Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted November 29, 2025 by Nicky in General / 2 Comments

Weekend time! And nearly the end of the month too; I cannot believe it’s about to be December.

Books acquired this week

This week we have two books acquired to review! Both from Netgalley; I’ve not been lucky enough (so far at least) to get physical copies.

Cover of Agnes Aubert's Mystical Cat Shelter by Heather Fawcett Cover of Platform Decay by Martha Wells

I’m excited for both! Technically I got the version of Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter with the UK cover, but I like this one better and I already had it saved, sooo. There you are.

Posts from this week

I’ve continued posting extras to get to grips with the pre-written review backlog, so there’s a bunch again for the roundup this week! As ever, don’t forget that most of them are books I read weeks/months ago by this point, so it doesn’t reflect this week’s reading. That’s below in the “What I’m reading” section!

Aaand if you were curious (as people often are) about why I bother to finish/rate/review low-star reads, I wrote about that not so long ago.

What I’m reading

After a quiet reading week last week, I finished eight books last weekend, so this was a bit more action-packed (inasfar as reading is action). Here’s a sneak peek at the ones I intend to review on the blog sometime:

Cover As If By Magic ed. Martin Edwards Cover of Bipolar Bear and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Health Insurance: A Fable for Grownups by Kathleen Founds Cover of Delicious in Dungeon vol 1, by Ryoko Kui Cover of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation vol 2 by MXTX

Cover of Answering Back ed. Carol Ann Duffy Cover of The Wages of Sin by Kaite Welsh Cover of Do You Really Only Want a Meal? vol 2 by Yasu Tadano Cover of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation vol 3 by MXTX

Cover of One Night in Hartswood by Emma Denny Cover of Paladin's Faith by T. Kingfisher Cover of Swordcrossed by Freya Marske

As you see, I’ve been busy, though my reading did slow down after the weekend.

As for the weekend’s plans, I’m not sure. I’ve finished my Book Spin Bingo card early for once, so I think I might chill with some manga/graphic novels, and maybe read volume four of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation. As ever, though, it’s down to my whim!

Linking up with Reading Reality’s Stacking the Shelves, Caffeinated Reviewer’s The Sunday Post, and the Sunday Salon over at Readerbuzz.

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Review – Hold Back The Tide

Posted November 28, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Hold Back The Tide

Hold Back The Tide

by Melinda Salisbury

Genres: Fantasy, Horror, Young Adult
Pages: 297
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Everyone knows what happened to Alva's mother, all those years ago. But when dark forces begin to stir in Ormscaula, Alva has to face a very different future - and question everything she thought she knew about her past...

Melinda Salisbury’s Hold Back the Tide has a heck of a first line, and a rattling pace from there on. It took me only just over an hour to read, despite being 300 pages long, which I hadn’t really expected. I’d forgotten most of the reasons I grabbed a copy, just that I’d enjoyed The Sin Eater’s Daughter, so it’d been kind of languishing on the TBR, but it surprised me.

It does feel a bit YA-ish, and there’s a touch of a love triangle — sort of, maybe. There’s sort of an impending potential threat of one, anyway, or you can read it as such. But this is definitely a thriller too, with more of a horror vibe than I was expecting: not only is the main character living with the constant fear of being killed by her father (which we learn immediately), but there are monsters coming out of the loch, people going missing from the village, and the obsessive sliminess of a man who loved her mother and now wants to have control over her. The tension and atmosphere is done really well.

I was enjoying the book well enough, but wasn’t sure whether it was really going to stand out, especially when one of the character survived what looked like a certain death; it just felt like things were going to resolve all too easily, leaving the book kind of toothless. I won’t spoiler, but the ending — while classic in its way — definitely fixed my impression that it was going to shy away from a bad ending.

Overall, I’m glad I finally got round to this; I had a lot of fun.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

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Review – Felix Ever After

Posted November 28, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Felix Ever After

Felix Ever After

by Kacen Callender

Genres: Romance, Young Adult
Pages: 360
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

From Stonewall and Lambda Award–winning author Kacen Callender comes a revelatory YA novel about a transgender teen grappling with identity and self-discovery while falling in love for the first time.

Felix Love has never been in love—and, yes, he’s painfully aware of the irony. He desperately wants to know what it’s like and why it seems so easy for everyone but him to find someone. What’s worse is that, even though he is proud of his identity, Felix also secretly fears that he’s one marginalization too many—Black, queer, and transgender—to ever get his own happily-ever-after.

