Category: Reviews

Review – Bitch

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

Review – Bitch

Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution and the Female Animal

by Lucy Cooke

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 400
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

What does it mean to be female? Mother, carer, the weaker sex? Think again.

In the last few decades a revolution has been brewing in zoology and evolutionary biology. Lucy Cooke introduces us to a riotous cast of animals, and the scientists studying them, that are redefining the female of the species.

Meet the female lemurs of Madagascar, our ancient primate cousins that dominate the males of their species physically and politically. Or female albatross couples, hooking up together to raise their chicks in Hawaii. Or the meerkat mothers of the Kalahari Desert – the most murderous mammals on the planet.

The bitches in Bitch overturn outdated binary expectations of bodies, brains, biology and behaviour. Lucy Cooke's brilliant new book will change how you think – about sex, sexual identity and sexuality in animals and also the very forces that shape evolution.

Lucy Cooke’s Bitch aims to re-examine things that are taken for biological truths (like the idea that eggs are more costly so female animals evolved to be choosy while sperm is “cheap” and male animals are always profligate with it) in order to debunk the idea that female animals are less evolved than male animals.

She digs into this through a wide range of examples, but it’s worth noting that she really takes until the last chapter to wrestle with the fact that a male/female binary is an overly reductive and in fact unhelpful way of viewing the world. Each example, until the last chapter, is predicated on the idea that there are female animals and male animals, and some of those female animals are a bit more masculinised than we thought, or the sex roles are a bit more fluid or just plain different than we thought. It’s only in the last chapter that she reckons with species that have more than two recognised sexes (humans also have more than two phenotypic sexes, but because intersex individuals are comparatively rare and viewed as simply aberrant, we don’t really talk about that and this is never acknowledged) and the fact that the variation between sexes is actually often less than the variation between any given pair of individuals (including individuals considered to be of the same sex).

Which is to say, she doesn’t really properly reckon with it at all, since it comes in as an afterthought. As far as she goes, there are some interesting examples that overturn and complicate scientists’ expectations.

It might be a good one to sneak in some more complicated biology on people who think that genes or hormones or genitalia are the be-all and end-all of sex, but have some space between their ears for new concepts.

Personally, I learned about some new-to-me examples, and learned about some scientists who are doing interesting work, but it wasn’t overall that surprising or new to me.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

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Review – Pagans

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

Review – Pagans

Pagans

by James Alistair Henry

Genres: Alternate History, Crime, Mystery
Pages: 321
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Two cops. One killer. Hundreds of gods.

21st Century London. The Norman conquest never happened. The ancient tribes of Britain remain undefeated. But murders still have to be solved.

The small, mostly unimportant, island of Britain is inhabited by an uneasy alliance of tribes - the dominant Saxon East, the beleaguered Celtic West, and an independent Nordic Scotland - and tensions are increasing by the second. Supermarket warpaint sales are at an all-time high, mead abuse shortens the lives of thousands, and social media is abuzz with conspiracy theories suggesting the High Table's putting GPS trackers in the honeycakes.

Amid this febrile atmosphere, the capital is set to play host to the Unification Summit, which aims to join together the various tribes into one 'united kingdom'. But when a Celtic diplomat is found brutally murdered, his body nailed to an ancient oak, the fragile peace is threatened. Captain Aedith Mercia, daughter of a powerful Saxon leader, must join forces with Celtic Tribal Detective Inspector Drustan to solve the murder - and stop political unrest spilling onto the streets.

But is this an isolated incident? Or are Aedith and Drustan facing a serial killer with a decades-old grudge? To find out, they must delve into their own murky pasts and tackle forces that go deeper than they ever could have imagined.

Set in a world that's far from our own and yet captivatingly familiar, Pagans explores contemporary themes of religious conflict, nationalism, prejudice... and the delicate internal politics of the office coffee round. Gripping and darkly funny, Pagans keeps you guessing until the very end.

James Henry Alistair’s Pagans is set in an interesting world in which the Norman invasion of 1066 never happened, and Britain is divided into Norse, Saxon and indigenous British contingents which don’t get along super great. Britain’s also a bit of a backwater, with geopolitics all flipped around from what we know — clearly a lot more than the Battle of Hastings did and didn’t happen/work out the way we know it. That’s never explored at great length, and is actually just the backdrop for a mystery.

