Blog

As someone who has never read any of Liz Tomforde’s Windy City novels, I went into this one with absolutely no idea what to expect, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that this is an incredibly emotionally intuitive and thoughtful book.

Although the mystery is compelling, this is really a novel about grief. Not simply the grief of losing a child, but the grief of losing certainty.

Darrow enters this novel in a position of weakness rather than strength. Despite everything he achieved at the Institute, he remains trapped between worlds. He's neither fully Red nor fully Gold. He belongs everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. That tension has always sat at the heart of the series, but Golden Son sharpens it into something far more psychologically compelling. Darrow is no longer simply trying to survive among the Golds.

Allen Levi's Theo of Golden is the kind of novel that restores your faith in literature's ability to illuminate what it means to be human.

One of the strengths of this series has always been its ability to balance romance with political intrigue, and The Night Prince expands both elements considerably. The mythology surrounding the God of Night, the Heart of the Moon, and Aurora's own heritage becomes far richer here, giving the story a larger scope than the more contained conflict of the first novel.

And yet here we are! Because somehow Tessa Bailey took a premise that should have had me rolling my eyes and transformed it into one of those books that I kept reading in one sitting.

One of the greatest strengths of this novel is its cast of characters. Biddy is an easy protagonist to love. She's curious, compassionate, intelligent, and brave without ever feeling unrealistically capable. Despite growing up in isolation, she approaches the world with an openness and sincerity that makes her instantly engaging. Watching her encounter new people, challenge long-held assumptions, and gradually discover her own strength was one of my favourite aspects of the s

And this book is really, really funny! Not “TikTok marketed as funny” where one character says something mildly sarcastic every forty pages and everybody loses their minds. I mean genuinely funny. The kind of humour that sneaks up on you in the middle of tension and makes you bark out an ugly little laugh before the book immediately throws another body at you.

Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah is not interested in offering readers the comfort of distance. Set in Western Sydney during Ramadan in May 2021, against the backdrop of escalating violence in Gaza and rising Islamophobic panic within Australia, the novel follows two Palestinian and Arab-Australian professionals attempting to navigate institutions that publicly celebrate diversity while privately disciplining it.

Agnes is the axis on which the novel turns. She is not written as a passive historical wife but as a force in her own right—rooted in the natural world, attuned to bodies, rhythms, and patterns others overlook. Her form of knowledge is intuitive, physical, almost wordless, which sets her in quiet opposition to the structured, literate world her husband eventually inhabits. This tension between ways of knowing—embodied versus intellectual—runs beneath nearly every scene.

At its heart, Red Rising is less about dramatic uprisings and more about what transformation really costs. Darrow, our protagonist, doesn’t just leap from “downtrodden” to “rebel” in a neat arc. Instead, his path is messy—distorted, disrupted, and deeply uncomfortable. He’s not simply liberated; he’s rebuilt from the ground up. To challenge the system, Darrow needs to get close to its very foundations—physically and mentally. The uneasy tension here? Sometimes, survival deman