Review: "Meet Me Under the Northern Lights" by

Meet Me Under the Northern Lights by Emily Kerr
Published 2021 via One More Chapter
★★★

The third stop in my northern lights tour! In this one, Lucy has a job problem and a drinking problem (only one of which she acknowledges), and she's packed off to Finland to help out at a retreat and ride out the worst of her problems.

What worked well for me here: well, Finland, obviously. There are some nice specific small things that we get to see—for example, Lucy helps to pull snow down from cabin roofs, which is the sort of detail I love; not something I've ever had to do, and not something Lucy ever expected to do, and not something tourists in cold places generally have to think about. I also like how limited any misunderstandings are; Lucy and Tommi have a rocky start, but we're spared the done-to-death thing where the hero thinks the heroine is into someone else (or vice versa), or that she might actually be guilty of the thing she's been falsely accused of, and so on.

What didn't work so well for me: Lucy is—said gently—kind of a train wreck. Her intentions are always good, but I cringed every time she had a bright idea that she thought she'd surprise the hero (and other more Finland-competent people), because it was always immediately clear that something was going to go badly. Messy heroines are, through no fault of their own, not my jam, and Lucy definitely leans messy.

The northern lights books I've read so far have varied pretty widely—Alaska, Iceland, and now Finland; heroines who are a photographer, an event planner, and now a radio personality; heroines whose personal growth involves very little, building some confidence and self-worth, and now some substantial personal demons plus villains. What's interesting is that the heroes vary rather less: In Alaska, we had a floatplane pilot who runs a wilderness retreat; in Iceland, a bus driver and tour guide; and in Finland, another wilderness retreat operator. Also of note: in every book, it's the heroine who comes in from a better-known city and falls in love with the Alaskan/Icelandic/Finnish way of living; it's the heroine who uproots her life for romance.

This is not a comment on these books specifically; it says more to me about what is common in romance novels generally. I have one more northern lights book on my list (not out yet, so can't compare yet!), and it'll be interesting to see how much it adheres to—or deviates from—the norm here.

Review: "Replaceable You" by Mary Roach

Replaceable You by Mary Roach
Published September 2025 via W.W. Norton & Company
★★★★

There are not all that many authors whose books can make me say out loud, under my breath, "oh no" while I'm walking down the street with my nose buried in my e-reader. (The bit about the drill and the cornea, if you're wondering.) And there are not all that many authors whose books infiltrate my dreams (...butt creases). And yet Replaceable You managed to do both, which is honestly on par for Roach's books. Also on par: I had to switch to reading something else several times over meals, because Roach delights in the occasional ick factor. It's all fascinating, so I'm not really complaining, but...you have been warned.

Roach writes pop science books, and in Replaceable You she turns her gaze to transplants, artificial replacements, and...well, some of the weirder things involved in both. I love weird medical things (museums of medical oddities are my absolute favorites), and this touches on a number of topics that I've long found intriguing—osseointegration prosthetics, iron lungs, etc. (Truly, rarely have I felt so jealous of an author as when Roach talks about having had the opportunity to spend the night in an iron lung.)

I would happily have read full books about many of the independent medical advances (and sometimes fails) that Roach describes here—heck, I have read full books about a number of these things. But Roach provides a marvellous jumping-off point for curiosity, plus a high number of asides that make it clear just how much she loves the sort of research that she gets to do in writing these books.

Take this (square brackets and ellipses original to the book): Here is onetime army surgeon Frank Tetamore describing one such invention—his own—in an 1894 paper: "These artificial noses are made of a very light plastic material. . . . They are secured on the face by bow spectacles made especially for the purpose." To obscure the lower border of the prosthesis, "a mustache [was] fastened to the nose piece." Forty years before novelty companies began selling Groucho Marx glasses, Frank Tetamore had invented a medical version. (loc. 122*)

Or this: Department of ghastly but true sentences: The chain saw got its start in the delivery room. (loc.1195)

Or this, for that matter: The current decade has seen a Mr. Potato Head Goes Green, made from plant-based plastic, a gender-neutral Potato Head set, and a low-carb Mr. Potato Head one-third the size of the original. Only one of those I made up. (loc. 2560)

You can't beat that energy. Highly recommended to anyone interested in science, playful snark, and medical specificity.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "The Dirt Beneath Our Door" by Pamela Jones

The Dirt Beneath Our Door by Pamela Jones (with Elizabeth Ridley)
Published September 2025 via Matt Holt Books
★★★

When the day ended, I would be one of two things: either dead, or free. Right now, either option sounded good. (loc. 65*)

Jones wasn't supposed to be born into polygamy: Her father, seeing what it did to his own mother, swore that he didn't want that life. But then, well, things changed. And by the time Jones was born—her mother's second child, and her father's eleventh—I think it's fair to say that her father had gone all in on polygamy, decreeing that Jones would be named after a high school girlfriend and eventually taking up with eleven plural wives. And although Jones knew she didn't want to be a second or third (or tenth or eleventh) wife, she saw only the path that was laid in front of her: marry young into polygamy (in Mexico, where her family lived because there was less government scrutiny), have children, have more children, welcome new wives into the relationship.