This works… okay. I had so many questions, including a lot of them about the marginal (nearly unknown) nature of Christians in the story, given that the Norse, Saxons and native British, or at the very least subgroups thereof, all converted to Christianity at some point in their histories, without any need for the Normans to invade. It doesn’t make sense.

If you set that aside, and accept the idea of a modern Britain that’s Saxon, Norse and indigenous British (with heavy marginalisation for “the Indij”), there are some fun details about how this works and how people experience the world, some of which are semi-reasonable to consider having grown out of Saxon, Norse and British beliefs. If you accept the context, the mystery that plays out against it is a fun one, playing the groups against one another (while having them work together in the form of the police) and leading up to quite the climax.

I actually enjoyed Aedith and Drustan’s characters, and the supporting cast; as a mystery, and with them as the cops, it’s quite fun. I could never take it quite seriously, and some of the obvious flips from reality to do with marginalisation are a bit ham-handed, but I sat back and let it take me where it wanted to go, and it was an interesting ride.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

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Review – Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Posted October 24, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 3 Comments

Review – Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Before The Coffee Gets Cold

by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 213
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

What would you change if you could go back in time?

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.

In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, see their sister one last time, and meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.

But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold...

I had suspected that Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold wouldn’t be entirely my thing, so I wasn’t surprised to find that I didn’t love it. It made decent light reading for the car, and I wanted to give it a try since I know other people have really loved it. Mostly, the style (or possibly the translation) didn’t quite work for me — there was quite a bit of reiteration and stating the obvious.

That said, I did enjoy the way it set up time travel with some really heavy constraints, and then played within them to show that you don’t have to change history with time travel to get what you need out of it. The stories are a little sentimental, but more or less in a way I expected, so there’s that. And I did like the story about the guy with Alzheimer’s, and how his wife decided to handle it.

In the end it isn’t deeply profound and life-changing — at least, I didn’t find it to be so — but it was pleasant, and I’m glad I gave it a shot. I might even read the other books at some point, if the library has the ebooks and I feel like they might fit in somewhere.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

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Review – Fence, vol 6

Posted October 23, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Fence, vol 6

Fence: Redemption

by C.S. Pacat, Johanna the Mad, Joanna LaFuente

Genres: Graphic Novels, Romance
Pages: 112
Series: Fence #6
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

A mysterious new fencer arrives at Halverton in the newest chapter of the GLAAD Media Award-nominated sports comic, perfect for fans of Heartstopper.

THE COMPETITION HAS BEEN RESET… EN GARDE!

Return to the thrilling world of high-stakes, competitive fencing, with a brand new story featuring the beloved cast of characters from the original hit series. Are Seiji and Jesse really through? The rumors around Halverton, the prestigious fencing training camp, have spread like wildfire, but it’s not long before a mystery fencer arrives–one who may finally pose a threat to the #1 spot. Will Seiji’s unquenchable quest for rivalry take Nicholas’ place? Where will his loyalty lie? And, when Seiji gets an up close and personal look into Nicholas’ past and determination against adversity while preparing for the difficult road ahead and the State Championships, he’ll have to confront a tempting thought… are they on… a date? New York Times and USA Today best-selling author C. S. Pacat (Dark Rise, Nightwing) and acclaimed cartoonist Johanna the Mad (Wynd) continue their winning streak with this on-point entry in the GLAAD Media Award-nominated series! Collects Fence: Redemption #1-4.

The sixth volume of C.S. Pacat and Johanna the Mad’s Fence is a self-contained arc in which they visit another fencing school to practice intensively, and several people have dates (but Aiden doesn’t). There’s a lot of great stuff, like Bobby and Dante (though Dante’s absent for most of the book), Harvard learning to assert himself a bit more, and Seiji and Nicholas getting closer.

It does however emphasise that Nicholas has got this good at fencing in little over three months, which… I take back what I said about the fact that he doesn’t magically improve overnight. This is nuts. Fencing isn’t heritable.

