Review: "Conflict of Interest" by Zarah Detand

Conflict of Interest by Zarah Detand
Published July 2026 via Storm Publishing
★★★★

Finn is days away from the next chapter of his life when he does something out of character—he plays along when a hot guy mistakes him for a prostitute. It's harmless fun...until he gets to his new role at the hospital and realizes that that hot guy is one of his supervisors. And also, neither of them really wants to leave the past in the past.

I had a bit of trepidation about this one, because "guy mistakes another for a prostitute" has so many possible ways to go wrong. The others of Detand's books that I've read have been delights, though, so I took the jump—and really, I should not have doubted. I'm very much enjoying the way Detand takes a look at the obvious route and says, in effect, "hmm, maybe not". The characters don't get it right all the time; they have minor misunderstandings and make decisions that don't always have a whole lot of common sense and take risks that they probably shouldn't. And at the same time...they have conversations as mature adults, and they take ownership of their actions, and they're good at (and passionate about) what they do without being unrealistic Wunderkinder. In short, they're people I would genuinely want to spend time with, which is both my favourite starting place for a romance novel and (let's be honest) though a depressingly low bar, one that many romance novels simply don't clear.

(Brief tangent: "Travis" is absolutely an evil-ex name in romance novels. Note that I'm talking specifically about romance novels—if your name is Travis, or your partner's name is Travis, or you named your kid Travis, that's great; I'm sure you or they are absolutely lovely. But in a romance novel? Absolutely a sign that they're not the end game.)

Altogether a satisfying read. I did note that the conflict had some similarities to that in Operation Boyfriend, but happily both the characters and the way the plot plays out are quite distinct. I'd happily read more in this series, and from Detand.

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

Review: "Our Knives Will Save Us" by Nephi Craig

Our Knives Will Save Us by Nephi Craig
Published July 2026 via Penguin Press
★★★★

Growing up, Craig had dreams of being a professional skateboarder—it was something of an accident (literal and figurative, I guess) that landed him in culinary school instead. It was culinary school that would get him out of the hole he'd found himself in...but it was a new look at traditional, Indigenous cooking that would ultimately pull him out of the holes that followed.

I didn't learn any of this in culinary school. During my formal education as a chef, the subject of Native foods never came up. The message I received from teachers and mentors, again and again, was loud and clear: When it came to cooking, all things French reigned supreme. (loc. 149*)

I'm perennially curious about stories and backgrounds that are not my own, and I have a growing list of books by Indigenous writers that I'm gradually working through (mostly while visiting my mother, whose library is much better for this than mine). Conveniently, Our Knives Will Save Us overlaps with another reading interest of mine, food memoir—the hook was baited, and this reader was caught.

This makes for a complicated story about family, heritage, addiction, loss, and coming home again. I love how much discussion of traditional foods Craig includes, as well as how clearly he calls out the ways in which Native cooking has been erased from history (or rather, appropriated by other cultures). I'm a rather disinterested cook (to the eternal dismay of my spouse), but I would cheerfully pore over a full book of recipes from Craig, ideally with even more history and context. (Would I make these recipes? Uh...I'd give the book to my mother, who is a much more interested cook than I, and then I'd hope she chose to make something with neither meat nor tomatoes.) I also love how straightforward he is in telling his story; when he makes excuses, it's in the context of coming back around and realizing that the excuses are just that, and gradually moving forward to make the changes he needs to make. A good one for those interested in memoir, Indigenous voices, food, recovery stories, and history.

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

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

Review: Short story: "Heat Trap" by Ellery Lloyd

Heat Trap by Ellery Lloyd
Published July 2026 via Amazon Original Stories

It's time for the annual girls' trip, this time to France. Lizzie's done the legwork, as usual, and if she isn't sharing all the details...well, there are reasons for that. But this is the first year she's brought a romantic partner with her. Mal is a dream boyfriend...except he isn't sharing all the details either.

This is relatively long for a short story, and it's satisfying. Too often stories with this general premise (group of friends off for a weekend) go off on a predictable route of "everyone is horrible to the point that the reader is happy when they start dying", but these friends are actually friends—maybe they take each other (or at least Lizzie) a bit for granted sometimes, but they genuinely want to spend this time together. This shouldn't be a surprise in this kind of story, and yet it was...and a pleasant surprise at that.

Another nice thing: There's a villain, but honestly a fairly run-of-the-mill one rather than an Evil Villain Who Is Evil. There's villainy, but it's an appropriate amount for this length of a story; I enjoyed that the story briefly got my pulse up without tipping over into caricature.

Honestly, my only complaint? I would have liked to read a version of this as a full-length book. And that's not much of a complaint at all.