Sometimes I was asked to babysit church members' kids, only to arrive and find the husband home alone, "just waiting" for his wife and kids to return. Then the flirting started. Even stranger, when the wife and kids arrived home, they joined the campaign to add me to their family as the next plural wife. (loc. 1193)

It sounds like a terribly hard upbringing. Jones didn't know anything different, of course, but she was never able to have what most people would consider a normal childhood—too much cooking and cleaning and childcare; not enough school or friendship or innocence. Dozens of siblings but very little one-on-one time with her father (and too much fear when she did have time with him). And terribly warped expectations for marriage:

"What more do you need?" He pulled away as his voice rose in irritation. "You can cook, sew, clean, and take care of children. What else is there, Rina?" (loc. 1447)

Jones paints a devastating picture of life in a cult. I'm surprised by how little strife she discusses between her father's wives, though honestly it sounds like she (and her mother) had limited contact with a lot of them. Or maybe they were all just too focused on survival for infighting—fear of their own husband, fear of Ervil LeBaron, just simple struggle to get enough food on the table to feed a household with no financial (or other) freedom and almost no financial (...or other...) support.

Most of the book takes place during Jones's upbringing and first marriage. There are some true jaw-droppers in here—I think they're worth reading in the full context and don't want to include spoilers, but I'll just say that her first husband's approach to marriage was...something else. Jones is able to find some compassion for him (he, too, grew up in the cult, and his actions very much reflect that distortion), but it's incredibly telling of how hard their community's demands were on girls and women.

Jones doesn't talk as much about her time after the cult, or about how her relationship with her parents changed as she got older. Her father ultimately helped her out with some things that surprised me, given the context of his chosen religion, and I'd have liked to know more about how that came about and how their relationship evolved as Jones struggled through her first years of freedom. I'd also have liked more about Jones and her kids figuring things out once they were outside the cult, though I'm not sure how much of that story she could reasonably tell while allowing for whatever levels of privacy her kids prefer. (I'd someday love to read a memoir from one of those kids, though, because I expect that their experience of leaving was in some ways even more jarring than Jones's.)

All told, a gripping read. Very much one for those with a preexisting curiosity about culty books, but also a reminder of just how much control a certain subset of people want to exert over others.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Everything She Does Is Magic" by Bridget Morrissey

Everything She Does Is Magic by Bridget Morrissey
Published September 2025 via Delacorte
★★★

Darcy's life revolves around Halloween: in the small town of Fableview, Halloween keeps the town running, and her parents are effectively the masterminds behind it. She's about to graduate from high school, and the job of keeping things running exactly as they always have, with no changes whatsoever, is hers to take over...whether she wants it or not. Meanwhile, Anya is in a bind—she needs a human to act as her protector so that she can join her family's coven when she turns eighteen, but finding someone she can trust is harder than it seems. And to get the pressure off, she's told her parents that Darcy is up for the job...

This was a cute, fast read. The way the town approaches Halloween is intentionally over-the-top cheesy—they know they're a tourist destination, and they long ago decided to lean into it. For Darcy's parents, Halloween is about candy-corn-printed cotton fabrics and cutesy fairies and bobbing for apples, not blood or zombies or the Salem Witch Trials. (Think Sabrina the Teenage Witch, not Scream.) For Darcy, it's gotten stale, but she's not looking for Scream either, just...I've run out of analogies. Darcy's just looking for a bit of change, and for the chance to find out what she does when her parents aren't running the show.

So I enjoyed the playfulness here—this fully leans into cozy vibes. A bit of a Sarah Dessen feel, actually, at least in the way the quirky best friend plotline plays out I'm not sure if a sequel is planned, but there is space for that quirky best friend to get her own story... I could have used a bit more exploration of Anya's powers, though; for me, witchy characters are basically wish fulfillment, because who doesn't want to be able to send some tingly power through their fingertips and effect instant change? Anya barely seems to use her powers, and I'm not sure if that's because she's not very powerful (though we're told that she is), or if there are serious limits to how much power a witch can use (does she need to recharge?), or if there's something to do with her being under eighteen, or something else. Anya's magic is in fixing things, of course, not creating rainbow glitter or whatever, but...I guess I wouldn't have minded a bit more of her family coming in and making things more magically chaotic. (Surely one of them can create rainbow glitter at will?)

