reading it.
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Just because a book is compulsively readable does not mean it is good. I read The Teacher in about two days, and it is the trashiest trash that I have ever read. It is even worse than that one Colleen Hoover book I read. I have never read anything by Freida McFadden until now and I do not understand why any of her books would be made into movies. And just so you know, I did not buy this book myself, my sister gave it to me. I am now beginning to question her taste in books.
Spoilers ahead because I really do not think you should bother reading this crap.
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I think I waited too long after finishing The Poppy War to read book two of the trilogy, The Dragon Republic, because the story has lost momentum for me and Rin is becoming an exasperating protagonist.
If you plan on reading The Poppy War, obviously do not continue reading this review of The Dragon Republic as there are spoilers.
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I feel like I did not read enough books in 2025, so I am going to have to up the ante in 2026. Before I do that, though, here are my top five books of 2025:
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After reading Richard Powers’ dense novel, The Overstory, Playground is definitely a much easier read, but there are many different thematic threads woven through Playground that I found myself feeling disoriented about what the novel is supposed to be about, and then the end hit me with a sledgehammer and left me feeling devastated.
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