Category: Reviews

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 Jinwooā€”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’sĀ 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 onĀ 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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Review – Stony Jack and the Lost Jewels of Cheapside

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

Review – Stony Jack and the Lost Jewels of Cheapside

Stony Jack and the Lost Jewels of Cheapside: Treasure and Ghosts in the London Clay

by Victoria Shepherd

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 400
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

June 1912. A pair of workmen deposit a heavy ball of clay in the antiques shop of George Fabian Lawrence, or ā€˜Stony Jackā€™ as he's better known. As Lawrence picks through the mud, a speck of gold catches his eye. A pearl earring tumbles into his hand, then another. A Burmese ruby follows; then Colombian emeralds, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and turquoise from Iran; tankards; watches; topaz; amazonite.

Stony Jack has discovered the greatest single cache of Elizabethan treasure.

Diving into Londonā€™s bustling, sometimes lawless, antiques trade at the turn of the century, Victoria Shepherd provides a compelling portrait of the city at the height of empire. A thrilling ride through Edwardian London, from the marble halls of the British Museum to the East End's maze of tenements and alleyways, Stony Jack and the Lost Jewels of Cheapside oversees the transformation of the city into a modern metropolis.

Victoria Shepherd’sĀ Stony Jack and the Lost Jewels of Cheapside digs into the story of the Cheapside Hoard, a cache of jewellery and gems from the 16th-17th century found during building work in 1912. “Stony Jack” was the navvies’ name for G.F. Lawrence, an antiquarian-cum-pawnshop owner who did work for various museums and spent most of his life hanging around construction sites hoping to swoop on interesting finds (including but not limited to jewellery). Shepherd traces the fate of the hoard, tries to figure out to whom it belonged, and discusses the lives of various people who were involved with it in some way.

There are a few problems with it, fascinating as I find that. The first is that Shepherd never met a digression or a wild supposition that she didn’t love. Everything is “maybe Queen Mary was in a car accident somewhere near Stony Jack’s shop because she wanted to go look at it”. And maybe not?! This isn’t fact, unless there’s some shred of evidence other than geographical closeness. There’s loads about Howard Carter, who had nothing to do with the hoard itself, beyond knowing Lawrence. And yet for all that, she choosesĀ not to dig into the sordid details of the paedophilia that one of the major players was involved in, explicitly eliding it to focus on her narrative, and allowing you to forget the man was total scum who abused children.

She also commits astonishing errors of fact in at least one field I know something about, Egyptology. Here’s one of her (very characteristic) run-on sentences, which contains so many errors it’s difficult to know where to start:

Now the world would know about the later kings of Egypt of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and Tutankhamun specifically, who, with his father, had reverted to the worship of one deity, Amun, the sun god, ending Egypt’s long-standing polytheism.

Akhenaten, who was probably (but not certainly) Tutankhamun’s father, worshipped theĀ Aten,Ā very much not Amun. The clue is in his name. Although his court at Amarna converted to monotheism, some no doubt more for political reasons than religious, the rest of Egypt didn’t instantly drop polytheism. This was not a “reversion”, either: Egypt hadn’t been monotheistic previously. You can’t revert to something you’ve never been.

Tutankhamun then later reverted to the worship of Amun, against his father rather than with him, and Amarna was abandoned. Polytheism in Egypt didn’t end: at best, it took a very, very short pause. Tutankhamun probably worshipped the Aten with his family when he was young, but he definitely didn’t “revert to the worship of one deity” with his father.

I unpack all that to give you the idea of how wildly bad Shepherd’s very basic scholarship is, so that you can take the book with appropriate heapings of salt on everything else. It’s just wrong in so many ways. And sure, maybe she’s better on her own ground,Ā but the facts of the Amarna Period in Egypt are so easy to discover that her ability to do basic fact checking seems suspect.

It’s a mildly entertaining read, but I fear that vast chunks of it are absolute fiction, even if it’s plausible fiction, and Shepherd’s scholarship is untrustworthy based on the aspects of it IĀ canĀ fact-check. It gets two stars because I did find it interesting enough to finish, but I can’t in good conscience give it more when it’s so very, very bad.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

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Review – Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers

Posted November 23, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers

Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers

by Jesse Q. Sutanto

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 338
Series: Vera Wong #1
Rating: one-star
Synopsis:

A lonely shopkeeper takes it upon herself to solve a murder in the most peculiar way in this captivating mystery by Jesse Q. Sutanto, bestselling author of Dial A for Aunties.

