Mostly when I look at books that are coming out I get a feeling for what I might like and usually I hit that shit out of the park. The Hounding. Witch’s Orchard. Mayra. Moderation. The Pretender. Hungerstone. I like what I like is what I’m saying. BUT. The library is free, so I will pick stuff up just in case, and sometimes those first pages speargun me and I’m so glad I traipsed out of the Haunted Gender Castle comfort zone I usually reside in.

How Bad Things Can Get by Darcy Coates

I will often pick up a thriller because I like to stay abreast of what the dark-secrets-and-knife-blades-glinting-in-the-night cottage industry is getting up to, plus I’m always looking for new Bad Husbands for my zoo.

The log line for this one, a few hundred fans win a weekend on a small island hosted by their favorite influencer, had me thinking it was going to be a Fyre Fest thing, which I was very into, but it ended up being a more or less explicit Mr. Beast callout, which I was also into. I didn’t really expect this book to rise above the normal bar for this kind of thing, and the normal high-octane thriller markers are there: cult stuff, fish-out-of-water protagonist with a Dark Secret, over-the-top murders, etc. But Coates is inventive, and a little weird with it, and her writing felt pretty baldly hostile to the social media panopticon we all find ourselves forced to perform in (brother I am right there with you), all of which elevated this for me.

A Rare Find by Joanna Lowell

I feel a little dishonest about calling this one a surprise, considering how much the premise was essentially a piece of cheese under a box propped up with a stick for me specifically: Regency Era girl antiquarian struggling with feelings for her annoying but hot gender nonconforming neighbor slash enemy. There are like 8 buzzwords in there that send out a pulse like the Pirates of the Caribbean gold to readers who are me. All that said, look at that cover. I have never really enjoyed a book with a cover like this, and that’s not a knock on all those books that write “enemies to lovers” on the cover, which I feel like is such lazy color-by-numbers marketing (wow, I guess it was a knock after all!) but I’m generally not built right inside to respond to obvious romance setups. I generally like my romance to sneak up on me, like a girl gets hired to clean a guy she thinks is explicitly ugly’s haunted house, or a girl gets hired to moderate her hot boss’s incredibly toxic VR Disneyland, or a guy gets sent back in time to write up a biography of the incredibly big and strong lady knight his nation’s myths are all based on, you get the idea.

But this thing really knocked my socks off. The banter really feels Austenian, even down to the authentically annoying-slash-insane relatives. There is genuine heat and chemistry between the leads and it even, I think, made a pretty good show about how being gender nonconforming would have functioned in a different era without feeling hackneyed or unrealistic. Plus, and I know this isn’t important to everyone, but there was artifacts, and digging for artifacts, and even some pretty nice musings about why it matters whose history gets preserved and recorded. I would have (maybe) forgiven the author for using the archaeology thing as vague set dressing but I’m so much happier that instead she scaffolded her protagonist’s identity around it. This book pulls off a lot is what I’m saying!

Hot Girls With Balls by Benedict Nguyen

My trajectory with this book was that I was very excited to hear about it (a trans athlete story in 2025 by a trans author had me seated but it being volleyball pushed me even more firmly into the chair) but I stumbled when I first started reading it. The prose is a bit different than I expected, both a little more abstract and a bit more minute, and it took me a bit to connect. But I’m glad I returned to it because it’s really a special one, another treatise on social media as a forever performance and an exploration of the kind of internet take poisoning that you will recognize if you’ve also been too online for the last decade.

Gliff by Ali Smith

This was another one where the prose almost threw me. I’m really a literal and chronically under-stimulated reader, meaning I need you to actually tell me what’s going on and what’s going on had better be a murder or a ghost or a murderous ghost or something. Gliff is different. It takes a while to fill in the background of the world you’re following characters through, picking up hints about how in this near-distant technofuture purposelessness is explicitly illegal and free speech is a distant memory, how being unknown to the bureaucracy is a crime in itself. It’s a little chilling how much you could extrapolate Gliff’s new 1984 world from the seeds around us, from surveillance to tech monopolies to imposed homogeneity. But there’s also hope, even for someone who’s thoroughly undergone the encoggification process, which I always like to see because I fear deep down I’m a bit of a cog myself sometimes.

Uncle Hater’s Bad Surprise Corner

I debated adding this section because in general I hold no ill will towards books I didn’t personally like. I generally assume they just weren’t for me, and every book represents an amount of effort and creativity that I feel bad writing it off as a whole, because almost every work has something you can take away from, unless it’s just straight up hateful or dishonest or insultingly lazy in some way. That being said, here are a few books I really wanted to like and just couldn’t!

First up is With a Vengeance by Riley Sager. Honestly this one is my own fault. I’ve read several Sagers at this point and they’re just not for me (aside from Only One Left, which at least had enough cockamamie twists glued to it to keep me entertained) but the covers always just drag me back in, this one especially. Train-Based Revenge Plot should have me good and on your side, but 100 pages in and the protagonist is still just kind of telling everyone “yep you guys are sure in for some kind of a revenge plot now, here on this train. Any minute now, you guys are getting so revenged. As soon as we are at the end of this 10-hour train ride, you’re all in for it.” I don’t know. That’s just not how I would set up a revenge plot. Like aren’t they just going to yell at you for nine and a half hours? Maybe I’m just too conflict averse but I probably would try to not be on the revenge train with all the people I was revenging, and would also probably put my phone on Do Not Disturb while it was happening so they couldn’t like, angrily text me about it the whole time. I’m sure on page 101 something exciting happens but I couldn’t get there. Damn you, cool-looking book cover with a train on it! I’ve been dashed on the rocks by the siren call of a cool-looking book cover yet again!

The Jackal’s Mistress by Chris Bohjalian really hurt. The pitch was Civil War-era espionage, a Union spy forming an alliance with a widow in the South. Unfortunately, and I really don’t mean to sound hateful here, but I forget that some male authors are still out here doing the breasting to the stairs boobily thing and I was reminded really jarringly of this when the protagonist woman spends the opening pages of this book getting almost sexually assaulted. And then she doesn’t even kill the attacker, a nearby man does. And then you flip over to the Union spy’s perspective and we’re cruising again, we’re doing Civil War stuff, all good, and then back to the woman’s POV and she’s thinking about her niece who’s 13 but her womanly curves are already starting to show. So unfortunately I had to put it down forever. RIP The Jackal I’m sure all your exploits were really cool and you probably saved that woman from getting harassed like 8 subsequent times but I unfortunately could not join you on your quest. A good Civil War book I read this year was How to Dodge a Cannonball, plus it was funny, maybe check that out.

I feel like I’m really all alone in not having liked Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito. This is definitely the most personal taste one on this list; I thought it was well written and executed exactly what it wanted to, but I just wasn’t really into what that was. It’s gross and chilly and brutal, all of which is well within its rights to be, but I was hoping it would also be funny. I was hoping there would be more to say about the Jane Eyre setting reacting to a Jane Eyre who wasn’t just plain and severe but also unhinged (which is kind of The Hounding, btw) but instead you just get a short and sweet rampage in a kind of unusual setting. Again, not a crime! Just something I was hoping to like more than I did.