Stone Matress: Nine Wicked Tales

• Author: Margaret Atwood
• First published: 2014
• Rating: ★★★★☆
• Is there a unifying theme to these nine stories? If so, it is not obvious to me. Perhaps “people teetering upon a brink of change”? As is common, not all the stories are equal, but all of them held my interest and made me guess and question. The very last story broke me and gave me a terrible feeling that perhaps, in a future not so far, this may actually be a reality.

Cloud Cuckoo Land

• Author: Anthony Doerr
• First published: 2021
• Rating:  ★★★★★
• If the start of this book seems strange and disjointed, stay with it. It shall reward you a thousand times. This is a truly monumental book that plays with many points and storylines that eventually all meet (my favourite thing ever), written just beautifully. A remarkable piece of literature.

The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches

• Author: Sangu Mandanna
• First published: 2022
• Rating: ★★☆☆☆
• Like The House in the Cerulean Sea but not nearly as good. This is one of those comfortable books that require very little from the reader, the plot being non-existent. There is a lot of dialogue that makes you convinced everybody is a licenced psychiatrist, lots of attempts to make the atmosphere cosy and pretty, with more than occasional “fuck” thrown into it for absolutely no reason at all. The children in the book are merely props used to pull our two main characters together, and the process of everything is so speedy one is deprived of any delicious longing. And the problems? Poof! Solved in an instant on the last 20 pages. This one was a disappointment.

River Sing Me Home

• Author: Eleanor Shearer
• First published: 2023
• Rating: ★★★☆☆
• While it is a promising debut, it still feels like a debut. Not a bad premise, but I felt it needed more of everything a story is usually made of. The main character’s goal is to find her children, scattered by the slavers, and at times she succeeds so fast and effortlessly that it felt like a Disney movie.

Death of the Author

• Author: Nnedi Okorafor
• First published: 2025
• Rating: ★★★☆☆
• You can really tell Nnedi Okorafor has poured her heart into this book and attempted something really big. It wants to be an ode to storytelling, a commentary on personal identity, brushes by some patriarchy problems, but there is also the question of disability and othering, of technology as a help and a possible problem (though the author clearly is an optimist in this case). Does it reach all those ambitions? Partly yes. In fact I was convinced this would be a five star up until the point when the main character´s father dies. After that the narration somewhat lost its momentum and breath. The ending itself too did not particularly impress me and by that time I have also fallen out of many sympathetic feelings for our heroine. I am glad I have read this, but I do not think I would sit through it again.

Cranford

• Author: Elizabeth Gaskell
• First published: 1853
• Rating: ★★★★☆
• Since the “cosy fantasy” and “cosy sci-fi” are a thing, could Cranford be considered as a “cosy classic”? A collection of languidly paced vignettes, it relies on the reader warming up to the characters more than anything else. Perhaps it could also serve as a nudge to take an interest in people with whom we share our communities, especially in this day when individualism is king.

Witchcraft For Wayward Girls

• Author: Grady Hendrix
• First published: 2025
• Rating: ★★☆☆☆
• Like….. what am I really supposed to take away from this besides 200 pages too many of teenage girls suffering for very little reward? The only horror in this book is three horrific-to-the-extreme birthing scenes.

Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley

• Author: Charlotte Gordon
• First published: 2015
• Rating: ★★★★★
• This dual biography of mother and daughter, long misjudged and misunderstood, is easily one of the best nonfiction books I have read in a very long time. It helps, of course, that their live stories were so compelling and moving (and frustrating!), but Charlotte Gordon paints in language and colours so vivid the reader just has to sit down and go for the ride. Excellent (and frustrating)!

The Death of Vivek Oji

• Author: Akwaeke Emezi
• First published: 2020
• Rating: ★★★★☆
• A very raw and intimate exploration of tragedies. The tragedy of living inside a body that does not feel your own. The tragedy of hiding and not being able to trust your nearest family. The tragedy of losing the only child. The tragedy of realizing you never knew that child at all. I am never a fan of explicit sex scenes, less so when they are between teenagers. Furthermore, one or two of those scenes actually made me uncomfortable in their frame context, so that was where the book did not work for me personally. I still recognize the skill that went into it. It is well-constructed and well-written and will definitely resonate with many.

Water Moon

• Author: Samantha Sotto Yambao
• First published: 2025
• Rating: ★★★☆☆
• While I loved the world the author has created and I thought the writing was very good as well, this book has a very weak plot that could really be summed up thus: our two main characters are running from a threat. Whenever they want to know something, they are told it is not to be talked about, and then they are told anyway. The threat comes near. They run into another set of whimsical surroundings. Repeat. About 7 times. The worst crime, though? There is no relationship development, no romance to speak of, everything happens instantly. Within an hour of meeting, our protagonists are risking lives for each other. Just cause. This definitely had potential, and if you enjoy the whimsy, there are things to be enjoyed, but in the end, the characters and the plot let the beautiful structure of it down. Generous 3 stars.

The Serviceberry: An Economy of Gifts and Abundance

• Author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
• First published: 2024
• Rating: ★★★★☆
• A short, beautifully written cry for help, underlining the destructive nature of capitalism, and yet offering a possible way forward. It may seem radical, but as always with Kimmerer, chooses to take nature itself as the model for her arguments.

Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City

• Author: Guy Delisle
• First published: 2011
• Rating: ★★★★☆
• I found this to be a travelogue that is, above all, honest. The author is not moralizing, never claims to have a moral highground (which so often happens when people meet other cultures), and through telling some of his stories, actually admits he could be even insensitive to his surroundings (I am refering here, of course, to the instance of him showing naked comic drawings to Muslim audience, first because he simply did not think ahead, later because he wanted to test if the reaction would always be the same). That said, he notices things a casual observer would notice and presents them very simply as they happened, letting the readers think about them on their own. In fact, at times, one wonders at how detached he could be to certain things around him - but then again, he was never in Jerusalem to do anything but support his wife, watch his kids and draw. But through his own work, unambitious in regard to the question of Israeli colonization of Palestine and everything that stems from it, he drew the eyes and attention to those very issues and did his little bit of good.