Vera Wong is a lonely little old lady--ah, lady of a certain age--who lives above her forgotten tea shop in the middle of San Francisco's Chinatown. Despite living alone, Vera is not needy, oh no. She likes nothing more than sipping on a good cup of Wulong and doing some healthy detective work on the Internet about what her Gen-Z son is up to.

Then one morning, Vera trudges downstairs to find a curious thing--a dead man in the middle of her tea shop. In his outstretched hand, a flash drive. Vera doesn't know what comes over her, but after calling the cops like any good citizen would, she sort of . . . swipes the flash drive from the body and tucks it safely into the pocket of her apron. Why? Because Vera is sure she would do a better job than the police possibly could, because nobody sniffs out a wrongdoing quite like a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands. Vera knows the killer will be back for the flash drive; all she has to do is watch the increasing number of customers at her shop and figure out which one among them is the killer.

What Vera does not expect is to form friendships with her customers and start to care for each and every one of them. As a protective mother hen, will she end up having to give one of her newfound chicks to the police?

I haven’t read anything by Jesse Sutanto before, butĀ Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers sounded like fun, and several people I follow were really enthused about it. It is wittily written, with a fun found-family dynamic,Ā butĀ I did find that it leaned very heavily into stereotypes, and it wasn’t always clear whether Vera was misunderstanding things because she’s “old” (she isn’t that old, but she’s written like she’s eighty) or because she’s Chinese. It is subverted at times, but she matched up so well to what I know about stereotypes of older Chinese women that I was kind of put off, even though I think it’s done affectionately (and I knowĀ that it’ll be viewed with amused recognition from some readers).

I think that could’ve been used really well to make people underestimate her, but I don’t think that really happened — and her meddling genuinely caused massive problems, and could’ve ruined at least one person’s life (and possibly more). It’s not that cute when you look at it that way. I found it honestly a bit cringe, at times.

I did also figure out who the murderer was just from the shape of the story, not from internal clues (apart from, I guess, one). The ending felt… a bit too easily earned, and I didn’t enjoy Vera’s manipulations. So overall I guess we’ll have to chalk this one up to “not for me”.

Rating: 1/5 (“didn’t like it”)

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Review – The Bookshop Below

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

Review – The Bookshop Below

The Bookshop Below

by Georgia Summers

Genres: Fantasy, Romance
Pages: 352
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

If you want a story that will change your life, Chiron's bookshop is where you go. For those lucky enough to grace its doors, it's a glimpse into a world of deadly bargains and powerful, magical books.

For Cassandra Fairfax, it's a reminder of everything she lost, when Chiron kicked her out and all but shuttered the shop. Since then, she's used her skills in less . . . ethical ways, trading stolen books and magical readings to wealthy playboys looking for power money can't buy.

Then Chiron dies. And if Cassandra knows anything, it's this: the bookshop must always have an owner.

To restore the shop, she'll need the help of Lowell Sharpe, a rival bookseller who is everything Cassandra is not - and knows it, too.

But as she is plunged into a world of unscrupulous collectors, deadly ink magic and shady societies, a dark force threatens to unravel the bookshops entirely . . .

I received a copy of this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

A certain amount of my reaction to Georgia Summers’Ā The Bookshop Below is due to really bad formatting on Kindle, which chopped off the ends of some words (I think) and made it difficult to see what’s meant to be part of the narration, where it’s including documents and people’s notes on the documents, the notes sent between different characters, etc. Some of that will presumably be better in the final version, and that would likely help the flow of the story.

I thought the magic system reminded me a lot ofĀ Ink Blood Sister Scribe,Ā and it felt like it never got very clearly laid out and delimited. That’s probably in part a matter of taste: I mostly rolled with it, but I can see other readers finding it extremely annoying. I did enjoy the concept of magic as a river, and bookshops as a way that magic gets out into the world through books which are more than just text. Despite that, sometimes it felt less about loving books and more just about making tangible magic with them; I wish it’d hewed a bit closer to books as magical and wonderful objects in and of themselves.

(Though sometimes worship of the printed codex as magic in and of itself can be annoying and problematic, too…)

I thought Cassandra brought a lot of her problems on herself in a way that was annoying, but I still got into her relationship with Lowell and her friendship with Byron, and her messy love for the bookshop she inherits. It ended on a surprisingly ambivalent note that I found pleasing: not a straightforward happy-ever-after, but a complicated compromise, with some signs of hope.