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

Review: "Daughter of the Mountains" by Fatimah Asghar

Daughter of the Mountains by Fatimah Asghar
Published July 2026 via One World
★★★★

Poems of homeland and family and love lost.

This is a fairly wide-ranging collection, drifting from mountain yearnings to observations on history and homeland to more maybe more expected reflections on relationships that have seen better days.

My favourite pieces here are about homeland and history, my favourite lines about yearning for the mountains. The poem [the women in my family] talks about names lost to time: women's names, that is; only the winds & only the mountains / keep them. we've forgotten the names, writes Asghar (24*). This year I sat down with my in-laws and asked for as much family history, as many names, as they could tell me; the men's names stretched back generations, but the women's names (many of which had been changed in marriage, anyway) had been lost to time. (One of those things that transcends culture, I think: Men's names hang on and women's names drop off the page.)

Another poem, [other life], tells itself in reverse, and if I'm going to pick apart one of these poems on my own time it's going to be this one—I love a bit of structural play in poetry, a bit of the unexpected. The poems about romance (and romance lost) didn't work as well for me, less because of facility with language and more because those are themes I see a lot of in contemporary poetry, but the range here means that a lot of readers will find something of interest.

*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 Roommate Rule" by Georgia Stone

The Roommate Rule by Georgia Stone
Published July 2026 via Harper Perennial
★★★★

Dylan is due a vacation—and if six all-expenses-paid weeks in Wales with a stranger weren't what she had planned, well, she can go with the flow. Definitely. For sure. Especially since there will definitely be separate bedrooms. Definitely.

I read this more or less entirely for the setting: I haven't been to Wales, and it's relatively high on my list of places to go. And six weeks there seems like more than enough time to get a feel for it! Happily, I liked the relationship a lot; Max is not my type, but then, Dylan thinks he's not her type either, and she eventually realizes otherwise. They do a lot of talking, some of it about more serious things than others, and while they have clashes (again, some more serious than others), they're good about not letting those fester for too long.

There are plenty of secondary characters, which is nice—Dylan and Max get to know each other not just on their own but within the context of other people, which feels important (like, you should know how your romantic interest interacts with their friends, you know? And also with relative acquaintances who they don't necessarily want to befriend). One character does kind of drop off the face of the earth once Dylan and Max heat things up a bit; it's nice that there isn't unnecessary drama there, but it did feel like a bit of a loose end. On the other hand, if I read things right, there's room for a related book with yet another character in the future...

Now, quibbles: On a practical level, the setup for this book does not make sense. Max has been invited for an influencers' weekend six-week, all-inclusive trip. It's a new venue that's trying to build some buzz, so inviting influencers makes sense—but six weeks is a huge chunk of time to host a bunch of influencers. Financial cost aside, that's weeks and weeks and weeks to entertain a group of people with varied personalities and needs and expectations. There are lots of excursions and events planned, but most of them they seem to do only once, even over six weeks; what's more, excursions aside, I don't think anyone leaves the compound—they seem perfectly happy to be off at summer camp with no ability to go to the shops or the cinema or whatever (or, say, to replace a critical but lost item...), and while I believe that for some of them, I don't believe it for everyone.

Obviously it's nicer for Max and Dylan to have six weeks to get to know each other, outside the requirements of their (well, Dylan's) ordinary lives. But...I can't help but think that it would have made a lot more sense if the Wales part of things had taken up one week, not six. (Also...at an influencers' retreat, surely everyone—but especially the people not used to being filmed—should have to sign some version of a UK GDPR form?)

That's a long quibble, but it wasn't actually one that bothered me much—just something that I started wondering about midway through and then wasn't quite able to let go of. Would recommend; would stash away in case I need a feel-good reread in the future; would consider getting overalls just to replicate Dylan's look on the (US) cover, except I'm too short to pull them off. (I don't think they're true to the book, but the overalls vibe is true to the book, so I'll take it.)

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

Review: "The Acrobat" by Wisława Szymborska

The Acrobat by Wisława Szymborska
Translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak
Published July 2026 via Ecco
★★★★

I like maps, / because they lie. / Because they give no access to the vicious truth. / Because great-heartedly, good-naturedly / they spread before me a world / not of this world. (loc. 369*)

Szymborska was an award-winning (Nobel-winning, in fact) Polish poet, and it's easy to see why. This collection pulls together some of her works, translated in English.

I haven't read any of Szymborska's poetry before, but honestly, these are poems I'd like to return to. I don't always understand them, but that's my preference in poetry; they're accessible enough that I could take something from each poem and complex enough to make me think, and think again.

