Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted July 4, 2026 by Nicky in General / 3 Comments

Happy weekend! And I’m glad to see it, especially since it’s going to be a pretty busy week ahead. Gotta soak up some relaxation now!

Books acquired this week

A couple of books I was excited about came out this week, but so far I’ve stuck to one — and everyone who knows me is very thankful I managed to get a copy, because when Bookshop.org didn’t have it on the release date and Waterstones turned out to not even be listing it as a book that exists, I was very pouty. Buuut Bookshop.org had copies a day after release, so, whew.

I dived in already… and accidentally flicked ahead and saw a new and confusing character name?! So I’m not sure where this is going, and I might regret not waiting for the last book in October.

I did also get an ARC and a library book, which I allllmost forgot about because I’ve already finished both of them!

And that’s everything… for now.

Posts from this week

Let’s do a bit of a recap: reviews first, as usual!

SF manga: Dinosaur Sanctuary, vol 6, by Itaru Kinoshita (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Graphic novel: Navigating with You, by Jeremy Whitley, Cassio Ribeiro & Nikki Foxrobot (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Myth retelling: Daedalus is Dead, by Seamus Sullivan (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Fantasy romance (danmei): Guardian, vol 2, by Priest (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Non-fiction: Ancient Egypt in 50 Discoveries, by Stephanie Boonstra & Campbell Price (3/5 stars, “liked it”)

As ever, most of these are books I read a while ago, since I hold reviews back to make sure I get a good mix of genres, rather than flooding everyone with 250 manga reviews at once. (Not quite literally, but the backlog of graphic novel and manga/manhwa/manhua reviews is longer than any other genre.)

As for the other posts from this week:

And if it tempts you, the June wrap-up has a photo of my bunnies and of my crochet project progress!

What I’m reading

I read a whole bunch of books last weekend, and then slowed down a bit during the week, but it’s definitely been a good week for reading. I got a blackout on the BookSpinBingo challenge from Litsy for the first time in a while, and generally felt really happy and energised about reading, hurrah!

So, a quick peek at the covers of the books I finished and intend to review on the blog…

Considering I haven’t finished a book since Tuesday, that’s quite the collection of titles — I hadn’t quite realised how much I was reading. Here’s hoping this weekend is good for reading too: I know I’m going to read more of Mistakenly Saving the Villain vol 3, and I’d like to finish Charlotte Booth’s Lost Voices of the Nile. Other than that, I’ve got back to Stephanie Burgis’ Wooing the Witch Queen, and have a couple of other non-fiction books on the go that I’ll probably dip in and out of.

I also want to find plenty of time for crochet and gaming, of course, so we’ll see exactly where my whims take me this week! Maybe it’ll be somewhere completely different to what I expect right now, and that’d be fine.

Hope everyone’s had a good week!

Linking up with Reading Reality’s Stacking the Shelves, Caffeinated Reviewer’s The Sunday Post, the Sunday Salon over at Readerbuzz, and It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? at The Book Date.

Tags: books, Stacking the Shelves, weekly roundup

June Reading Wrap-Up

Posted July 3, 2026 by Nicky in General / 7 Comments

July’s here, so it’s time for a look back at June! Which was a bit of a weird month, but I seem to have said that last month too…

June in general:

Mostly the thing that sticks out about June this year was how hot it was, in the UK. I’ve had cause to be very glad that we have a couple of portable air conditioners, and even our bunnies ended up having to chill out in an air conditioned room… We rush ordered a pen so they could hang out in comfort, given the rooms with the portable air conditioners aren’t at all bunny-proofed.

It isn’t a huge amount of space, but it worked okay as a place for them to stay cooler during the hottest parts of the day, and they got comfy in it after a while!

I didn’t work on my bookcase blanket a lot during the heatwave, but I did make quite a bit of progress this month all the same, completing the second “shelf”. In the first shelf I stuck quite close to the pattern, but in the second I’ve started modifying the pattern now that I’ve learned the principles, to keep things looking a bit more varied (otherwise I’d be repeating the same book patterns a lot). Here’s a peek at the progress, with a book (of course) for scale!