A good one for those looking for a super cozy, low-heat, queer autumn YA read.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: Short story: "Bad Date" by Ellery Lloyd

Bad Date by Ellery Lloyd
Published September 2025 via Amazon Original Stories

Fay is off on a first date. There's just one problem: He's not what he seems, and he knows more than he appears to.

But then, there might be another problem: Fay also knows more than she appears to.

This is a dark little story. It's clear early on that nobody is what they are trying to present to the world; I'm not sure that any of the characters in this story could be considered mentally stable. Fay is an actress whose career has dried up (and with it her money); Oliver is a fan who badly wants more; Wolf is Fay's son who has never had a normal life; Poppy is Fay's best friend who knows exactly where the bodies are buried. The question is how far each of them is willing to go—and who will have the upper hand in the end.

I liked this more as I got farther into it and it became clear that Fay knew more than she was letting on (did not enjoy being in Oliver's head, thank you). The ending was a bit of a letdown—it was clear that that was the direction the story was going in, but I actually tried to swipe forward to the next page multiple times before realizing that no, the story was over; the ending was that abrupt. Still a fun little thriller (well—can I call this fun, when we had to be in Oliver's head and also contemplate Wolf being let loose on the world?), but I was glad that this was a story rather than a book.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Let's Get Together" by Brandy Colbert

Let's Get Together by Brandy Colbert
Published September 2025 via Clarion Books
★★★★

Brandy Colbert takes on The Parent Trap? Yes please.

In Let's Get Together, everyone's favorite secret-twins movie gets a modern twist. For Kenya, starting grade 6 is just another move in the right direction. She has a happy life with her father and grandmother, and she sees no reason for a new direction. But for Liberty, things are more complicated—she's in the best foster home she's ever had, but her entire living memory is nothing but uncertainty. And Kenya is the biggest uncertainty she's seen in a while—because although Kenya and Liberty have never met before, they're mirror images of each other.

Although this is based on The Parent Trap, in some (limited) ways It Takes Two is a more direct comparison—in The Parent Trap (and yes, you'd better believe that I've seen the 1998 and the 1961 versions, and also read the original Das doppelte Lottchen), the girls are both happy in their single-child-of-a-single-parent lives, not a little spoiled (especially in the film versions), and in their predicament because their parents willingly split them up. It Takes Two mixes it up with doppelgängers rather than twins, and with one girl living in a truly miserable foster care situation. (Man was that movie terrible, and also man did I love it. I wonder whether the library has a copy...?)

Colbert delivers a more realistic take: without spoiling the "how" of the split, I'll say that the reason the girls were split up is, you know, not a case of the parents dividing the assets. And although Liberty has had her fair share of rough foster placements—the book doesn't go into details, and it doesn't need to—she's finally in a good one, one that feels like it could be the real thing...until her world is turned upside down. Again. Now, I've read enough about foster care (although not specifically in a California context) to question some of the details of the book; as far as I know, some of the plot points (like Liberty's foster mother and biological father being able to decide Liberty's medical care) are...very unlikely...but then, this is a middle-grade book and I don't think those details need to be pitch perfect to work. I love how readily Liberty and Kenya take to being sisters—they're cautious (Kenya in particular has to get used to sharing her space), but they want it to work, so (well, for the most part) they try to reach out and put themselves in the other's shoes. I also like that things don't work out exactly as the girls plan—again, no spoilers, but there's another twist of a sort at the end, and it keeps things interesting.

A good one for middle-grade readers...but also for those of us adults who grew up on lost-twin stories and love a fresh take.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Every Step She Takes" by Alison Cochrun

Every Step She Takes by Alison Cochrun
Published September 2025 via Atria
★★★

Sadie could use a shakeup in her life—and that comes in the form of a surprise trip to complete a pilgrimage across Portugal and Spain and in the process help out her sister. Meanwhile, Mal has been shaking up her own life over and over again since coming out to her father backfired...and now, with his funeral looming, she's taking a break to walk one of the Portuguese routes of the Camino de Santiago. What they don't anticipate when airplane turbulence inspires Sadie to shriek out all her secrets and insecurities: they're on the same tour. What they also don't anticipate: chemistry. But whether either of them is ready for a relationship, well...