Anyway, it’s a cute volume, and I would really like a lot more of it, please and thank you.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

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Review – Valkyrie

Posted October 22, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Valkyrie

Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World

by Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 280
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Valkyries: the female supernatural beings that choose who dies and who lives on the battlefield. They protect some, but guide spears, arrows and sword blades into the bodies of others. Viking myths about valkyries attempt to elevate the banality of war - to make the pain and suffering, the lost limbs and deformities, the piles of lifeless bodies of young men, glorious and worthwhile. Rather than their death being futile, it is their destiny and good fortune, determined by divine beings. The women in these stories take full part in the power struggles and upheavals in their communities, for better or worse.

Drawing on the latest historical and archaeological evidence, Valkyrie introduces readers to the dramatic and fascinating texts recorded in medieval Iceland, a culture able to imagine women in all kinds of roles carrying power, not just in this world, but pulling the strings in the other-world, too. In the process, this fascinating book uncovers the reality behind the myths and legends to reveal the dynamic, diverse lives of Viking women.

JĂłhanna KatrĂ­n FriðriksdĂłttir’s Valkyrie attempts to give us a pretty comprehensive picture of the position of women in Norse society (I don’t say “Viking”, because “Vikings” are the ones who went out trading and plundering, and this is a more complete picture than that), using evidence from archaeology, from any written sources we have, and especially from the sagas.

It may sound weird to take evidence from sagas, but there are two reasons this is justified. First, as anyone who has studied the Icelandic sagas knows, they contain detail which has been verified. Oral histories passed down through generations have, in many different societies worldwide, proven astonishingly accurate in general, and archaeological evidence has verified things previously considered fanciful (like the fact that the Vikings made it to North America, now a matter of historical fact).

That said, such sources need handling with care, and the author does that pretty well, always explaining what seems a reasonable inference and what isn’t. She leans on the sagas a lot, though, and that can get pretty repetitive (especially if you’ve read them).

Overall, I found I didn’t learn a lot, but I did start with a fairly high degree of knowledge. I think it might be a bit dry for a lot of readers, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff discussed, albeit sometimes crushing to one’s hopes of bands of Viking warrior women.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

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Review – The Hero

Posted October 21, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The Hero

The Hero

by Lee Child

Genres: Non-fiction
Pages: 96
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

In his first work of nonfiction, the creator of the multimillion-selling Jack Reacher series explores the endurance of heroes from Achilles to Bond, showing us how this age-old myth is a fundamental part of what makes us human. He demonstrates how hero stories continue to shape our world – arguing that we need them now more than ever.

From the Stone Age to the Greek Tragedies, from Shakespeare to Robin Hood, we have always had our heroes. The hero is at the centre of formative myths in every culture and persists to this day in world-conquering books, films and TV shows. But why do these characters continue to inspire us, and why are they so central to storytelling?

Scalpel-sharp on the roots of storytelling and enlightening on the history and science of myth, The Hero is essential reading for anyone trying to write or understand fiction. Child teaches us how these stories still shape our minds and behaviour in an increasingly confusing modern world, and with his trademark concision and wit, demonstrates that however civilised we get, we’ll always need heroes.

Lee Child’s The Hero is a bit of a ramble about language that works its way around to talking about what “hero” means, and how he thinks humans developed heroes. It’s a short read and it’s pretty slight, based on little evidence and without any sources — but if you’re interested in Child as a storyteller, it might be worthwhile to read and get an idea of how he sees storytelling and indeed heroes.

For me, I haven’t actually read any of Child’s work (and I’m not sure it’d be my thing if I did), but it was still mildly entertaining to follow someone else’s slightly rambling train of thought and imagination about how stories came to be, and why we need them.

Not something I’d super recommend, though.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

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Review – Blood on the Tracks

Posted October 20, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Blood on the Tracks

Blood on the Tracks

by Martin Edwards (editor)

Genres: Crime, Mystery, Short Stories
Pages: 288
Series: British Library Crime Classics
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

“Never had I been given a tougher problem to solve, and never had I been so utterly at my wits’ end for a solution.”