When an anonymous student begins sending him transphobic messages—after publicly posting Felix’s deadname alongside images of him before he transitioned—Felix comes up with a plan for revenge. What he didn’t count on: his catfish scenario landing him in a quasi–love triangle....

But as he navigates his complicated feelings, Felix begins a journey of questioning and self-discovery that helps redefine his most important relationship: how he feels about himself.

Felix Ever After is an honest and layered story about identity, falling in love, and recognizing the love you deserve.

It’s difficult to figure out how to rate Kacen Callender’s Felix Ever After, because I’m pretty sure it’d have meant an enormous amount to me when I was 10-15 years younger, but the teenageness of it all just hits wrong at this particular point in my life. I somewhat steer away from YA at the moment because of that, because it’s not for me, and it’s not super fair to complain when a book for a totally different target audience doesn’t chime with me! But I had a copy, and I wanted to give it a shot.

There were ways in which I really didn’t have fun with this book: the teenager thing, the drama of it all, but also the fact that it rhymed somewhat with experiences I had in school (a forced outing based on private stuff — the fact that everybody decided I was a lesbian was somewhat off-base and it’s not a way I’d define myself now, but that didn’t change anything about how bad it all was at the time). I’m over it, but it’s still not a fun time to think about or be reminded of so strongly.

But the strong friendships and bonds between the characters, the careful fumbling toward what feels right, that did all still come through and feel relevant. None of us are immune to getting tangled up in this stuff, no matter how old we are, and there was joy in seeing Felix come through, in seeing the strength of his bonds with Ezra, his father, and seeing him get free of stuff that wasn’t serving him.

In the end, I can’t say I loved it for me, but I love that it exists, and that other people can have it.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

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Review – The Book of Were-Wolves

Posted November 27, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The Book of Were-Wolves

The Book of Were-Wolves: Were-Wolf History and Folklore

by Sabine Baring-Gould

Genres: Crime, History, Non-fiction
Pages: 142
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

First published in 1865, Sabine Baring-Gould’s "The Book of Were-Wolves" is the first serious academic study and one of the finest ever done on the subject of lycanthropy and werewolf lore.
With the shocking histories of 10 famous cases, this classic blends science, superstition, and fiction to tell the full story of the were-wolves among us.

Not relegating the were-wolf just to a secular and sceptical study, nor simply to spiritual banter, Baring-Gould manages to compress an enormous span of historical material into his work; a work which is no doubt of value to the academic and those involved with the occult at the same time.

Sabine Baring-Gould’s The Book of Were-Wolves was a bit of a random choice from the Serial Reader catalogue, solely because it was kinda apropos for spoopy season. Baring-Gould was an antiquarian and collector of folk lore, and this book is a collection of folklore about lycanthropy, along with some of his musings about where such stories may come from.

He dug into a bunch of texts for this, and I found his discussion of shape-changing (not always into wolves) in Norse mythology pretty interesting — I know the texts, but hadn’t really looked at them from that point of view before.

However, he also theorises about what gives rise to talk of lycanthropy, blaming mental illness, and starts discussing real-life cases of horrific murder, etc, etc. That bit gets a bit long and to my mind irrelevant, and doesn’t really have any conclusions.

Still, kinda interesting!

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

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Review – The House Dress

Posted November 27, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The House Dress

The House Dress: A Story of Eroticism and Fashion

by Elda Danese

Genres: Fashion, History, Non-fiction
Pages: 150
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

The idea of the house dress is closely related to the concept of housework and domesticity. At the same time, it is distinguished by not being a uniform, thanks in particular to the decorations of the fabric. Starting in the late 1940s, a whole series of movies contributed to its image through a gallery of remarkable female characters, the latest of which is Pedro Almodovar’s film Volver, with a female lead who is equipped with a wardrobe full of beautifully ornamented house dresses. After taking into account its distinctive and expressive features, author Elda Danese traces the circumstances that led to the success and the worldwide use of the house dress over a period spanning from the 1920s to the present.

Elda Danese’s The House Dress is a pretty dry and academic discussion of the evolution, use and meaning of the house dress, digging into a bit of the history of it, the words used for it, and how it’s been used in cinema as well.

