Tag: NetGalley

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Listen by Sacha Bronwasser explores who gets seen—and who gets silenced

Mandy Webster

Sacha Bronwasser’s Listen is a quiet, unsettling novel that stares straight into the power imbalance between those who look and those who are looked at—and asks what happens when the powerless finally start to speak. Translated from Dutch, Listen unfolds slowly, like a photograph coming into focus, until the image becomes both vivid and painful.

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The novel moves between Paris and the Netherlands, between 1989 and 2015, tracing two women—Eloise and Marie—whose lives briefly overlap through the same family and the same Paris apartment. Both arrive as au pairs, both nearly invisible to the family they serve, and both find themselves noticed at last only when that attention becomes dangerous.

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Finding her voice: The Writing Room by Marcia Argueta Mickelson

Mandy Webster

In The Writing Room (releasing November 4, 2025), Marcia Argueta Mickelson delivers a powerful coming-of-age story about finding your voice, claiming your space, and learning that silence in the face of injustice is its own kind of complicity.

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

Eighteen-year-old Maya has just graduated high school when her wealthy, self-satisfied father kicks her out of his New York City apartment to “make her own way.” With her mother living in Guatemala and her father’s emotional abuse still echoing in her head, Maya spends the summer sleeping on her friend Yoly’s couch while she works, writes, and counts the weeks until she can move into the dorms for college. Her life changes when she gains access to a shared workspace known as “the writing room,” a place that gives her both the structure and sense of community she’s been missing.

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When going home means facing the ghosts you tried to forget: Do Not Follow by Surbhi Bansal

Mandy Webster

Returning home after years away can feel like stepping back into a life you no longer recognize. In Do Not Follow by Surbhi Bansal, that homecoming forces one woman to confront the choices, expectations, and silences that have shaped her entire life.

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Seema, once a promising surgeon, is now a consignment store owner living far from the path her family imagined for her. When her father dies, she returns to Albany after seventeen years to help her mother sort through their family home. What follows is a deeply emotional story about grief, identity, and the unspoken costs of cultural and familial duty.

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Pam Kowalski is a Monster! by Sarah Langan — When memory lies and the world unravels

Mandy Webster

There’s something deliciously unsettling about realizing your memories might be wrong. Sarah Langan’s Pam Kowolski Is a Monster! turns that unease into a full-blown psychological and supernatural meltdown. This novella barrels through themes of memory, trauma, and rivalry with the manic energy of an apocalypse that might already be happening — or might only be in the mind of its unraveling narrator.

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Janet Chow’s life didn’t exactly pan out the way her classmates might have predicted back at Sewanhaka High. Once destined for greatness, she’s now middle-aged, adrift, and licking the wounds of a career in journalism that has long since crashed and burned. Then she spots her old nemesis — Pam Kowolski, the girl she used to despise — who has somehow transformed into “Madame Pamela,” America’s psychic sweetheart and doomsday influencer. Pam is rich, beautiful, and adored, while Janet is invisible. Convinced that Pam’s fame is built on lies, Janet sets out to expose her as a fraud. But digging into Pam’s past also means unearthing the pieces of her own history that she’s conveniently buried — and the deeper she digs, the more she starts to question what’s real, what’s remembered, and what’s imagined.

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The Gallery Assistant by Kate Belli: A twisty, sinister thriller with a uniquely New York perspective

Mandy Webster

Kate Belli’s The Gallery Assistant is a thriller that keeps readers on edge, blending the tension of a murder mystery with the complexity of a city and world forever changed by tragedy. Chloe Harlow, a young gallery assistant in New York, wakes up one morning in November 2001 with hazy memories of the night before—and quickly discovers that an up-and-coming painter and the gallery’s newest artist has been murdered. Pulled between her life in Williamsburg and the high-stakes Upper East Side art world, Chloe is thrust into a dangerous web of deceit, secrets, and deadly intrigue.

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While the story is undeniably gripping, it does fall into the familiar—and sometimes frustrating—trope of a main character holding crucial information back from the authorities. Chloe’s insistence on solving the murder herself, despite having no investigative training and facing serious danger, is occasionally hard to swallow. Her reluctance to report even life-threatening incidents strains believability, though it does drive the narrative tension. A bit more insight into her reasoning could have made these choices feel more grounded.