What worked well for me:
- There isn't enough Camino fiction out there, and a lesbian romance? Yes please.

- This takes place on the Portuguese route, too; the Camino Francés (which runs across northern Spain) is the most popular route by far, with the Camino Portugues (which runs north through Portugal and Spain) a distant second, and the Francés is much much more common in both fiction and memoir. (I walked both, back to back, but—if it's not confusing enough already—a different variant of the Portugues route.)

- Sadie is unapologetically fat, and although she has some related insecurities, for the purposes of the Camino her weight is treated as a nonevent.

- I liked the tour group more than I expected to (Stefano is a little over the top, but Rebecca is an unexpected gem).

- I liked Sadie's doom-spiral on the plane (as someone without flight anxiety but with travel anxiety...relatable).

- There's room left at the end for a possible sequel (perhaps on a different route?), which I'd be all in favor of.

- This shouldn't be relevant by the time the book is published, but I read an ARC that hadn't been through proofreading yet, and some of the small errors (which are, again, normal for this point in the process) were choice. We have an aircraft maker named "Boing" and a tibia located in a character's forearm—I'm here for it. (Yes, this point is in the correct list. One of the oddities of my nerdery is that I have favorite typos.)

What didn't work so well for me:
- Too many brand names (often 10+ per chapter) and cultural references. I get why authors include them (especially for more recognizable brands, they convey info quickly and add some detail), but too many brand names always reads to me as...well, kind of lazy, and something that will quickly date the book.

- Neither Sadie nor Mal really did it for me as a heroine, and together I wasn't convinced of their chemistry. Their introduction (though not the reader's introduction to Sadie) involves Sadie drunk and crying and yelling on a plane, and even if Mal finds that cute, the cringe feeling followed me for the rest of the book. This might just be me—"messy" heroines have never really been my thing. Mal could be a balancing point, but the deeper we get into the book the more Mal's veneer of having-it-togetherness cracks and the messier she gets too. That has its positives, of course (keeps her more complicated), but it also made me wonder about the stability of a relationship between two people who are individually on such unsteady ground. (And—not to be shallow—but it killed the cool-girl appeal! Fine in real life, but sometimes in romance you just want your unapproachable cool girl to be approachable after all...but still mysteriously cool.)

- (Minor spoiler in this BP) I would have preferred a setup other than faking dating. Other than being a bit trope-y, the way Sadie and Mal eventually end up in bed together (spoiler: one character begs another) sat badly with me. That should have been a point for one of them to say "whoa, we're getting in too deep" or "hey, this is getting too complicated for me", not to demur for three seconds and then go ahead.

So where does that leave me? I came out of this with some significant reservations but am still pretty thrilled that it exists. I probably won't return to this one, but if there is a follow-up book set on the Camino or another path in the future, I'll happily read it.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Videotape" by Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy

Videotape by Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy
Published September 2025 via Bloomsbury Academic
★★★

Now, videotapes are all but obsolete—in retrospect they were something of a blip in media history, rapidly replaced by DVDs and then video streaming services. But when videotapes were first invented, bringing media not just into people's homes but on individual schedules, they were revolutionary. In Videotape, Godeanu-Kenworthy ties the history of the videotape (and accompanying VCR) to Iron Curtain politics—videos as black-market goods, as subversion, as a distinct touchpoint in history.

Videotapes don't particularly interest me, but random microhistories do, and Object Lessons is one of my favorite series these days. Perhaps the best moment here is Godeanu-Kenworthy's recollection of a woman who did much of the translation of English movies into Romanian for a behind-the-Curtain audience. There's a broader discussion of audio translations that were superimposed on the original track, so that you could hear both the original English and the Romanian translation (my family hosted an exchange student from Ukraine once, and he had learned fluent English from watching such films in Ukraine), but I love the specificity of this one woman's voice being the soundtrack for a generation (and her idiosyncracies being recognizable to that generation too).

The Iron Curtain material also helps because the history of the videotape itself is relatively short. More tension than I might have expected despite that (e.g., film studios pushing hard against videotapes because they were afraid of losing control of the market), and of course videotapes paved the way for other things, but it's an interesting departure from microhistories of things that are still heavily in use; it's something of a different story when the biggest part of said story seems to be over.

I enjoyed this, but because I'm not a film/television person I went in knowing that my practical interest would have limitations. Obviously Videotape is best suited to videophiles, but I recommend the entire series to bog-standard nerds who like deep dives.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Medieval Nuns at War" by Elizabeth Quillen

Medieval Nuns at War by Elizabeth Quillen
Published September 2025 via Pen and Sword History
★★★

The classic image of nuns is simple: black habit, wimple, maybe stuck in a convent. And historically, there was some truth to this—there was tremendous pressure on nuns not just from within convents but from the Catholic church more broadly to stay cloistered, stay out of worldly life.