It’s not a subject I know a lot about; a bit from the various fashion history books I’ve read, and a bit from the Great British Sewing Bee (at least, definitely last season’s tribute to Diane von FĂĽrstenberg, but I’m pretty sure I remember other wrap dress/house dress challenges), so this did fill in some gaps, but it was also probably a bit too scholarly for me — where fashion history is concerned, I know very little, enjoy reading about it, and for the most part let the knowledge go again, ahaha.

So overall probably not one for the casual reader, though it does include a lot of reference images!

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

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Review – Jumping Jenny

Posted November 26, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Jumping Jenny

Jumping Jenny

by Anthony Berkeley

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 240
Series: British Library Crime Classics
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

At a costume party with the dubious theme of "famous murderers and their victims," the know-it-all amateur criminologist Roger Sheringham is settled in for an evening of beer, small talk, and analyzing his companions. One guest in particular has caught his attention for her theatrics, and his theory that she might have several enemies among the partygoers proves true when she is found hanging from the "decorative" gallows on the roof terrace.

Noticing a key detail that could implicate a friend in the crime, Sheringham decides to meddle with the scene and unwittingly casts himself into jeopardy as the uncommonly thorough police investigation circles closer and closer to the truth.

Anthony Berkeley’s Jumping Jenny shows both his playfulness with the expectations of the genre and his tendency toward misogyny, making it an interesting read that’s also pretty darn frustrating. The man had a problem with women, and a fetish about spanking them to “fix” them, and this wasn’t quite as obtrusive as in some of his books, but did flit in and out of the story.

It doesn’t help that I don’t like Berkeley’s “detective”, Roger Sheringham, at the best of times — and here he’s suspecting everyone of murder except the right person, and trying to shield everyone from looking like murderers, while getting everything absolutely wrong and making everything worse. The structure amuses for a while, but it starts to really get frustrating.

In the end, “interesting but not enjoyable as a whole” would be my verdict, even without Berkeley’s misogyny.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

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WWW Wednesday

Posted November 26, 2025 by Nicky in General / 6 Comments

Cover of One Night in Hartswood by Emma DennyWhat have you recently finished reading?

One Night in Hartswood, by Emma Denny. It was… okay. There was nothing in it that I outright bounced off, other than the fairly genre-typical lack of communication/lying about identity, but I didn’t super click with it either. Sometimes that kind of predictability is comforting, but usually something else (like characters I adore) compensates for it to pull me in, and that didn’t seem to happen here for me.

Cover of Swordcrossed by Freya MarskeWhat are you currently reading?

I’m in the midst of two books: Freya Marske’s Swordcrossed, and T. Kingfisher’s Paladin’s Faith. I haven’t totally gotten into the former yet, though there’s nothing so far to dislike beyond a worry that Luca’s lies are going to fuck things over in a way that I find both predictable and annoying.

As far as Paladin’s Faith goes, Kingfisher’s usual wit makes this fun, but I’m not sure about the match-up of Shane and Marguerite, or indeed about spending much time with this particular flavour of self-hating guilty paladin. All Kingfisher’s paladins seem to run basically the same software, and that can get frustrating.

Cover of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation vol 4 by MXTXWhat will you read next?

Volume four of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, pretty certainly. I was very tempted to start it already, but I’m trying to focus on finishing up my Book Spin Bingo reads first — especially since I have only two left to finish (the books I’m currently reading), so I’m really close to a blackout that isn’t super last minute, for once!

Anyway, I don’t adore MDZS as much as many seem to, but I’m having fun, and I kinda want to strike while the iron is hot after finishing volume three on Monday. But we’ll see!

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Review – Paladin’s Hope

Posted November 25, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Review – Paladin’s Hope

Paladin's Hope

by T. Kingfisher

Genres: Fantasy, Romance
Pages: 254
Series: The Saint of Steel #3
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Piper is a lich-doctor, a physician who works among the dead, determining causes of death for the city guard's investigations. It's a peaceful, if solitary, profession... until the day when he's called to the river to examine the latest in a series of mysterious bodies, mangled by some unknown force.

Galen is a paladin of a dead god, lost to holiness and no longer entirely sane. He has long since given up on any hope of love. But when the two men and a brave gnole constable are drawn into the maze of the mysterious killer, it's Galen's job to protect Piper from the traps that await them. He's just not sure if he can protect Piper from the most dangerous threat of all...