Overall, I enjoyed it, while thinking that some stuff could probably have used pruning out and tightening up, while other things could’ve stood to be a bit more detailed. Not a perfect read, but entertaining.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

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Review – In Love’s Key, Reprised

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

Review – In Love’s Key, Reprised

In Love's Key, Reprised

by Guri Nojiro

Genres: Manga, Romance
Pages: 209
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Forced by poor health to take a leave of absence, curmudgeonly conductor Kiri returns to his rural hometown for some much-needed rest. But on his very first night back, he comes dangerously close to freezing to deathā€”until local grocer Osamu scoops him up out of the cold and into the warmth of his embrace. Can this younger man, a years-long fan of Kiriā€™s work, thaw out the ice in the maestroā€™s heart? Or will Kiri be doomed to a life of frigid loneliness forever?

Guri Nojiro’sĀ In Love’s Key, Reprised has a fairly typical Japanese m/m dynamic: one guy goes obsessively after the other, who appears to resist and be very grumpy, but finally gives in and it’s been love all along. It’s a bit insta-love (with the slight justification that Osamu saw/heard Kiri playing the piano some years before at a critical point in his life), but it comes out pretty cute.

The premise is that Kiri is a well-known orchestral conductor whose work has suffered since the death of his mother, as he starts being too harsh and nitpicky, falling all out of sympathy with his musicians. Run-down, he ends up going to his mother’s home for a while to recover, whereupon Osamu smothers him with enthusiasm, gets him to conduct the school choir, and wriggles into his life with enthusiasm and warmth, helping Kiri to warm up as well (both literally and figuratively, since he ends up cuddling Kiri shirtless after finding him freezing and wet from snow/no heating in his house).

The art is okay, and there are some very cute moments; it didn’t blow me away, but it did manage to tug on my heartstrings anyway, especially at the end when Kiri publicly calls Osamu his partner. It’s pretty tropey, but… sometimes that’s fun, and it hit the spot for me right now.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

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Review – Vaccines: A Graphic History

Posted November 20, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Vaccines: A Graphic History

Vaccines: A Graphic History

by Paige V. Polinsky, Dante Ginevra

Genres: Graphic Novels, Non-fiction
Pages: 36
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

Vaccines have been used to safely introduce people's bodies to diseases for centuries, and they save millions of lives each year. By giving people a weakened or dead version of a disease, a vaccine allows the body to develop antibodies which recognize and fight the disease later on. Early vaccinations used dry scabs from smallpox to promote smallpox immunity. Doctors and scientists across nations took and improved the method, developing vaccines for health crises from whooping cough to polio to COVID-19. This graphic history features famous cases and current challenges, including the time frame for creating a new vaccine.

Paige V. Polinsky’sĀ Vaccines: A Graphic History is a very whistle-stop tour of the history of vaccination, covering types of vaccination, how vaccination works, early vaccination, and COVID vaccines, all in an incredibly tight space.

It doesn’t seem to really know what it wants to be, since there are quite technical terms (like “live attenuated vaccine”), illustrated by a couple of examples, but then it’s soĀ general and swift that it lacks actual interest, to my mind.

It seems like a valiant educational effort, and the art’s not terrible or anything, but… I think it’s simultaneously too dry and too brief to do much good.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

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Review – No Ordinary Deaths

Posted November 20, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – No Ordinary Deaths

No Ordinary Deaths: A People's History of Mortality

by Molly Conisbee

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 352
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

History is written by the A-listers' deaths - the queens beheaded and archdukes assassinated. We hardly ever learn how ordinary folk met their end and with what consequences, or consider how death has moulded our beliefs, politics and societies through time.

Historian and bereavement counsellor Molly Conisbee reveals how cycles of dying, death and disposal have shaped the lives of everyday people. Richly told and startlingly fresh, Conisbee's evocations of a cross-dressing madam in Victorian London or the professional death-watchers of the Middle Ages, of wakes, plague pits and graverobbers, all paint a fascinating picture of the hopes, fears and wishes of our forebears.

Molly Conisbee’sĀ No Ordinary Deaths is a history of mortality as experienced by (some) people in the UK, trying to focus on those we know less about — not the deaths of kings and queens, but shopkeepers and housewives, servants and petty thieves. I found it mostly successful in providing something of that point of view, and appreciated some of the examples dug up, especially in the chapter about queer experiences and deaths.

That said, I don’t think it was a good choice for me to readĀ right now, because a central thing that Conisbee returns to again and again is that people these days aren’t in touch with death. Death happens away from the home, people don’t see corpses, people don’t sit with the dying, etc, etc… aaaand my constant urge was to call bullshit, because of course, that’s not my personal experience. I was with my grandmother when she died, quite intentionally; longer ago, I also saw my grandfather just after he died, and had intended to be there.