A signalman is found dead by a railway tunnel. A man identifies his wife as a victim of murder on the underground. Two passengers mysteriously disappear between stations, leaving behind a dead body.

Trains have been a favourite setting of many crime writers, providing the mobile equivalent of the “locked-room” scenario. Their enclosed carriages with a limited number of suspects lend themselves to seemingly impossible crimes. In an era of cancellations and delays, alibis reliant upon a timely train service no longer ring true, yet the railway detective has enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in the twenty-first century.

Both train buffs and crime fans will delight in this selection of fifteen railway-themed mysteries, featuring some of the most popular authors of their day alongside less familiar names. This is a collection to beguile even the most wearisome commuter.

Blood on the Tracks — edited by Martin Edwards, as usual for the British Library Crime Classics series — is a collection of stories on an apparently very specific theme: railway mysteries. And yet there’s plenty, and several novels as well that one can point to (more than one by Agatha Christie alone, as I recall!), so it’s definitely a worthy theme.

As ever, there were some stories that spoke more to me than others, but overall it’s a collection I enjoyed, including the Holmes pastiche by Knox (despite being often wary of Holmes pastiches). Reading E. Bramah’s story featuring Max Carrados made me almost resolve to write to the lecturer back at university who refused to include more diverse characters like disabled detectives/characters in the course material (“what’s next, animal detectives? This would be really scraping the barrel”) — Max Carrados being, of course, totally blind. These collections are really fun for how they dig for forgotten stories and bring them back to light.

Overall, one of the most fun collections; not just interesting because I’m interested in the genre, but with stories I enjoyed in and of themselves.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

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Review – A Magical Girl Retires

Posted October 19, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – A Magical Girl Retires

A Magical Girl Retires

by Park Seolyeon

Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 176
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

A millennial turned magical girl must combat climate change and credit card debt in this delightful, witty, and wildly imaginative ode to magical girl manga.

Twenty-nine, depressed, and drowning in credit card debt after losing her job during the pandemic, a millennial woman decides to end her troubles by jumping off Seoul’s Mapo Bridge.

But her suicide attempt is interrupted by a girl dressed all in white—her guardian angel. Ah Roa is a clairvoyant magical girl on a mission to find the greatest magical girl of all time. And our protagonist just may be that special someone.

But the young woman’s initial excitement turns to frustration when she learns being a magical girl in real life is much different than how it’s portrayed in stories. It isn’t just destiny—it’s work. Magical girls go to job fairs, join trade unions, attend classes. And for this magical girl there are no special powers and no great perks, and despite being magical, she still battles with low self-esteem. Her magic wand . . . is a credit card—which she must use to defeat a terrifying threat that isn’t a monster or an intergalactic war. It’s global climate change. Because magical girls need to think about sustainability, too.

Park Seolyeon reimagines classic fantasy tropes in a novel that explores real-world challenges that are both deeply personal and universal: the search for meaning and the desire to do good in a world that feels like it’s ending. A fun, fast-paced, and enchanting narrative that sparkles thanks to award-nominated translator Anton Hur, A Magical Girl Retires reminds us that we are all magical girls—that fighting evil by moonlight and winning love by daylight can be anyone's game.

I’d been curious about Park Seolyeon’s A Magical Girl Retires for a while, since magical girl stories are fun and the cover art very much calls up that aesthetic and genre. It was available on Kobo Plus, and looked like a quick read, so I snagged it and tore through it: it really is a quick read, very breezily written (despite some dark themes, e.g. the whole first chapter involves the main character considering suicide, and her depression is clear throughout) and with fun art that livens things up.

Unfortunately it felt like it was too much of a quick read — everything happened so fast, each chapter was so short, and I could’ve done with more build-up of the relationship between the main character and Ah Roa (which could’ve been really cute). There’s a lot of fun stuff in the detail of how being a magical girl works, the fact that there’s a magical girl union, etc etc, it just… skips by so fast that it’s difficult to get invested.

