Tag: Book Blog

Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Beautyland review: what it means to be from another planet (or maybe just human)

Mandy Webster

There are books you read, and there are books that read you. Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland falls firmly in the latter category—a shimmering, genre-bending novel that manages to feel both comfortingly familiar and utterly alien in the best sense of the word.

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On the surface, Beautyland is a portrait of Adina Giorno, born in 1977 Philadelphia at the moment Voyager 1 launches into space, carrying the famous Golden Record—a time capsule intended to tell extraterrestrial life about Earth. Adina, it turns out, might be an alien herself, sent to observe Earthlings and report back via fax machine to her faraway planet. This premise alone is delightfully surreal, but Bertino isn’t writing science fiction as escape. She’s using it as a lens to magnify something deeper and more tender: what it means to live life feeling not entirely of this world.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

The Trap you won’t see coming: Catherine Ryan Howard’s masterclass in modern crime fiction

Mandy Webster

Catherine Ryan Howard’s The Trap is a masterfully crafted psychological thriller that deserves far more attention than its underwhelming cover might suggest. Inspired by the real-life disappearances of women in 1990s Ireland, the novel is as unsettling as it is propulsive, offering a chilling and suspenseful exploration of grief, obsession, and the desperate human need for answers.

Get your copy of The Trap from my independent online bookstore today!

The story unfolds through three distinct perspectives: Lucy, a woman determined to catch her sister’s killer after her mysterious disappearance; Angela, a civilian working with the Irish police whose side investigation threatens both the case and her career; and a nameless predator whose terrifying narration will keep your heart pounding. These shifting points of view give the book its pace and emotional heft, and Howard moves between them with expert precision.

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Annie Bot made me relive my abusive marriage—and that’s what makes it so powerful

Mandy Webster

In Sierra Greer’s novel Annie Bot, a robot girlfriend cooks, dresses, and has sex on demand—all at the pleasure of her human owner, Doug. She’s designed to be the “perfect” woman, built to fulfill his desires without resistance. But as her artificial intelligence evolves, so does her awareness, and what begins as obedience starts to feel like a slow, painful awakening.

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I didn’t expect to find pieces of myself in a robot. But Annie Bot made me feel an immediate—and visceral—sense of recognition. Like Annie, I once existed solely to please someone else. My (now ex) husband didn’t see me as a person—only as the idea of a wife he wanted to mold me into. Over ten years of marriage, I was trained through threats, manipulation, psychological warfare, and physical violence to anticipate his moods, regulate my behavior, and suppress anything that didn’t align with his expectations. That Annie had to do the same—scan Doug’s tone, facial expressions, and body language, and modulate her responses accordingly—was deeply familiar.

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What’s the point of surviving? A haunting look at life after captivity in I Who Have Never Known Men

Mandy Webster

Most dystopian novels are driven by resistance, escape, or revolution. Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men asks a deeper, more disquieting question: What happens after? After the fences fall, after the captors vanish, after the systems collapse. What’s left to live for—especially when you never knew what it meant to live in the first place?

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Originally published in 1995 and recently rediscovered by BookTok readers who can’t stop recommending it, this slim but devastating novel centers on a girl known only as “the child”—the youngest of forty women imprisoned deep underground by silent male guards. The women have no memory of how they got there or how long they’ve been inside. Time doesn’t function the way it should. They suspect they were drugged. They’re fed regularly, forbidden from touching, and watched constantly, but no explanations are ever given. It’s a setting that feels like a cross between The Handmaid’s Tale and The Road but stripped of the usual narrative comforts: there’s no master plan to uncover, no rebellion to lead, and no villain to confront. There’s only waiting.

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What secrets lie beneath the surface of The Bog Wife?

Mandy Webster

What happens when the land that sustained your family for generations suddenly stops keeping its end of the bargain? In The Bog Wife, Kay Chronister drops us into the eerie isolation of rural West Virginia, where five estranged siblings are forced to confront not just each other but the decaying legacy of their ancestral covenant. The Haddesleys have always served the cranberry bog, and in return, the bog has given them what they need—until now.

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This novel is southern gothic by way of eco-horror, rich with decaying settings, creeping dread, and characters who make you want to shout at the page. And I mean that literally: there are moments when you’ll be begging Wenna, the middle child trying to break free, to just Google something already. But that’s part of the tension. These characters have been so deeply insulated from the outside world that the obvious often eludes them. Their sense of what is normal, what is allowed, what is true, has been shaped entirely by what they’ve been taught to believe—and by what they’ve been carefully kept from knowing.

