Tag: Book Reviews

Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Facing the long shadows: A review of Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker

Mandy Webster

Some novels get under your skin. Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker goes even deeper—straight into your bones—where it sits heavy, resonating with truths too often ignored.

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At its heart, Madwoman is a story about the devastating, lifelong impact of domestic violence, especially on children. Clove has carefully built a life meant to erase her past: a loving husband, two children, a safe home in Portland. She believes that with enough self-help tools, supplements, and daily gratitude meditations, she can outrun the terror of her childhood in a Waikiki high-rise.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Facing the demons we inherit: a review of This Is My Body by Lindsay King-Miller

Mandy Webster

Shame is a demon—and sometimes it takes more than holy water to drive it out. In This Is My Body, Lindsay King-Miller delivers a gut-punch of a horror novel that fuses family trauma, queer identity, and religious extremism into a story that’s as unsettling as it is compulsively readable. At its core, this is a book about how the shame we inherit can twist us, haunt us, and, if left unchecked, destroy us.

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Brigid, a gay single mom, has spent years keeping her daughter Dylan far from the influence of her fanatically Catholic family. But when Dylan begins experiencing violent, terrifying fits that seem eerily familiar to an incident from Brigid’s childhood, she does the unthinkable—she goes back. Back to the home she swore she’d never return to. Back to her manipulative, self-righteous Uncle Angus, the priest who once “saved” a girl through exorcism.

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Finding power in the dirt: A review of The Peculiar Garden of Harriet Hunt

Mandy Webster

In The Peculiar Garden of Harriet Hunt by Chelsea Iversen, a woman’s solitude, survival, and subtle rebellion are rooted—quite literally—in the soil beneath her feet.

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Set in Victorian London, this gorgeously atmospheric novel tells the story of Harriet Hunt, a woman left to tend her crumbling family estate and the lush, almost sentient garden that surrounds it. Her father has mysteriously disappeared, and society has all but cast her aside. Her only companions are the magical plants she lovingly tends: wild vines, blooming plums, and a pulse of earth-bound power that seems to know her better than anyone else ever has.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

The Dead Husband Cookbook is a wickedly satisfying feast of justice

Mandy Webster

Some recipes call for salt, sugar, and spice—but in Danielle Valentine’s The Dead Husband Cookbook, the secret ingredient is retribution. When infamous chef and TV personality Maria Capello’s husband vanishes under suspicious circumstances, the whispers never stop. The media paints her as a murderer, a woman who cooked up her culinary empire on the bones of her missing spouse. But Maria never talks. Not for decades. Not until now.

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Thea Woods, an up-and-coming writer, gets the job of a lifetime: working with Maria on her explosive memoir. She’s whisked away to the Capello family’s secluded farm, where the air smells faintly of nostalgia—and something far more unsettling. It doesn’t take long before Thea realizes that Damien Capello isn’t the only man who has gone missing in this family’s orbit. And the deeper she digs, the more she begins to understand that Maria’s perfect “coastal grandmother” persona hides a recipe of equal parts love, loyalty, and something darker.

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The Witch of Willow Sound is a haunting tale of memory, superstition, and the danger of silence

Mandy Webster

If you lived beneath a rock that might crush you at any moment, would you believe in witches? In The Witch of Willow Sound, debut author Vanessa F. Penney weaves a chilling and fast-paced gothic tale that blends feminist themes with East Coast folklore, offering a story that’s as unsettling as it is poignant. When Fade returns to the shadowy forests of Willow Sound, Nova Scotia, in search of her missing aunt Madeline, she finds only a rotting cottage and a community eager to assign blame. The villagers of nearby Grand Tea have always called Madeline a witch—but now, as misfortunes pile up and a hurricane approaches, their fear is turning violent.

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The worldbuilding in this novel is both original and deeply atmospheric. At the heart of Grand Tea’s folklore and fear is a massive rock perched above the town, a looming presence that could fall at any moment. You can feel the weight of it as you read—how its threat presses down on the villagers, shaping their beliefs, their behaviors, even their cruelty. The psychological tension it creates is masterful. It makes perfect, eerie sense that a place so precariously positioned would invent scapegoats and spin stories about curses and witches. The mob mentality that develops is reminiscent of The Crucible, complete with paranoia and projection.