Someone else mentioned this was a case where a short story should be expanded into a novel rather than vice versa, and yeah, that’s the feeling I had. The main character is well-drawn as far as it goes (though it’s mostly the depression!) but everything else feels sketched in, and the stakes are so high that that doesn’t seem right. There are definitely neat ideas here, just. Hmmm. It didn’t quite work.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

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Review – Solo Leveling, vol 6

Posted October 19, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Solo Leveling, vol 6

Solo Leveling

by Dubu, Chugong

Genres: Fantasy, Manga
Pages: 304
Series: Solo Leveling #6
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Jinwoo continues to progress rapidly through the Demon's 6 Castle, climbing toward the top floor with the help of a demon noble who has agreed to escort the intruder if it means not having to fight him herself! Preoccupied with his personal quest, Jinwoo is unaware of the escalating threat outside the dungeon. The ant magic beasts that laid waste to Jeju Island are looking to relocate, and if they reach the mainland, all of Korea could fall. Will the combined S-ranks of Japan and Korea be enough to quell the swarm—and will Jinwoo be joining them?!

Volume 6 of the Solo Leveling manhua is a lot of fun, though it feels a bit weirdly paced, or like the volumes are weirdly split up. The first half is basically all about Jinwoo’s ascent of the Demon’s Castle, with lots of action and fighting that involves Jinwoo being… still clever, but mostly also way overpowered.

The second half is largely about the Jeju Island plot, with Japanese and Korean high-ranked hunters joining up, testing each other, and then starting the raid… and Jinwoo isn’t a super important part of that plot, since he chooses not to get involved due to his mother’s recovery. It feels really weird that he’s not involved, narratively, but I’m guessing he’ll be getting stuck in soon enough. I can’t imagine the system’s super interested in him no longer hunting…

The art and colours continue to be lovely, and while I don’t follow the action scenes well, eh, I never do — just not a visual person. I’m very curious where it’s all going, and also probably curious enough to start reading the light novel.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

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Review – Between Two Rivers

Posted October 17, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Between Two Rivers

Between Two Rivers

by Moudhy Al-Rashid

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 336
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

In ancient times, the vast area that stretches across what is now modern-day Iraq and Syria saw the rise and fall of epic civilizations who built the foundations of our world today. It was in this region, which we call Mesopotamia, that history was written down for the very first time.

With startling modernity, the people of Mesopotamia left behind hundreds of thousands of fragments of their everyday lives. Immortalised in clay and stone are intimate details from 4000 years ago. We find accounts of an enslaved person negotiating their freedom, a dog's paw prints as it accidentally stepped into fresh clay, a parent desperately trying to soothe a baby with a lullaby, the imprint of a child's teeth as it sank them into their clay homework, and countless receipts for beer.

In Between Two Rivers, historian Dr Moudhy Al-Rashid examines what these people chose to preserve in their own words about their lives, creating the first historical records and allowing us to brush hands with them thousands of years later.

Bringing us closer than ever before to the lives of ancient people, Between Two Rivers tells not just the history of Mesopotamia, but the story of how history was made.

Moudhy Al-Rashid’s Between Two Rivers is a conversational, fairly personal introduction to some Mesopotamian history through things that she is interested in herself, which made it a nice companion for a quiet evening, while leaving a bit of an itch for more info in some cases. The chapters lead on nicely from each other, building up a picture of ancient life based on the finds in the palace of Ennigaldi-Nanna, a priestess and daughter of a Babylonian king.

In the process, while introducing the finds and contextualising them as best as possible, Al-Rashid digs into some of the assumptions that archaeologists make (does a label for an item make a museum? does the presence of learning materials make a school, or are there other explanations like reuse of waste?). Perhaps the thing that startled me the most was realising that we can actually follow some specific ancient people through scribal records by name, getting a fair outline of their lives.

What’s most obviously lacking, though, is any kind of photography or even sketches to show us what she’s describing. She does write pretty good descriptions that give me a fairly reasonable idea of what she’s discussing, though I have no “mind’s eye” and thus I’m not really able to “picture” them in the way most people can.

So, yeah, pretty conversational, sometimes a little rambling/repetitive, overall: I enjoyed her style and her choices of topics, and found it an overall very pleasant read, but it did make me want to return to Selena Wisnom’s The Library of Ancient Wisdom and spend more time with that in hopes of more detail.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

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