Gaming-wise, I tore through the puzzles in the game inbento, which was on a pretty steep sale at the time and still is. It wasn’t super tricky, so it didn’t take me that long, but the simple-and-cute story and clever puzzles kept me busy a while. It was nice to play for a short break from other tasks, since you can just do a level or two at a time.

Other than that, my wife and I finished up PowerWash Simulator and PowerWash Simulator 2 (until the new DLC comes out in July!), and finally went back and finished everything in It Takes Two (a game with fun mechanics but a story we don’t recommend), so we started on Flock Around, which is a fairly chill bird-watching co-op game. We haven’t played a ton of it yet, but there was a lot of excited running to each other to find new birds and such.

I finished the month playing a lot of DREDGE, which is a game themed around fishing and eldritch horrors. I confess to some very loud surprised yelps at times when something came after my poor little boat. I have a lot still to do in this game, but I think I’m close to finished with the main story.

Reading stats:

Right, let’s get to the meat of things, ahaha. First up, my StoryGraph graphics for last month!

Total books read: 25
Total pages read: 5,652
Rereads: 0
ARCs: 1
Series finished/up to date: 2
Books owned pre-2026: 2
Books owned from 2026: 13
Borrowed books: 10

Fiction: 14
Non-fiction: 7
Poetry: 4
Comics, manga, manhwa, etc: 2

Slightly fewer books again, but almost the same number of pages as last month — if I’d read at the same pace I was doing at the end of the month, I’d have read a lot more books in total, I think, and it looks like I was reading longer books! So I was pretty happy with that. I changed up my reading habits a bit, trying to read a bit closer to how I used to before I was thinking in terms of how many books I finish a year and all of that… and it seems to be working well.

(Which, if you’re curious and hadn’t seem me talk about it already, is basically that I have 3-4 books “active” at once, and I rotate through them reading a chapter or two at a time. There’s no “rule” about it — I can sit and mainline an entire book if I want! But if I get restless, the next book is there to grab my attention again.)

Progress on reading goals:

Overall total books: 171/400 (30 books behind)
Overall pages read: 39,309/100,000 (10,828 pages behind)
Books read from backlog: 30/100 (20 books behind)
Books owned since 2026 and not yet started: 20/20

20 Books of Summer: 6/20 (0/5 bonus)

As you see, I’m slipping ever further behind on my goals. If I don’t recover things by the end of July, I’ll probably just adjust the targets. Although I set high targets, part of it is just having a good sense for how much I’m reading relative to my “normal”. If I’m struggling to read as much, that usually means something’s wrong, and that’s a very good signal for me to have… but it doesn’t stop me adjusting my goals if it feels crappy.

However, I’m off to a good start with my 20 Books of Summer list! I picked 20 specific books to finish and 5 potential bonus books just in case I wanted to swap some in, and so far I’ve finished six of my original picks: two non-fiction, two books that were in-progress that I’d stalled on, and two danmei.

Blogging stats:

Views: 13.2k
Visitors: 12.4k
Likes: 332
Comments: 325
Reviews: 22
Other posts: 21

Down on pretty much all metrics! Including number of reviews, which is probably part of it.

Most viewed posts:

Review – Solo Leveling (light novel), vol 6 (173 views)
Review – Solo Leveling (light novel), vol 8 (159 views)
Top Ten Tuesday: British Library Crime Classics (63 views)
Top Ten Tuesday: Bookish Wishes (47 views)
Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Can’t Believe I’ve Never Read (45 views)

My own favourite posts:

Stuff I loved from elsewhere:

From Books, Bones & Buffy: THE CHILDREN By Melissa Albert – Review, by Tammy
From The Bibliosanctum: Book Review: Mortedant’s Peril by RJ Barker, by Mogsy
From The Bibliosanctum: Book Review: The Arcane Arts by S.D. Coverly, by Mogsy
From Becky’s Book Blog: Headlights by C.J. Leede – ARC Review!, by Becky
From Books, Bones & Buffy: HEADLIGHTS by C.J. Leede – Review, by Tammy
From Becky’s Book Blog: These Immortal Truths by Rachelle Raeta – ARC Review!, by Becky
From Books, Bones & Buffy: THE SIXTH NIK by Daniel Kraus, by Tammy
From Foxes and Fairy Tales: ARC Review: The Moonsingers, by Louise
From Lola’s Reviews: Review: Field Guide for the Formerly Villainous by Autumn K. England, by Lola

Once more, I’d saved a lot of really good and interesting reviews (not all positive, or for books I’d necessarily be interested in!) so it was really hard to whittle it down to a reasonable number… but I’ve managed!