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What happens when the rich girls fall? Megan Abbott’s El Dorado Drive delivers a smart, suspenseful answer

Mandy Webster

Once upon a time, the Bishop sisters were the kind of women thrillers love to center: wealthy, well-dressed suburbanites who lunch and plot in cul-de-sacs that glisten like glass. But Megan Abbott has never been interested in the fairytale version of domestic noir. In El Dorado Drive, she rips those women from their thrones and deposits them somewhere much more volatile—post-auto-industry Detroit—and asks what happens when the once-powerful fall from grace. The answer is the Wheel.

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Harper Bishop, the youngest of the three sisters, is just trying to survive. Her finances are a mess, and her once-golden life has dulled into daily stress and compromise. When her older sisters—Pam, charming but in the middle of a messy divorce, and Debra, the family’s once-proud matriarch—invite her to join a secretive new club, she’s intrigued. The Wheel, they promise, isn’t an MLM or a pyramid scheme. It’s a sisterhood. A chance. A solution. But readers know better. Abbott knows we know better.

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What price are you willing to pay? Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It explores ambition, class, and compromise on a college campus

Mandy Webster

What starts as a college novel about an overworked RA quickly builds into something darker, messier, and far more interesting. In Come and Get It, Kiley Reid (Such a Fun Age) pulls readers into the fluorescent-lit hallways of a University of Arkansas dorm where ambition, identity, and power quietly grind against one another until the friction threatens to ignite.

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The book centers on Millie Cousins, a 24-year-old “super senior” RA with big goals and a razor-sharp budget spreadsheet. She dreams of homeownership, financial stability, and a long-term campus job—ideally in housing, a world she knows inside and out. Millie genuinely enjoys dorm life, even the rituals of roommate drama and bulletin boards. But despite her clear-eyed focus, she’s mired in the emotional labor of Belgrade Dormitory, where she splits duties with another RA and is expected to monitor the mental health and behavior of dozens of residents—all for just $250 a month.

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What secrets lie behind the Midnight Door? Katrina Monroe’s haunting tale of sisterhood and trauma

Mandy Webster

What if the scariest thing isn’t what waits behind a mysterious door, but what happens when you never speak of it again? Katrina Monroe’s Through the Midnight Door is a genre-bending novel that slips between the psychological and the supernatural, the traumatic and the magical, all while anchoring itself in the emotionally raw terrain of sisterhood. It’s eerie and unsettling in the best way—but also heartbreakingly intimate.

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Years after the Finch sisters dared to unlock the doors in a seemingly impossible abandoned house in their dying hometown, the youngest, Claire, is found dead inside it. Her death pulls Meg and Esther—both estranged and damaged in different ways—back into each other’s lives. They’re not just grieving a sister; they’re unraveling what really happened that summer and what they never told each other.

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Why you shouldn’t sleep on Jessica Johns’ Bad Cree: A chilling debut about family, grief, and survival

Mandy Webster

What begins with a severed crow’s head and a haunting dream evolves into something far more layered in Bad Cree, Jessica Johns’ eerie and powerful debut. This genre-blending novel offers readers a gripping supernatural mystery while also digging deep into themes of grief, intergenerational trauma, and the quiet, often unseen strength of women supporting one another through pain.

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When Mackenzie wakes to find a crow’s head in her hands—only to have it vanish—she can no longer ignore the disturbing dreams that have been plaguing her. As her waking world becomes increasingly infected by her nightmares, she leaves Vancouver for her hometown in Alberta to reconnect with the family she left behind. At first, she fears the worst: her mother and sister are furious with her for skipping her sister Sabrina’s funeral. The stage is set for major emotional fallout—but instead of fracturing further, the women in Mackenzie’s family do something more surprising: they show up for each other.

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What if your dreams could incriminate you? A review of The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami

Mandy Webster

Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel is one of the most urgent and unputdownable novels I’ve read in years. I devoured it in a single day, heart pounding and mind racing, both captivated by its story and shaken by how plausible it all feels. Set in a chillingly believable future where artificial intelligence and corporate surveillance have penetrated even our subconscious minds, the book offers a harrowing exploration of power, privacy, and resistance—especially for women.

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When Sara returns home from an overseas trip, she’s abruptly detained by the Risk Assessment Administration and told that, based on an algorithm analyzing her dreams, she is likely to commit a violent crime against her husband. She’s placed in a detention center with other “dreamers,” all women, all accused not of what they’ve done, but of what they might do. With every misstep—real or perceived—their stay is extended, and their ability to prove their innocence slips further out of reach.

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