I absolutely sped through Paladin’s Hope, perhaps because it’s fairly self-contained and feels tighter than the previous books (with a lower word-count, too). It’s a romance for Galen and Piper, who’ve both appeared in the story before, and while there’s a samey-ness to the brooding and suffering nobility of Kingfisher’s paladins, overall it was still cute and effective (and honestly I found Galen’s worries about it among the most realistic, compared to Istvhan’s and Stephen’s).

I really enjoyed the monster-of-the-week nature of this book, somehow: Piper and Galen help out a gnole, Earstripe, in trying to get to the bottom of a bunch of dead bodies that have some kind of undefinable sameness about them. In so doing, they get themselves into a trap, a labyrinth that they have to work their way out of by handling what is basically an obstacle course — and of course the close proximity stirs up the chemistry between Piper and Galen, and the situation stirs up Galen’s nightmares…

Earstripe is a great third for their merry band; we get quite a bit of time with gnoles in this one, which for people who liked The Wonder Engine should be a draw (unless you’re a monster and find them annoying or something). Piper’s scientific fascination with all kinds of things is lovely, and particularly his interest in gnole anatomy and gnole culture.

As ever, Kingfisher’s storytelling is fun and her ideas fascinating. I wasn’t very happy about that epilogue, though, just because… how could you end there?! This big mystery that’s hovered around each book, and that’s where you end this one!? Is there going to be more about this?!

Yes, I just used up my entire quota of question marks and exclamation marks for the day.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

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Review – Solo Leveling, vol 8

Posted November 25, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Solo Leveling, vol 8

Solo Leveling

by Dubu, Chugong

Genres: Fantasy, Manga
Pages: 304
Series: Solo Leveling #8
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Sweeping the ants on Jeju Island put Jinwoo on the map. The top guilds in Korea are all clamoring to recruit Jinwoo—but why join one when he can establish his own?

Volume eight of the Solo Leveling manhwa positively sped by, with lots of action scenes and less politicking than some of the other volumes. I loved that even in a dungeon, Jinwoo was immediately ready to return to his sister and help her, even though he can’t let the people he’s working with down either.

I’d love to see a bit more of his sister and his mother now, but it’s also clear that hunting isn’t something Jinwoo’s going to give up, and that the primary focus remains how strong he is. His minions are ridiculously powerful at this stage, and I find myself surprisingly 100% behind it. It might not sound fun to have little at stake because Jinwoo’s always gonna beat everything, but it becomes entertaining just to watch his constant ascent.

Also… poor Haein Cha. He’s so oblivious, so confused about her feelings. Yeesh.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

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Review – Seeing Stars

Posted November 24, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Seeing Stars

Seeing Stars

by Simon Armitage

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 74
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

A thrilling new collection from the hugely acclaimed British poet Simon Armitage. With its vivid array of dramatic monologues, allegories, and tall tales, this absurdist, unreal exploration of modern society brings us a chorus of unique and unforgettable voices.

All are welcome at this twilit, visionary carnival: the man whose wife drapes a border-curtain across the middle of the marital home; the black bear with a dark secret; the woman who oversees giant snowballs in the freezer. "My girlfriend won me in a sealed auction but wouldn't / tell me how much she bid," begins one speaker; "I hadn't meant to go grave robbing with Richard Dawkins / but he can be very persuasive," another tells us. The storyteller behind this human tapestry has about him a sly undercover idealism: he shares with many of his characters a stargazing capacity for belief, or for being, at the very least, entirely "genuine in his disbelief." In these startling poems, with their unique cartoon-strip energy and air of misrule, Armitage creates world after world, peculiar and always particular, where the only certainty is the unexpected.

The poems in Simon Armitage’s Seeing Stars are prose-poems, which I’d forgotten; I liked this more than the other collection of his work I read recently, though I can’t say I was a huge fan even so — it’s just that I found this one a bit less insular, I guess? Less rooted to a particular place, and thus more accessible.

There were a couple of pieces that I quite liked, and they’re all pretty inventive and vivid, but I’m not sure it left a huge impression on me, all the same. It’s funny how ambivalent I am about Armitage’s poetry when I love his translation work on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight so much… but there you have it.

I’m still sure that somewhere there was at least one of his poems that I really liked, so the search continues — but only when the library has copies.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

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