Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Make Me Better by Sarah Gailey: A hypnotic look at belonging, control, and the cost of transformation

What would you give up to finally belong somewhere—and would you recognize the moment it stopped being your choice? Make Me Better is an unsettling, slow-burn descent into the seductive promise of community, where healing and control blur until they’re indistinguishable. Fans of Wife Shaped Bodies, The Unworthy, or Sorrowland will find something deeply familiar—and deeply disturbing—here.

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At the center of the story is Celia, a woman whose longing for connection overrides her sense of self-preservation. She doesn’t just develop crushes—she builds entire imagined lives around men she barely knows. When she recognizes how precarious that pattern is, she redirects that intensity toward the idea of motherhood. A baby, after all, would be hers in a way no one else ever has been. That same vulnerability makes her the perfect target for something like Kindred Cove.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica: A haunting, lyrical descent into devotion and decay

From the author of Tender Is the Flesh comes another brutal yet mesmerizing vision of humanity undone. In The Unworthy, Agustina Bazterrica imagines a world consumed by climate collapse and desperation, where one woman survives inside a secretive religious order that thrives on submission and silence. From her isolated cell, she writes her story in scraps of ink, dirt, and blood—confessing, questioning, and unraveling as the walls of her faith begin to crack.

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This is horror not of jump scares, but of ideology and indoctrination. The convent’s rigid hierarchy—the Enlightened and the Unworthy—mirrors the broken world beyond its gates, one where water is scarce, and mercy even scarcer. When a new woman arrives and challenges what the narrator believes to be truth, the cracks widen. What emerges is a story about power, memory, and the price of obedience in a collapsing world.

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