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Book Reviews

How to review a book (and how many stars to give it)

Mandy Webster

If you’ve ever stared at a review box after finishing a book and thought, I liked it… but was it a three-star read or a four-star one?, you’re not alone. Book reviews, especially those with a star rating attached, can feel deceptively simple—but they deserve some real thought. After all, your review might influence someone else’s decision to read (or skip) a book.

How do you decide which books merit five stars vs. three or even one?

So how do you decide what to say? And how many stars should you give?

Let’s start with the most important question: Why review books at all?

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Would you move in with a man you suspect is a serial killer? Love Letters to a Serial Killer asks why so many women say yes

Mandy Webster

Tasha Coryell’s Love Letters to a Serial Killer is a gripping character study disguised as a thriller—and just when you think it’s about to go full Dateline, it pivots into something stranger, sadder, and, at times, even a little cozy. Yes, cozy.

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The setup sounds ripped from a true-crime podcast: Hannah, a thirty-something woman drifting through life, starts writing letters to William, an accused serial killer awaiting trial. When he’s acquitted, she doesn’t just meet him—she moves in with him. Not because she believes in his innocence. She doesn’t. She just— can’t resist.

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It Was Her House First by Cherie Priest is a chilling ghost story with a smart, skeptical heroine—and a lesson in listening to your gut

Mandy Webster

Cherie Priest’s It Was Her House First is a fresh take on the haunted house novel, blending magical realism with classic ghost story suspense and a smart, wary heroine you can’t help but root for. When Ronnie Mitchell inherits enough money to finally buy her dream home, she snaps up a dilapidated cliffside mansion sight unseen—only to discover it comes with a terrible legacy and a very possessive spirit.

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That spirit is Venita Rost, a former silent film star who may look like a cat now, but still has claws—and a long memory. Venita’s fury radiates through the house, where she is eternally bound with her nemesis, Bartholomew Sloan, a ghost shackled by his own complicity. Their presence lingers not only in creaking floorboards and flickering lights, but also in eerie, unforgettable moments—like when a man named Hugh shows up at the back door to “work” on the house. Ronnie knows he’s not living. She also knows better than to pretend otherwise. The way Priest blends these surreal moments into the everyday is one of the book’s most magical and eerie strengths.

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What really happened on that study abroad trip? This Stays Between Us is a thriller with secrets, nostalgia, and a killer twist

Mandy Webster

There’s something about group travel—especially when you’re young and far from home—that heightens everything. The connections are fast, the drama is intense, and the stakes, whether you realize it or not, can be life changing. For me, it was a study abroad trip to Portugal, Spain, and Gibraltar at seventeen: whirlwind friendships, unrequited love, long hours on a tour bus, and at least one fellow traveler who drank too much and clearly needed help. We even had a retired singer who we realized – after my cousin recognized her from an old vinyl album of our grandma’s – had killed her husband decades before. And the “professor” who organized the trip? A con artist who scammed us out of a promised excursion to Morocco. Thankfully, no one ended up dead on that trip, but reading Sara Ochs’ This Stays Between Us brought a lot of that strange, charged energy back.

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This sharply constructed thriller centers on two timelines: the “then,” when a group of students embarks on a month-long study abroad adventure in Australia, and the “now,” when the discovery of a long-missing student’s remains forces the group back together. From the beginning, there’s a sense that the friendships formed on the trip—particularly between best friends Claire and Phoebe—weren’t as solid as they appeared. And as we learn more about what happened on the trip, the facade begins to crack.

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Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk sinks its fangs into grief, motherhood, and the hunger we can’t outrun

Mandy Webster

In this haunting Argentine gothic, the vampire isn’t a glamorous predator but a creature driven by instinct—feral, tragic, and devastatingly human. Marina Yuszczuk’s Thirst, translated by Heather Cleary, breathes new (undead) life into the vampire novel, weaving a queer, feminist narrative that shifts between 19th-century Buenos Aires and its modern-day counterpart. The result is an eerie and lyrical meditation on desire, decay, and the violent inheritance of womanhood.

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The novel opens with the vampire as a child, taken by her mother and given over to the man who will eventually transform her. From the beginning, Thirst is deeply concerned with the bond between mothers and daughters—and the ways that bond can be both protective and damning. In the present day, the unnamed narrator grapples with her own mother’s slow death while caring for her young son. Grief unmoors her, and she finds herself wandering the cemetery where she first encounters the vampire. What begins as curiosity blooms into obsession, desire, and something even darker.

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