I really need to start drafting these posts earlier in the month, though, so I don’t have to spend nearly two hours getting it all organised, ahaha.

Tags: books, monthly wrapup

Review – Ancient Egypt in 50 Discoveries

Posted July 2, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Ancient Egypt in 50 Discoveries

by Stephanie Boonstra, Campbell Price

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 236
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
This book presents the unique history of ancient Egypt through 50 artefacts discovered during excavations of the EES since its founding in 1882. They are brought together in this beautifully illustrated volume from global museums: from major collections as well as those that are a little less known. Readers will travel through three millennia of Egypt’s history from the Early Dynastic to the end of the Graeco-Roman Period uncovering the daily lives of the ancient Egyptians by investigating everyday items, as well as the elite objects of the ruling classes. 90 illustrations.

Alongside these artefacts, further topics are unpacked relating to the history of Egypt and Egyptology as well as those characters that have played a role in the ‘discovery’ of ancient Egypt.

Each object entry is written by an expert in their field. Contributions include several items from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the Metropolitan Museum in New York as well as the University Museum of Kyoto, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, and Bolton Museum.

Ancient Egypt in 50 Discoveries is nominally written by Stephanie Boonstra and Campbell Price, but they also acted as editors, gathering together a bunch of contributions from others associated with the Egypt Exploration Society.

As a result, though it’s a lovely volume with some good (full-colour) photographs of various finds, it has a somewhat disjointed feel; there are extra sections with info that repeats from the main objects and vice versa, and it doesn’t quite feel like a cohesive narrative. Some of the objects are related to each other, but most stand alone, and I think it could’ve benefited by being a bit more drawn together.

Still, there are some good photos and good choices of object, and they make a good point about the later periods being less interesting to archaeologists and treated as a “decline”, while still actually producing amazing monuments equal in quality to before. It’s a bias that comes out of the fascination with a particular period of ancient Egypt, and isn’t necessarily the full truth.

As someone who knows a fair bit about ancient Egypt, a lot of the extra info wasn’t necessary for me — but would definitely help orient someone who knows less about it.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Campbell Price, history, non-fiction, Stephanie L. Boonstra

WWW Wednesday

Posted July 2, 2026 by Nicky in General / 6 Comments

Technically it’s now Thursday, but pfft, doesn’t count as a new day until I’ve slept, right?!

What have you recently finished reading?

Cassandra Khaw’s Find Me Where It Ends, which I’m going to find difficult to review and talk about because it’s profoundly a book I don’t think it was a good idea for me to read. It’s about suicide, and while there’s an amount of metaphor going on with the black dog that shows up to let the women of Antigone’s family know they’re going to die, and the fact that she welcomes it into her home… it’s also very much not a metaphor, and suicide is woven through the whole book. Read with care if you have any mental health issues — if I thought too hard about this one I know I’d end up feeling very, very anxious, and those who struggle with low mood and suicidal ideation might struggle as well.

What are you currently reading?

I’ve actually finished most of the books I was rotating through, and am about to figure out the next batch to be on deck. The only one I didn’t finish yet that I’ve got a decent way into is Charlotte Booth’s Voices of the Nile. A lot of the info is familiar to me, but then there are titbits that aren’t, e.g. the discussion of same-sex relationships in ancient Egypt and the theories around the tomb of Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum.