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Her One Regret by Donna Freitas: A feminist thriller that dares to question motherhood

Mandy Webster

Motherhood is supposed to be the pinnacle of womanhood. At least, that’s what society keeps telling us. But what happens when a woman doesn’t want to be a mother? Or worse—what if she becomes a mother and regrets it? Donna Freitas takes on this taboo head-on in Her One Regret, a feminist thriller that is both riveting and deeply necessary.

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The story begins with Lucy Mendoza, a successful Rhode Island real estate agent who vanishes, leaving her baby behind in a grocery store parking lot. It’s the kind of headline that grips national attention and instantly frames her as a monster in the public eye. But Lucy’s best friend Michelle knows something the rest of the world doesn’t: Lucy once confessed that she regretted becoming a mother, so much so that she had fantasized about faking her own kidnapping.

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The Ordinary Bruja by J.E. Ortega shows us the histories we’ve been taught to forget

Mandy Webster

What do we inherit from the generations before us—magic, shame, resilience, silence? In J.E. Ortega’s novel The Ordinary Bruja (coming November 4, 2025), Marisol Espinal returns to her hometown of Willowshade, Ohio, after her mother’s death and finds herself face-to-face with the family secrets she’s been running from. The story unfolds with an atmosphere of both dread and wonder, as Marisol confronts not only the haunting presence of Hallowthorn Hill but also the pieces of her own identity she’s been taught to bury.

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The novel is steeped in Dominican folklore and written with a lyricism that brings the supernatural to life. The hill itself becomes a character—watching, waiting, whispering—and what it wants is Marisol’s surrender to fear. But Ortega makes clear that the greater threat isn’t the folklore itself, but the way Marisol has been taught to erase herself: her culture, her curls, her curves, her magic. The suspense is as much psychological as it is spectral, and the real horror comes from how shame and generational trauma can consume us if we let them.

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Night Watcher brings Halloween horror vibes to a storm-soaked thriller

Mandy Webster

Sometimes a thriller doesn’t just keep you on edge—it crawls under your skin and lingers like a nightmare. That’s exactly what Daphne Woolsoncroft achieves in Night Watcher, a dark, atmospheric suspense novel set in Portland, Oregon, where the rain never stops and neither does the fear.

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Nola Strate has spent her adulthood trying to outrun the shadows of her past. As a child, she narrowly escaped a notorious Pacific Northwest serial killer known as the Hiding Man. Now she’s a late-night radio host, fielding calls about hauntings and strange sightings on the show her father once made famous. It’s the perfect job for someone who wants to talk about fear without facing it directly.

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The Haunting of Paynes Hollow by Kelley Armstrong: When family secrets won’t stay buried

Mandy Webster

When Kelley Armstrong writes horror, you know you’re in for a story that goes beyond simple scares—and The Haunting of Paynes Hollow (releasing October 14, 2025) is no exception. This chilling, supernatural thriller digs into the shadows of family history, twisted memory, and the things we inherit whether we want to or not. The book is available now for pre-order on Amazon.

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Samantha Payne never expected to inherit anything from her grandfather, not after years of distance and the painful memory of her father’s alleged crime. Fourteen years earlier, Sam witnessed her father burying the body of a child—an image that convinced her he was guilty, despite his own father’s unshakable belief in his innocence. But at the reading of the will, Sam is shocked to discover she’s been left the family’s valuable lakefront property at Paynes Hollow, with one strange condition: she must stay in the cottage for a month and “face the fact she was wrong.”

That’s when the real terror begins.

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She’s Going to Pay by Alexandra Ivy struggles with execution despite a promising premise

Mandy Webster

I’m always drawn to novels set in overlooked places—small towns that don’t typically get the spotlight—and Alexandra Ivy’s She’s Going to Pay caught my attention for that reason. Set in Canton, Missouri, it has all the ingredients of a juicy domestic suspense: a missing father, a stepmother with a hidden identity, a hometown full of secrets, and a daughter who reluctantly returns to face it all.

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The setup is fantastic. Jesse Hudson left Canton years ago after her stepmother and stepsister vanished under suspicious circumstances and her father was suspected of murder. When he also disappeared, Jesse built a life elsewhere. Now she’s back to sell his old bar, only to learn her stepmother was never who she claimed to be. As Jesse digs into the past, she becomes convinced her father’s disappearance is tied to this buried identity—and discovers that someone in town has been waiting for her return.

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