Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Bruja’s Nest by Brenda LaTorre: A monstrous story about motherhood, power, and the price of freedom

Brenda LaTorre’s Bruja’s Nest is a dark, unsettling body-horror novel about a young woman who believes she can escape poverty and abuse by securing a wealthy husband, only to discover that real power cannot be borrowed from a man.

Yolanda has grown up knowing that her mother favors her older brother and blames her for nearly everything that goes wrong. When her mother catches her in bed with her brother, she blames Yolanda rather than the son who actually betrayed her. It is one more lesson in a lifetime of lessons telling Yolanda that she is somehow always at fault. But Yolanda is determined not to end up trapped in the same kind of life. She wants money, security, and a future she controls herself. When college doesn’t work out, she finds another path forward: marriage.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

What Feeds Below by Tatiana Schlote-Bonne: A lush, terrifying descent into the Void

Tatiana Schlote-Bonne’s What Feeds Below is an immersive fantasy horror novel filled with lush worldbuilding, gruesome monsters, claustrophobic environments, and enough heart-pounding action to make you feel as though you’re trapped alongside its characters in the depths of the earth.

At the edge of the City of the Void lies a massive chasm that stretches miles underground. Known simply as the Void, its layers are filled with monsters, carnivorous plants, and dangers that become increasingly difficult to understand—and survive—as travelers descend. For Petra and Jade, two orphaned best friends living in the city’s slums, the Void is also a way out. They make money by guiding tourists who are willing to risk their lives in search of whatever treasures might be waiting below.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

The Sisters of Crimson House by Melissa Anderson Sweazy: A Southern Gothic about family secrets and inherited expectations

Melissa Anderson Sweazy’s The Sisters of Crimson House is a Southern Gothic horror novel about a family of psychics, a haunted Memphis mansion, and the secrets that can shape a person’s entire understanding of who they are. I have to admit that I approached this book with some skepticism. Lately, just about every book I’ve read that has been compared to Practical Magic has turned out to be a dud for me, so when I opened the description of The Sisters of Crimson House and saw that comparison, I groaned. Out loud. But I had already received the ARC, so I figured I might as well give it a chance.

Fortunately, The Sisters of Crimson House turned out to be better than the recent Practical Magic comps that have disappointed me. It isn’t a book I would put in the same category as one of my favorites, but there was enough going on to keep me reading, and that’s something. At least I didn’t DNF this one.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Buzzard by Inez Ray: A dystopian future where exploitation never ends

Inez Ray’s Buzzard is a ferocious dystopian novel about reproductive control, corporate power, and the terrifying possibility that our technological future could look very different while the fundamental structures of human exploitation remain exactly the same.

Set in 2086, Buzzard imagines an American future in which the United States no longer exists, abortion is illegal, fertility is closely monitored, and corporations have effectively replaced government. Midwife Mae Bastet has spent seven years imprisoned in Buzzard, a private prison in the Sonoran Desert operated by the paramilitary corporation Obsityan. She was arrested for providing reproductive health care to women and separated from her two sons. Now she is trying to survive long enough to get back to them.

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Find Your Next Read, Poetry by Mandy Webster

How Do You Spell That Sound? My new picture book is here!

I’m excited to announce the release of my new picture book, How Do You Spell That Sound?—a playful celebration of language, imagination, and all the wonderfully strange sounds that don’t always fit neatly into words.

Have you ever heard a sound and thought, “How do you even spell that?”

A sneeze. A crash. A buzzing bee. The sound of something squishing, popping, rattling, or roaring. We have plenty of words for sounds, but sometimes the best way to capture a sound is to invent one of our own.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Strange Bedfellows by Amanda Mortlock: A witch, a familiar, and a relationship that gets increasingly uncomfortable

There is something undeniably fun about a novel in which a college student is secretly a cat, falls in love with a witch, and discovers that the two of them are connected by a dark magical history. Strange Bedfellows, Amanda Mortlock’s debut novel, has an inherently strange and entertaining premise, and for much of the book, I was perfectly happy to go along for the ride. This is not a novel that is trying to be deeply literary, and it doesn’t need to be. At its best, it is dark, steamy, weird, and playful in exactly the ways its premise promises to be.

Unfortunately, the further I got into the novel, the more its problems began to outweigh its charms. Strange Bedfellows follows Cleo, a college student who has an impossible secret: sometimes she becomes a cat. When she meets Wes, a brooding musician, at a Halloween party, the attraction between them is immediate. Things become considerably more complicated when Wes discovers that the cat who has been part of his life is actually Cleo. Even more complicated is the revelation that Wes is a witch and Cleo is his familiar.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

We Already Dug the Grave by Emma C. Wells: A kitschy Southern gothic thriller

I wanted to love We Already Dug the Grave. After all, I absolutely adored Emma C. Wells’ debut novel, This Girl’s a Killer, so when I saw that Wells had another book coming out, it was an automatic must-read for me. Unfortunately, while We Already Dug the Grave has plenty of the ingredients I loved in her debut, it never quite captures the same sharp wit or confidence.

We Already Dug the Grave follows estranged sisters Milly and Francis, who have spent years apart after something terrible happened in a Tennessee meadow. Milly has always been the odd one, with an ability to divine the future through tea leaves. But lately, the tea leaves have gone silent, which might seem like a blessing considering how bleak Milly’s life has become.

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Body Language by Meg Howrey explores the complicated choices of family, autonomy, and Alzheimer’s

Body Language by Meg Howrey is a deeply thoughtful and surprisingly funny literary novel about three sisters forced to confront their mother’s wishes, their own differences, and the difficult question of what it means to honor someone’s autonomy when they can no longer make decisions for themselves. The novel releases September 1, 2026.

Body Language is a great literary novel—profound, evocative, and layered—but perhaps more importantly, it is a readable literary novel. There is a difference. Literary fiction can sometimes become so enamored with its own language and philosophical underpinnings that reading it begins to feel like work. Meg Howrey avoids that trap. Her prose is clear, concise, intelligent, and often very funny, while still giving the story the depth and complexity I want from a literary novel. In my opinion, clarity is one of the major requirements of a good novel, and Howrey demonstrates just how much can be accomplished without burying a story beneath unnecessarily elaborate language.

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