I suspect that the other in-progress books I’m going to resume are Stephanie Burgis’ Wooing the Witch Queen, which I anticipate being fun but maybe a bit agonising for me with the mistaken identity thing and waiting for that to be found out, and Carwyn Graves’ Welsh Food Stories. I’m very curious about the latter, since I only really know bara brith (sort of like fruitcake), picau ar y maen (Welsh cakes) and cawl (soup).

What will you be reading next?

Probably volume three of Feng Yu Nie’s Mistakenly Saving the Villain, which just came out and is even now winging its way to me, and/or volume two of Lv He Qian Ye’s The Wife Comes First. I’m eager about both. There’s also an outside chance I’ll read volume three of Priest’s Guardian, which I also just got and completes that series.

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Review – Guardian, vol 2

Posted July 1, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Guardian

by Priest

Genres: Fantasy, Light Novels, Mystery, Romance
Pages: 341
Series: Guardian #2
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
THE SLEEPING GOD STIRS

As snow quietly covers Dragon City in the final days of the lunar year, patients writhing in pain flock to the hospital. Baffled doctors call upon Zhao Yunlan and his team for help. As the case unfolds, Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan discover that one of the Four Hallowed Artifacts, the Merit Brush, has appeared in the Mortal Realm. In the wrong hands, its power can be transformative.

While each step toward the artifact only pulls the pair deeper into a vortex of mysteries, Zhao Yunlan keeps stumbling upon a name: Kunlun. Who is Kunlun, and what is his connection to the Merit Brush? As Zhao Yunlan closes in on the answer, will he also uncover the truth behind Shen Wei's knowing gaze?

Book two of Priest’s Guardian gives us some major developments, both showing us who Zhao Yunlan really is and how he originally met Shen Wei, and getting into more detail on the bigger plot that’s bringing that to light. I must admit I probably need to skim the details again, but there’s a lot going on and a whole mythology here to figure out, but the way things are getting on is pretty intriguing.

We do get some more glimpses of the lives of the side characters Zhao Yunlan works with, and also of his family — his discussions with his parents about his sexuality and his relationship with Shen Wei are well done.

Aaaand we get some progression on the horrific pining, with Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan moving toward an openly romantic relationship, with lots more pining and chemistry off the charts. I can’t wait to see how they sort themselves out and properly commit to something, with Zhao Yunlan aware of the history between them. I hope they get a really happy ending, given the tragedy that seems to have befallen them in the past. Only one more book for everything to resolve, and I can’t quite see how it can all be wrapped up in that time!

I do still dislike the way Zhao Yunlan (and maybe others) consistently call Daqing “fatty” and stuff like that, though. Sure, he’s a cat yao, not a human, but he’s a speaking character. I know that culturally it can come across differently, but it doesn’t seem to be meant positively here, so that’s worth being aware of.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, danmei, Priest, SF/F

Top Ten Tuesday: Books Releasing in the Second Half of 2026

Posted June 30, 2026 by Nicky in General / 20 Comments

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday is all about upcoming titles, and I must confess, as always I’m not very up on this, aside from the ARCs I get offered by Orbit or happen to see on Netgalley. Honestly, how do you all keep up?!

Still, I did some research and poked around, and checked my wishlist too for books I previously noted wanting, and thus found some books I’m interested in!

