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Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children #1), by Seanan McGuire

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Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire My rating: 5 of 5 stars Not the fantasy of going through the door, but the heartbreak of coming back. Every portal fantasy asks what lies beyond the door. What Seanan McGuire asks instead is what happens after the door shuts behind you, and that shift gives “Every Heart a Doorway” its bruised, peculiar power. » Children have always disappeared under the right conditions. « I went in expecting something wistful and whimsical. What I found was weirder, sadder, and much sharper about loneliness, belonging, and the violence of being told that your deepest truth is nonsense. » Narrate the impossible things. « That line feels like the novella’s method in miniature. McGuire writes with the economy of a fable, but not the emotional simplicity of one. The prose is lean, clean, and surprisingly cutting. Eleanor West’s school is not a cosy sanctuary for charming misfits so much as a halfway house for children who have already found the worlds that suite...
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Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer

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Annie Bot by Sierra Greer My rating: 4 of 5 stars I found "Annie Bot" deeply unsettling, and I mean that as praise. This is not a comfortable novel, nor should it be. Sierra Greer builds Annie’s world around a premise that is immediately cruel, a sentient artificial woman designed to please a man who wants obedience, reassurance, and sexual availability without ever having to recognise the full personhood of the being in front of him. Doug is monstrous not because he is extravagant in his evil, but because he is so recognisably entitled, selfish, and certain that Annie exists for him. I loathed him from the start, and the novel is strongest whenever it forces that revulsion into the foreground. What made the book painful to read, in the best sense, was Annie’s growing awareness of her own lack of choice. Every decision she makes is constrained by systems of control, punishment, and dependence, which means even small acts of thought or resistance carry emotional weight. Gr...
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Middle of the Night, by Riley Sager

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Middle of the Night by Riley Sager My rating: 2 of 5 stars I picked “Middle of the Night” up because a Goodreads friend recommended it. In hindsight, I really should have known better. Riley Sager has been wildly uneven for me, and this novel lands firmly on the wrong side of that divide. At first, the setup works. A vanished boy, a suburban cul-de-sac, a traumatised adult returning to the scene of childhood horror, sleepless nights, uneasy neighbours, dark woods. That is exactly the sort of material from which a properly creepy thriller can be made. Sager knows how to build that initial itch of dread, and for a while I kept reading in the hope that the book would cash in on its atmosphere. » The worst thing to ever happen on Hemlock Circle… « The problem is that the novel gradually mistakes strangeness for depth. What begins as eerie and potentially poignant becomes weird in a way that feels more contrived than unsettling. The story grows increasingly complicated without becoming ri...
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Platform Decay (The Murderbot Diaries #8), by Martha Wells

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Platform Decay by Martha Wells My rating: 3 of 5 stars Platform Decay should have felt like a homecoming. Instead, it feels like being shoved out of an airlock and told to keep up. I absolutely loved Murderbot at its best. The early books worked because the action was never really the point, or at least never the whole point. The point was the anxious, avoidant, furious, funny, traumatised self hiding underneath the armour. Murderbot was compelling because every mission doubled as self-exploration: what does freedom mean, what does personhood mean, what does friendship mean when even admitting you have friends feels like an exposed nerve? "Platform Decay" knows that version of the series still exists, but it only lets us see it in flashes. » ”SecUnit.” « That one word, from Mensah, carries more emotional weight than whole stretches of the surrounding plot. Likewise, the late moment where Murderbot acknowledges being surrounded by friends is exactly the sort of subtle, painf...
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Facets of Death (Detective Kubu #0.5), by Michael Stanley

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Facets of Death by Michael Stanley My rating: 3 of 5 stars "Facets of Death" is a strange sort of prequel: useful if you already like Detective Kubu, but not quite alive enough to explain why you should. On paper, it has all the right ingredients. A huge diamond robbery in Botswana, an inside-job suspicion, cross-border violence, and young David “Kubu” Bengu entering the Criminal Investigation Department with more education than field experience. The opening has that procedural promise I usually enjoy: logistics, institutions, competence, and a crime whose mechanics matter. What works best is Kubu himself. Even in this younger version, he is recognisably the man I like in the later books: observant, stubborn, fundamentally decent, and already more interested in understanding people than in swaggering through a case. I enjoyed seeing the early shape of him, especially the way his intelligence has to push through resentment from colleagues who do not quite know what to do with...
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The Vanishing Neighbor, by Ava Roberts

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The Vanishing Neighbor by Ava Roberts My rating: 2 of 5 stars “The Vanishing Neighbor” wants to be a glossy domestic thriller about belonging, grief, and the violence that can hide behind curated neighbourhood charm. Its hook is simple and promising: Grace is at a neighbourhood party, slips away for half an hour, and that small absence becomes suspicious when Sadie, the beloved neighbour, later goes missing. In the hands of a sharper book, this could have been a tight little study of how a community turns predatory the moment it smells weakness. Instead, it reads like something shallow, but desperately pretending to be more. Grace, our viewpoint and reluctant investigator, is the one-eyed king among the blind, surrounded by people blinded by their own perceived importance and supposed social standing. The problem is that the novel mistakes that setup for depth. It keeps gesturing at “appearances” and “secrets” as if naming them were the same as exploring them. Characters do not feel l...
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Bred and Butter, by Heather Lauren

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Bred and Butter by Heather Lauren My rating: 1 of 5 stars Bred and Butter is a (thankfully!) short, kinky romance that I wanted to enjoy on its own terms: tight focus, brisk heat, and a sense that the author knows exactly which emotional buttons to press. Instead, I spent most of my time wincing at sentences that seem not merely unpolished, but unproofread, and the story itself never gives me enough character, wit, or tension to compensate. » Who’s laugh makes me smile « That is the problem in miniature: basic grammar slips, and the voice does not feel intentional enough to turn roughness into style. Even the erotic imagery strains for intensity in ways that land oddly chosen rather than charged. » The sight of her painted body withering beneath me is stunning. « Yes, withering. Under him. As if desire were a draught, and her body was a sad little plant being left to crisp at the windowsill. That single word does not heighten anything, it suffocates it. It turns sex into horticultural...
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