Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss's Glossier
Marisa Meltzer
Baby's first audiobook and boy, was the narrator awful. Was an interesting enough look into the founder of Into The Gloss and Glossier, though nothing groundbreaking.
Everyone Is Lying to You
Jo Piazza
A murder mystery set in the world of tradwife influencers. I enjoyed the twist!
Mean Moms
Emma Rosenblum
Salacious, trashy fluff akin to reading celeb gossip. You'll figure out the villian easily, though you're going to root for no one.
One True Loves
Taylor Jenkins Reid
A poignant tale of love, loss, growth, and the human condition. Bring tissues!
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
Sarah Wynn-Williams
Boy, was Sarah trauma bonded to her job at Facebook! Seeing how Facebook powers the disinformation scheme made me want to scream.
Play Nice
Rachel Harris
September Book Of The Month Club Pick
The real horror was how insufferable this book was.
Women and Girls on the Autism Spectrum
Sarah Hendrickx with Jess Hendrickx
Incredibly affirming reading the lived experiences of other autistic women. I showed my husband the chapter on alexithymia because it spoke to me; I've always struggled in cognitive behavioral therapy because I cannot identify or describe my feelings.
Cultish
Amanda Montell
Cults are my special interest so Cultish was a big disappointment. I don't mind an irreverently written nonfiction book, but this was a stream of consciousness from a podcaster, not an academic who had something meaningful to say.
Heavenly Tyrant
Xiran Jay Zhao
This really suffered from second-book-of-a-trilogy syndrome.
Coming back to drop a star because Zheng was such a negging, abusive piece of shit and everything about the forced relationship between him and Zeitan was uncomfortable. I do not like dubious consent in sexual relationships! (Zeitan spent most of the book as his hostage, that is not a situation where one can consent to sex. The book tried to frame it in a way where she was making an empowered choice, but THAT IS NOT POSSIBLE.) This book was a huge step back from Iron Widow, which was earnest, but flawed.
I hate not finishing a series, so we'll see if book three can redeem itself any.
Red City
Marie Lu
October Book Of The Month Club Pick
Interesting world building!
Mentors becoming sexually involved with their barely legal mentees that they knew since they were children squicked me out. The star-crossed lovers angle was the weakest part of the book; the two leads shallow childhood friendship did not make for a convincing slow burn yearn. Nonetheless, the world itself has me curious enough to want to read whatever comes next.
Yellowface
R.F. Kuang
This book was way too chronically online. Twitter, Instagram, and Goodreads all being part of the plot means it's already dated. I liked it better before knowing that Athena was the author's self insert and that June's biggest critic was based upon her own personal experience with a journalist critiquing her works. Anyway. At least June was batshit in an amusing way; I actually finished the book, going against my gut feeling that I should DNF and move on. I actually cared enough to see it through! My reward? A stupid fucking ending that wasn't satisfying at all.
Sigh. I'm listening to my gut next time.
What Moves The Dead
T. Kingfisher
A retelling of Edgar Allen Poe's short story The Fall of the House of Usher. Kingfisher is excellent at writing delightfully creepy details.
What Feasts At Night
T. Kingfisher
It was awesome to get to travel to Gallacia with Easton! Loved the fact that it was a twist on Romanian folklore.
What Stalks The Deep
T. Kingfisher
The weakest of Kingfisher's Sworn Soldier series but still a damn good novella. I love Appalachia as a setting because it's an area that's rich with tradition and superstition; things got very Lovecraftian (without the racism).
The Pumpkin Spice Cafe
Laurie Gilmore
Logan was an asshole wrapped up in "gruff farmboy" packaging. I've known genuinely good rural men of few words; this guy was a fuckboy who fell in love with any pair of swinging tits that paid him even a passing interest. His little comment when Jeanie announced she's back on the pill? Of course he's one of those. Like I said, fuckboy.
Jeanie was an idiot manic pixie dream girl that the entire town immediately swooned over. Has this author ever been to a small town where everyone has known everyone else all their lives? The populace will be nice to you, but it's superficial nice. Bless your heart Southern "nice". Especially after a different city girl BrOkE LoGaN's HeArT by turning down his public proposal. (Again, that's completely out of character for the type of man Logan's supposed to be.) Shy, steady men would rather die than propose to someone they barely know at their town's biggest event of the season. He played a move straight out of Fuckboy 101 and thought he had her because who would want to be the person who turned down a public Christmastime proposal in front of everyone this man has ever known? Thankfully, his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend was too intelligent for that kind of manipulation and told his ass "no" right in front of all of his nosy neighbours and hit the bricks. Thanks for the dick appointments, BYEEEEE! Logan would then spend most of the rest of the book comparing Jeanie to the one who got away and she put up with it because she has no self esteem and MAN HOT, HEHE.
The pop culture farm animal inserts were absolutely cringe. Cool, the author likes Lizzo and Harry Styles. That adds nothing to the plot, which seemed to be more vibes and less... anything else, anyway. Plot? What plot? This baby can only hold so much miscommunication and sex! Oh wait, there was the whole "mystery", which was insulting to anyone with eyes.
The grumpy manager Norman, the only person who behaved the way I expected someone from an insular community to, was the one who tried to run Jeanie off...? DUH. However, the reason for his ire was that he was quietly in love with the cafe's original owner, Jeanie's Aunt Dot, and wanted to buy the coffee shop from her so they could... do something together...? I guess?
This book is the written equivalent of a cloyingly sick scent of a Bath and Body Works pumpkin-such-and-such candle that you burned once because it was a gift and you didn't want to be rude before relegating it to the back of your shelf to collect dust.
The Gingerbread Bakery
Laurie Gilmore
Apparently, I'm a glutton for punishment for reading another Laurie Gilmore novel after loathing Book 1. This was apparently book 5, though Gilmore says that her Dream Harbor books can be read as standalones. Annie and Mac are background characters in Book 1 and and there's a few more names that get added to the town roster between that book and this one. But I don't care to read any of them after this shitfest.
I wanted to root for Annie as a fellow neurotic baker but damn. She sucked in a way that wasn't even interesting! If you're going to be a villain, at least keep us entertained. Holding a grudge over the end of a teenage fling as a grown fucking woman IN HER THIRTIES was uncomfortable to read. That's not character growth or setting boundaries, it's petulance. This author needs to stop listening to Taylor Swift's music.
Was standing her up at the diner wrong? Sure. But he was an embarrassed kid with no life experience wanting to avoid telling the girl he liked that he failed at going out into the world because he missed her too much. That's the kind of missed connection shit that you roll your eyes at affectionally while catching up over coffee because life tends to give you genuine challenges by the end of your twenties and into your thirties. The book would have been half its length if Annie had any fucking perspective.
Mac's obsession with Annie and comparing every other woman he's dated after her was just sad. My guy. Puppy love is sweet and of course you're going to look back fondly on your youth, but to sabotage any chance at an adult relationship to play mind games with someone you dated for a summer at 19? I. Literally. Can. Not. Not. Obviously, this gruesome twosome both suffer from arrested development.
[Edit: 12/16/25]
Wow, I just remembered that Annie slaps the fucking shit out of Mac and NOTHING BECOMES OF IT. That's abusive, babycakes. If the tables had turned and it had been Mac slapping Annie, no one would be okay with that. His ass would have been bounced from Dream Harbor quicker than it takes to bake a batch of cookies. This is a trope that needs to die in a fiery pit. I changed my mind about being okay with those two being stuck together, even Mac-the-man-child deserves a better woman. Or his hand. Whatever. Just not Annie. She can die alone. 0.5 stars down from 1.