Mistakenly Saving the Villain, vol 3, by Feng Yu Nie.
This is supposed to be out today according to Seven Seas, making it technically ineligible for the list. However bookshop.org say it’s out tomorrow, so it counts. I just devoured volume two a couple weeks ago, and I’m very eager to continue the story: Yue Wuhuan is pretty unhinged, but Song Qingshi is pretty fascinated by him too, and weird and over-intense though the relationship might be, I’m very curious about how they end up and what the system intends for Song Qingshi in the wake of his choosing the wrong character to rescue. The fourth volume is also due out in the latter half of the year, hitting shelves in October.
The Feywild Job, by C.L. Polk.
Technically this seems to come out today as well, but I’m highlighting it because I thought it was next month, and no one can stop me, mwahaha. I’ve really enjoyed Polk’s books in the past, and this heist story sounds like a lot of fun. I like the cover, too!
The Reimagining of Thornwood House, by Jaleigh Johnson.
I don’t know a lot about this, but the idea of a house getting grumpy and walking off and needing to be coaxed back sounds like a lot of fun. It comes out 2nd July, so I guess I don’t have long to wait!
An Expert Witness, by Sue Black.
I only just learned about this one, but I’m excited! I’ve really enjoyed Sue Black’s previous works, because she pairs technical detail with a resolve never to lose sight of respect and humanity when handling the dead. It’s coming out on 2nd July.
The Wife Comes First, vol 3, by Lv Ye Qian He.
I haven’t read the second volume yet, so there’s just a chance there’ll be a dealbreaker there… but I flew through the first volume despite its flaws, and I imagine I’ll be keen to find out how all the court intrigue comes to a head in the third, by the time it comes out. I have volume two on my ‘on deck’ pile, after all! I love Jing Shao and his realisation that Mu Hanzhang was loyal to him to the end, and the way he’s seizing his chance to do better. This one’s coming out on 21st July.
Dinosaur Sanctuary, vol 8, by Itaru Kinoshita.
I love this manga so much, it’s just the perfect palate cleanser for anything. My reviews have been going up recently, actually, but I’ve been waiting since just before Christmas when I originally devoured the first seven volumes (I have a huge backlog of graphic novel/manga reviews that I trickle out to avoid overwhelming the blog with those). I love that it’s basically a story about a zoo, only the animals are dinosaurs. I also really enjoy the fact that it has a dinosaur consultant and adds little fact files by him. This one’s due out 28th July, and I think I’ll preorder it on Kobo!
A Trade of Blood, by Robert Jackson Bennett.
This is the third book of the Shadow of the Leviathan series which I’ve been enjoying a lot. I actually have the ARC and need to get back to it, but I have to read it on my other device because (sigh) it couldn’t be sent to Kobo because it’s a PDF. I couldn’t resist requesting it anyway, though, and I’m so glad I’ve been able to dig in. The mystery sounds intriguing, and I imagine we’ll get more details toward a clearer picture of the world/the Empire… It’s due out in August.
Our Cut of Salt, by Deena Helm.
This one is a bit out of my comfort zone, coming out from Tor Nightfire on 22nd September. It’s a horror story, with three generations of a Palestinian family linked with a home in Haifa. It might actually be one that’s more for my wife, but something about it has kinda grabbed me. Maybe the setting? Anyway, I think I’ll be giving it a try!
The Scarlet Ball, by Nghi Vo.
I love Nghi Vo’s work, so I’m planning to read this even without knowing much about it. The set up (now I’ve actually read the blurb) sounds intriguing, too: the main character can literally take the face of a missing debutante to play her part — in exchange for what? How does that all work out? Well, unless I request the ARC I’ll have to wait until 6th October to find out.
As You Wake, Break the Shell, by Becky Chambers.
I didn’t know this was coming out but I’m definitely excited: I’ve enjoyed Chambers’ work so much in the past. I’m intrigued by the living ship/pilot link, too, as well as Chambers’ normal ability to make me care about the characters and relationships. It’s not due until 22nd October… big pout.

Excited to see what others highlight today! My wishlist is waiting for new finds.

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday

Review – Daedalus is Dead

Posted June 29, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Daedalus is Dead

by Seamus Sullivan

Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 176
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
A beautiful and nightmarish story of fatherhood and masculinity, told through the intertwined fates of Greek mythic figures Daedelus, Icarus, King Minos, and the Minotaur.

Daedalus of Crete is many things: The greatest architect in the world. The constructor of the Labyrinth that imprisoned the Minotaur. And the grieving father of Icarus—plunged into the sea as father and son flew from the grasp of the tyrannical King Minos.

Given the chance to reunite with Icarus in the Underworld, Daedalus will confront any terror to see him again—whether it be the vengeful spirit of Minos, the cunning Queen Persephone, or even the insatiable ghost of the Minotaur.

But there's one terror he didn't expect. As he encounters the people from his life, Daedalus begins to worry that his identity as a husband and father, mentor and friend was all a lie. And that the truth, stalking him in the labyrinth of his own heart, might be too monstrous for him to bear.