He made himself a glass violin so he could see what music looks like. (loc. 564)

I don't speak Polish and can't comment on the translation, but I loved the introduction—for all that I enjoyed Szymborska's wit and sly commentary, I think I would have gotten less out of it without having read the introduction, written by one of the translators, first. Cavanagh spends some time talking about how they chose to approach the poetry, including rhymes and neologisms and alliteration. It was something I came back to again and again as the book progressed. How might this look in the original Polish, for example?

So much world all at once—how it rustles and bustles! / Moraines and morays and morasses and mussels, / the flame, the flamingo, the flounder, the feather— / how to line them all up, how to put them together? (loc. 497)

You can see that the translators leaned hard into rhyme and alliteration, presumably at the expense of literal translation. I imagine this is a judgement call for anyone doing translation work, not only but especially of poetry: When do you go for precision, and when do you go for vibe? I take no issue with the choice to go with vibe, but I'd be dead curious to see a translation that went for something directly literal, too.

Look at the happy couple. / Couldn't they at least try to hide it, / fake a little depression for their friends' sake! (loc. 687)

A high four stars and one I'm likely to return to.

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

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

Blog tour: "Summer of Love" by Kerri Maher

Summer of Love by Kerri Maher
Published July 2026 via Berkley
★★★★

In the present day, Dawn is struggling—she's stopped drinking, but sobriety is a tenuous thing, and she can't imagine telling her mother, a renowned vintner, that her relationship with alcohol is so different from her mother's. And in the past, Winnie too is struggling: She's rejected the stability of her upbringing in favor of a life as an artist, and while she finds creating rewarding, her relationship (passionate, complicated) leaves things to be desired.

How the stories overlap gradually becomes clearer as the book goes on. Or rather: It's clear early on that Winnie and Dawn's mother are sisters, but Winnie's been gone since Dawn was little; she's never had a chance to know Winnie as an adult, but she and Winnie have more in common than she knows to ask about.

I read this largely for the portion of the story that takes place in the past. I go through phases of wanting books about the 60s and 70s, though (unhelpfully) I can never quite decide whether I want something realistic or something idealized. This falls more in the former camp; although Winnie is wrapped up in the countercultural movement, this isn't all hippies and Woodstock and free love. Instead Winnie is trying to figure out how to eke out a creative life, and constrained by the limitations of the time and place, and unable to fully advocate for herself within her relationship or within her family. Meanwhile her sister Miranda—Dawn's mother—is taking over the family business, and although she has a head for it and a love for it and a strong support system, the 60s and 70s are not an easy time to be a woman in male-dominated business.

Overall it's a fairly quiet book. My heart went into my throat when Winnie had the ethics run-ins (vague to avoid spoilers!), but that's resolved quietly too. At some point it became clear to me how the family parts of things were going to play out, and from there it was largely a matter of the pieces all coming together, a climax for the past storyline, a climax for the present storyline. Perhaps worth noting that there's a fair amount of discussion of drinking and sobriety, which will be appealing to some readers and warrant caution to others; there's no glorification of rock-bottoms, which is nice, but it's something that Dawn in particular spends a lot of the book thinking about.

3.5 stars for a thoughtful family story with some food for thought.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley and for inviting me to take part in a blog tour.

Review: "Glasses" by Adam Geczy

Glasses by Adam Geczy
Published July 2026 via Bloomsbury Academic
★★★

Back to my favorite nonfiction series! This Object Lesson is about (you guessed it) glasses, an object that I know both quite well and not as well as I ought to. Did reading this inspire me to figure out where my poor neglected spectacles are and tote them with me to an evening class? Yes. Did they help? Arguably. Did I then immediately put them aside and go back to my glasses-less life? Yes.*

But I digress. In Glasses, Geczy traces the phenomenon of four-eyed life, delving a bit into the physical history of glasses (which, all things considered, haven't been around that long) and quite a bit more into the cultural history—who has historically worn glasses in TV shows and movies, what the implications are for character development, etc. It will probably surprise nobody to hear that glasses are often a stand-in for nerdiness or undesirability, though Geczy also discusses the role of sunglasses as symbols of mystery and privacy.

A couple of missed opportunities here. Geczy says that, looking at Pixar films, he can find only two uses of glasses, in "Inside Out" and "Turning Red." But...what about "The Incredibles"? Edna wears glasses, and the entire family wears masks at various points (not glasses but might be an interesting discussion point). I haven't seen most Pixar movies, so I took a quick scan of a Wikipedia list and immediately turned up "Up" and "Soul" as well; there might be others. Now, the inclusion of Edna would not weaken Geczy's broader point about the portrayal of characters with glasses, and I'm guessing that neither would the inclusion of the characters in "Up" and "Soul" and whoever else a more detailed look at Pixar movies turned up. That said, I tend to want more research than vibe in this series, and when I can so easily refute something the author says, I'm disappointed. (I also hoped for significantly more about glasses and the Khmer Rouge—it's something that Geczy brings up late in the book, but only in passing, which is too bad when it's something that makes such a strong point about the assumption that people with glasses have an intellectual bent.)