Not all nuns obeyed. Medieval Nuns at War tells the stories of a few of these nuns, as much as is known. These are varied stories: Some nuns did battle within their own convents, fighting for control or against corruption; others left their convents entirely and sought a less reclusive life.

It boggles my mind a bit to read about literal children being consigned to convents—Matilda, whom the book discusses early on, was eleven when she was made abbess of a convent. She was the daughter of an emperor, so I suppose the normal rules did not apply (most eleven-year-olds stuck in convents were not immediately put in positions of power!), but...oh, it's much like child marriages of the era, I suppose; all these life-determining choices made when girls were far too young to decide for themselves. (Worth noting, perhaps, that leaving a convent after a nun had taken vows could get her excommunicated, so the choices made by others mattered.)

Far and away the most interesting story is that of Antonio de Erauso, which comes at the end; Erauso was born Catalina de Erauso in the late 1500s, consigned to a convent as a child...and then escaped and, according to Erauso's own memoirs, lived a wild and varied life. It's a little hard to gauge how much of Erauso's stories are true and how much are "the fish was THIS big", but Quillen has the sources to back up the general thrust of the story. Erauso is the most interesting character here simply for there being so much information available; Quillen focuses largely on nuns about whom not all that much was written, which is something of a double-edged sword: these are stories worth telling, but because they were not treated as stories worth telling centuries ago, when people were in a position to record more details, there is a very limited amount that we can know now.

I read this in part because I had just read a historical novel set in part in a beguinage, and there is some overlap (indeed, Quillen also discusses beguines and their connections to nuns). I did find it a slow read at times, partly because there's a limit to what even the most determined researcher can turn up and partly because I don't have a background in medieval history; it probably would have done me well to do a bit more general catch-up on that history (and, in particular, the medieval Church) before turning to this. An excellent book for researchers, though, and for those who want a reminder that convents have always been more complicated places than popular culture would suggest, and many nuns have lived lives every bit as interesting as those outside the habit.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Meet Me Under the Northern Lights" by Mandy Baggot

Meet Me Under the Northern Lights by Mandy Baggot
Published September 2025 via Boldwood Books
★★★

Chloe never thought falsely bolstering her CV with a command of Icelandic would come back to bite her—but come back to bite her it does when she is sent on a last-minute trip to (you guessed it) Iceland to do research for a client pitch. Naturally, romantic shenanigans ensue.

This is one where I saw an opportunity and I took it: I saw several "northern lights" books in short succession and decided that the only natural thing to do was read all of them and pretend I have a northern lights view in the sky. This is the second of those four books (I'm waiting on a library copy for the third, and the fourth doesn't publish until November).

What worked well for me here: Partly because Chloe is doing prep work for what amounts to a guided trip, she has a chance to do a lot of Iceland-specific things. She doesn't try hákarl, but that's probably just as well (neither Chloe nor I would handle that particularly well), and she's pretty game about all of the things she does try. Her backstory also has some interest—I would have preferred a few more specifics about her condition (I spent much of the book mildly concerned that it would end with a "surprise! This is fixed! The doctors were wrong!"), but the general details are something that I haven't seen a ton of in romance, so that was nice. And, of course, the emphasis on found families is great.

What didn't work so well for me: I didn't really believe the romance. Gunnar gives Chloe a pet name the first time they meet, and it translates—she looks this up early on—to "my sweetie," which, given the time frame, reads as more creepy than anything to me. Why not call her something a bit funnier that would feel cute/romantic later in the book? "Little elf" or something else that might tie into the Icelandic setting. He's also withholding some pretty big information from her for most of the book, and at some point I have to think his ex is right; it's not about the information itself but that he feels the need to hide it. In general, though, I'm not really a fan of withheld information as a conflict point, and here we have both Gunnar's family situation and Chloe's work situation to contend with. (The work situation just makes me a bit sad—a boss who sends you on a last, last-minute trip and can't be bothered to help out with what she knows will be a tricky hotel situation is not one you should be bending over backward to please...to say nothing of a boss who calls you in for a surprise, zero-warning, high-stakes video meeting with external clients. It's a romance novel, so everything eventually works out in Chloe's favor, but I ended up finding the way it works out even less believable than the romance.)

So overall: Fun but not the best fit for me as a reader—but then, I was just in it for Iceland! I expect this one will find its readers.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.