Seamus Sullivan’s Daedalus is Dead is a fun one, which takes its full length to fully deliver the sting in the tail of the retelling (which I suspect is why people who DNFed feel it’s a run-of-the-mill retelling that doesn’t bring anything new to the story). In terms of the bones of the story, it doesn’t subvert the actual events too much: there’s a bull, there’s the wrath of the gods, there’s a monstrous baby and a labyrinth, and Daedalus escapes Minos with his son Icarus by shaping two pairs of wings with wax that softens when Icarus flies too high, leaving him to plummet into the sea.

It’s all told in Daedalus’ voice, addresses to his beloved Icarus, apparently the centre of his world. The love is palpable, an almost-obsession with Icarus and what he was like, what he did, why he died. Daedalus is willing to do anything to reunite with him, and we see him bargain with Persephone and reshape hell as he tries to earn the chance.

But through the story, we slowly get little details that make us stop and re-evaluate the good guy persona Daedalus is presenting to us: the treatment of Asterion, the callousness about the deaths of others, the obsession only with his own safety and that of Icarus. The knowledge that what he’s doing is wrong, and doing it anyway to save his own skin. The affectionate relationship with Ariadne, that gets split open later when we actually meet Ariadne… It becomes clear that we have a deeply unreliable narrator, and the whole thing hinges on a moment in which Ariadne identifies something that heroes have in common, that Daedalus too shares.

I won’t give any more spoilers than that — though it’s hard to talk about it in any detail without the acknowledgement of the unreliable narration, and the moments of fracture where you get to see what Daedalus is really like.

It’s a complex one, because the love for Icarus is clearly real: Daedalus will suffer to get to see him again. But how real? Is it love for Icarus, whoever he might have been and whoever he might become? Or is it love of his own legacy, love of someone he shaped, love of the idea of being a good and loving father?

We don’t get answers, as such. We’re left guessing. And that, spun carefully out through the whole novella until the whole of the problem is clear only in the closing pages, is why this is a good retelling.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Seamus Sullivan, SF/F

Fantasy with Friends: Reading Order

Posted June 29, 2026 by Nicky in General / 8 Comments

A new week, and a new Fantasy with Friends prompt! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about series reading order:

When reading a favorite fantasy series, which reading order would you recommend? For instance, when reading Narnia, do you think people should go by publication order or by chronological order? Or, if you like to recommend Tolkien, do you think readers should start with LotR or The Hobbit? Feel free to discuss any favorite fantasy series you have!

It feels like this question isn’t super relevant to my current faves, buuuut the prompt does help!

C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia: personally, I always go with chronological order, starting with The Magician’s Nephew and placing The Horse and His Boy immediately after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (since they overlap). I like starting at the beginning, and I feel like it gives you a solid footing for the following books. Still, there are solid reasons to go by publication order, and that’s the information you have available: if you read The Magician’s Nephew first, you’ll know more than the characters about the world of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I personally think it works both ways, and have always read it that way, but… I can see the strengths of the other way too.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings: definitely read The Hobbit first. It has important setup for The Lord of the Rings, and it’s a better transition one into the other if you start with it and then let Tolkien bridge you into the higher fantasy tone of The Lord of the Rings: you can track the tone changing from the first chapter into the flight to Rivendell. The other direction would be a really weird transition, and anyway you’d have missed the introduction of the Ring and Gollum. You still have to be prepared for the fact that the audience is a little different between the two books and that the tonal shift is coming, mind you: I’m also open to the two books just being for different audiences, and only reading one or the other (though personally I love the whole).
Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising: I rarely ever recommend doing this, but if you’re coming to it for the first time as an adult and you don’t have much patience with children’s literature, skip Over Sea, Under Stone. At least on your first read. I do think it has a great deal of merit and adds to the lore, but The Dark is Rising introduces the stakes a lot better and is less from a child’s point of view: the protagonist of The Dark is Rising is a human child as the book starts… but as he discovers, he’s also an Old One, and that changes his perspective a lot compared to the kids in Over Sea, Under Stone, who are just human. That said, I would suggest reading Over Sea, Under Stone before Greenwitch, if you do get into The Dark is Rising, because you need to know Simon, Jane and Barney and their relationship with Merriman before you can plunge into that.