Although this isn't memoir, Geczy also tends to extend his own (unhappy) experience of wearing glasses as a child to what he assumes glasses-wearing is like for all children. I don't know that there's anywhere where more kids are impressed than unimpressed by glasses, but as someone who was very excited to get her first glasses at the age of eight (and for whom they were, socially, a nonevent), I think there's more nuance there, probably tied to location and gender and generation, among other things. I'm resisting (valiantly) the urge to poll my college alumnae about their experiences wearing glasses (or not) as children, and I'm only hanging on to that resistance because it would be an extremely unscientific poll (mine always are), but...this might have been a good opportunity for a more scientific poll.

More pressingly: Geczy makes several comments about eyewear sometimes being used to hide deformities or facial oddities, not just for the sake of the wearer but for the sake of the viewer. His comments about this are generally tangential (he doesn't go into this in any depth), or perhaps just flippant, but the implication throughout is that it's a good thing for people to not have to see people's disabilities or differences, and...well, it did not sit well. It reminds me of ugly laws, and surely we have come beyond those? It's a small part of the book but brought the whole thing down for me.

All told them, some interesting points and a lively voice, but since these are short books maybe not enough room to go into depth on all the things I would have liked to see. Not my favorite of the series so far, but I'm excited to see what else the series brings.

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

* The eye doctor told me that they were my driving glasses. I don't drive, I said. Then they're your not-reading glasses, he said. But that's never, I said. He thought I was joking, so I still don't really know when I'm meant to wear them.

Review: "The Weight of One Pomegranate" by Brynne Rebele-Henry

The Weight of One Pomegrante by Brynne Rebele-Henry
Published July 2026 via Soho Teen
★★★

Isa's sister Eleni was her north star—but Eleni died recently, suddenly, unexpectedly, and her death has torn Isa's whole world apart. And to make matters worse, she's only now finding out just how much Eleni didn't tell her.

I read this largely on the strength of Rebele-Henry's Orpheus Girl. I'm cautious with books about grief these days, but I like a coming-of-age story and stories with queer characters, and, well, curiosity calls. Isa's grief is still new and raw, and she's still trying to understand her place in the world now that her sister is no longer there to show her the way.

Some mornings, when I wake up, I've forgotten. Then I swing open the bedroom door only to realize that it's not the door to our room anymore. And something dark and sharp edges its way into my throat and makes it hard to speak. It's like falling, the remembering. (loc. 49*)

That grief is visceral and real, but I struggled to connect with the characters in other ways. Isa's parents are shadows of themselves and whispers on the page (or, more often, off the page); she starts to understand her sexuality throughout the book, but it's unclear how close she really is to the person she likes and whether she really likes them or more the idea of them. I can read Isa as neurodivergent or as someone who simply hasn't found her people yet, and though it doesn't really matter for the purposes of the story, I'm left with a lot of questions. (There are some letters in the book, incidentally, one of which brings Isa some peace but for me again raises some questions.)

The language is lovely, and I do wonder whether I might take more away from this one if I come back to it in the future. Not a bad one to pick up for poetic writing and a quieter look at grief.

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

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

Review: "70,000" by Lenna Jawdat

70,000 by Lenna Jawdat
Published July 2026 via Central Avenue Poetry
★★★★★

In 1948, alongside the other events that comprised the formation of the Israeli state, some 70,000 books were removed from Palestinian homes and libraries. Some 6,000 are now in Israeli libraries, where most Palestinians cannot access them; the remaining 64,000 have presumably been lost to history. Jawdat, herself a poet of Palestinian descent, set out to illustrate this loss in the simplest of ways: by writing out the numbers 1 to 70,000.

The numbers start out simply—columns on a page. The columns tighten as Jawdat seeks to fit more numbers on each page, pens change, the columns expand and contract and fit themselves into and around art, interspersed with history (family history, Palestinian history) in the form of poetry.

I ask my partner to help me write numbers, notes Jawdat. He wrote less than 20 before tiring. (168*)

This is an inherently political book—there is no way for it not to be—and it is sharp and pointed and painful. Palestine is for Jawdat an abstraction to a point, a place her forebears fled and a place she does not know if she will ever be allowed to visit. And it is also, to her, an intensely real place, one tied up in family and scent and memory and war. And still a place she does not know if she will ever be allowed to visit.

What I like in poetry is sometimes idiosyncratic, but I like poetry that asks me to work for it, that asks me to think, that do something interesting with form. And this delivers in spades. My favorite poetry collection that I've read in a good long time.

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

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