I’m sure I’m not alone in that, though I do think that the generalisationsĀ areĀ broadly correct — it’s just a raw spot for me right now, and bad timing to read this particular book. It’s possible it could be written without constantly harping on that theme, and I might’ve liked it more that way, but that doesn’t make it a bad book, just one I didn’t get along with right now.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

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Review – Door into the Dark

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

Review – Door into the Dark

Door into the Dark

by Seamus Heaney

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 56
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

"Door into the Dark," Heaney's second collection of poems, first appeared in 1969. Already his widely celebrated gifts of precision, thoughtfulness, and musicality were everywhere apparent.

Seamus Heaney’sĀ Door into the Dark was only his second collection, but his style is unmistakeable. I couldn’t pick a poem from this collection I especially liked as a stand-out, but they all have presence and demand attention: there’s something deliberate about every single word.

Which is not to say ponderous, to be clear — they’re all very readable and don’t drag on too long or anything like that! It just feels like every word and phrase is chosen to be impactful, to have weight.

Not a favourite collection, but it was worth the read.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

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Review – All Of Us Murderers

Posted November 18, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 6 Comments

Review – All Of Us Murderers

All of Us Murderers

by KJ Charles

Genres: Historical Fiction, Mystery, Romance
Pages: 343
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

A genre-bending Gothic mystery with a strong LGBTQIA+ romance from beloved, award-winning author KJ Charles.

When Zeb Wyckham is summoned to a wealthy relativeā€™s remote Gothic house on Dartmoor, he finds all the people he least wants to see in the worldā€”his estranged brother, his loathsome cousins, and his bitter ex-lover, Gideon Grey. Nothing, he is certain, could possibly be worse.

Then the grizzled old patriarch announces the true purpose of the gathering: He intends to leave the vast family fortune to whichever of the men marries Cousin Jessamine, setting off a violent scramble for her hand and his wealth. Disinterested in being tied further to a family he can barely stand, Zeb tries to leaveā€¦only to realize that heā€™s been trapped. The walls are high, the gates are locked, and when the mists roll in, thereā€™s no way out.

And there may be something trapped within the dark monstrosity of a house with them.

Fear and paranoia ramping ever-higher, Zeb has nowhere to turn but to the man who once held his whole heart. As the mists descend, the gaslight flickers, and terror takes its hold, two warring lovers must reconcile in time to uncover the murderous mysteries of Lackaday Houseā€”and live to tell the tale.

It took me a bit to get into KJ Charles’ All of Us Murderers: I was pretty sure I would enjoy it, because I’ve really enjoyed almost all of her books, but the opening has almost the whole cast being really unpleasant to each other. Which I should’ve perhaps expected, given that it’s heavily gothic in inspiration, but I guess it felt like a bit of added nastiness than the main character plainly has ADHD, and that’s used as a weapon against him.

That said, once Gideon and Zeb actually start talking to each other and not just sniping, and especially as they work through what happened and start working together, it becomes a lot more fun. It isn’t just Zeb with a massive target on his back, but the two of them against the united forces of Zeb’s horrible family, and you can be pretty sure they’ll win out in the end.

It didn’t take me long to figure out basically what was happening, but it was still interesting to be along for the ride and watch Zeb steadfastly refusing to believe in supernatural occurrences… and it was still fun to have the dramatic and very gothic reveals of what exactly is going on, and what the plan is.

Gideon and Zeb — once they’re talking to each other — make a good team, and I love that (despite his self-recriminations) it’s really plain that their break-up wasn’t all Zeb’s fault. There’s a bit of sharpness round the edges with how they’ve handled Zeb’s ADHD together in the past: Gideon covering for him and taking care of him, but also sometimes getting exasperated and seeming to treat him like a child, or sniping at him because of it. The relationship feels so vivid and realistic, even (or especially?) against the ridiculous gothic background.

To clarify: when I call it a ridiculous gothic background, I say this with affection. Charles was clearly having fun with the setting and genre, and I enjoyed it very much. But it’s ridiculous all the same, if you try to explain the plot outside of the story itself and all the atmospheric trappings it builds up.

I was a bit surprised by how it ended for Zeb and Gideon, because that felt pretty un-gothic — but then, they could hardly have had a happy ending if they’d let the gothic story decide their fate, and this was the best way for them to be happy. I was very pleased by that part!

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

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