As a kid, I’d have always said chronological order for anything, but I think publication order has a lot to be said for it because that order is pretty sure to give you the information you need in the order you need it… and I think authors’ recommended reading orders can be useful here too.

Mostly, I prefer it to be unambiguous: gimme series numbering and a recommended reading order next to the title page, please!

Tags: discussions, Fantasy with Friends

Review – Navigating With You

Posted June 28, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Navigating With You

by Jeremy Whitley, Cassio Ribeiro, Nikki Foxrobot

Genres: Graphic Novels, Romance
Pages: 220
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
Neesha Sparks is a disabled, vocal community activist with a passion for costume design. Gabby Graciana is an optimistic surfer - and, like Neesha, a new kid at school. When the two girls discover that they like the same manga series, Navigator Nozomi, they become more than just fellow new kids. But it was more than just having read the same book series--neither of them had finished it! Soon, they become new friends on a mission - to track down the remaining Navigator Nozomi books. This slice-of-life romance follows the two girls as they adventure across North Carolina to find each book, with their story intercut with the tales of Navigator Nozomi. Neesha and Gabby find more than just the books though—they find acceptance, friendship, understanding, and love.

Jeremy Whitley and Cassio Ribeiro’s Navigating With You is really cute: two girls meet, both new to the school, and end up bonding over a manga they remember reading. We get excerpts from the fictional manga (albeit read left-to-right like a Western comic) as the girls find the various volumes and get back into the story. Unsurprisingly, the lessons learned in the manga they’re reading parallel some of the stuff they need to grow on.

I loved that a lot of thought went into their backgrounds and how to bring them across, particularly for Neesha (who has a form of cerebral palsy). It strikes a balance between showing us the wholeness of who these people are and doing an Educational Bit about food from their culture or how Neesha’s mobility aids help her, etc.

The relationship that forms between Neesha and Gabby (and their families!) feels natural, and their growing support for each other was a really nice read. It’s not all feel-good — Gabby has some serious trauma to work through, while Neesha hasn’t exactly had it easy either — but I loved the journey. The character designs and art are nice, too, and the manga-style sections are reasonably convincing.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Cassio Ribeiro, graphic novels, Jeremy Whitley, Nikki Foxrobot, queer fiction, romance

Review – Dinosaur Sanctuary, vol 6

Posted June 28, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Dinosaur Sanctuary

by Itaru Kinoshita

Genres: Manga, Science Fiction
Pages: 200
Series: Dinosaur Sanctuary #6
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
SUZUME MOVES ON AGAIN, AND BENKEI RETURNS!

Rookie dinokeeper Suma Suzume is continuing to make the rounds through every department in the struggling Enoshima Dinoland. Now that Umeko the Centrosaurus is out of surgery, Suzume’s time with the ceratopsians comes to an end. Can she find a way to get close to Fuzuki, the decidedly peculiar head of the pterosaur department? And what happens when Benkei, the Troodon chick she raised, scampers back into her life?

Volume six of Itaru Kinoshita’s Dinosaur Sanctuary covers Umeko’s surgery and initial recovery period, and then has Suma moving on to a rotation with the pterosaurs and visiting Benkei in the lab. There’s some really cute stuff here, and of course Suma’s usual near-magic ability to eventually get along with everyone.

We do also get a moment between Suma and Kaidou (with Karin bailing) which gives us some more interpersonal background; I kind of wondered for a second if there’s a hint of romance there? I don’t know how I’d feel about that!

Anyway, as usual, it’s a fun volume and based in science, and I enjoyed it a lot. I’m not so appreciative of the slight cliffhangers between volumes (Umeko’s prep for surgery between five and six, and now the fate of the lab between six and seven), but it makes sense as a way to keep people buying the manga…

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Itaru Kinoshita, manga, SF/F