Review: "The Cut Line" by Carolina Pihelgas

The Cut Line by Carolina Pihelgas, translated by Darcy Hurford
English translation published February 2026 via World Editions
★★★★

Rural Estonia: Liine has fled to her rural family cottage in the wake of a much-needed breakup. It's peaceful, and it's not: war hovers just around the corner, climate change is making its mark, and more than anything Liine doesn't really know what's next.

When everything is quiet, when the guns aren't firing, this is the most beautiful place in the world. (loc. 119*)

I'm fond of novels in translation for a couple of reasons—first, I often get to read about places that aren't so commonly written about in English; second, the rhythm and style of books written in different languages is often different. (Think, e.g., about the recent uptick in interest in translations of Japanese novels—could be wrong, but I assume one of the reasons for this is just that the style of writing is different than what most English-medium authors are doing.) As far as I can remember this is the first novel out of Estonia that I've read(!), so far be it from me to paint all Estonian novels with the same brush, but...nice to see contemporary things from places about which I know little.

Anyway, back to more specifics: The Cut Line is told in a not-quite-stream-of-consciousness style, as Liine works and ruminates and tries to avoid falling back into the angry orbit of her ex; as her family asks if he was so bad, really; as gunfire echos nearby; as nothing happens and everything changes anyway.

The description highlights climate change and the threat of war; the mention of climate change made me a little hesitant to read this (I already read too much real-life news), but I found nearby military action to make more of a impact when reading. (Also stressful, and also a little too close to real life! But worth noting that this is not a war story.) I don't know any Estonian, so I can't speak to the translation accuracy, but this made for a smooth read, and I never found myself wondering about the original—a good sign.

One for readers of lit fic and those looking for something slow, quiet, deeper currents moving under deceptively calm waters.

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

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

Review: "Archie, Vol. 3" by Mark Waid and Joe Eisma

Archie, Vol. 3 by Mark Waid and Joe Eisma
Published 2017 by Archie Comics
★★★

Volume 3! In which Mr. Lodge has had a hissy fit and moved the family away from Riverdale, Veronica has been shipped off to a Swiss boarding school (she's miserable, but honestly, that was my dream as a teenager), and we meet Cheryl Blossom. Cheryl's basically there to be the new Big Bad so that Veronica can be a bit softer—the Veronica of the first couple of volumes wouldn't have thought twice about participating in a mean-girl trick or two, but the Veronica of this volume has developed Morals, and perhaps a Conscience. There's very little of Betty here, except for a moment when Cheryl uses her to learn more about what makes Veronica tick, and we get a minor subplot involving a secondary character who has a crush on Betty...though it remains to be seen whether that plotline goes anywhere.

It's interesting—some things about these comics have been updated. At the end of this one there's a sneak peek into one about Reggie, and in that he raids his father's liquor cabinet, which he'd never have been allowed to do in the squeaky-clean originals; of course the shape of the Betty-Veronica rivalry is a bit different; Kevin (who was introduced to the Archie universe specifically to be The Gay One, because heaven forbid that any of the original characters might come out) is no longer the only queer character. Other things are just the same. They're as over the top as they ever were, with characters who are at times caricatures of the originals...who were themselves already caricatures. That's the point, I suppose! It's the whole genre. But I do wonder what this would look like in a different graphic novel form, with a less slapstick take.

Review: "The Hunter" by Tana French

The Hunter by Tana French
Published March 2024 via Viking
★★★★

Cal Hooper is back for book two, and things are about to get messy...or perhaps just messier. A few years have passed since Cal moved to Ardnakelty. He's more entrenched in the town's daily life, Trey—the local kid for whom he serves as mentor and, often, family—is growing up, and of course things are never quiet long enough.

The Hunter brings back in most of the usual suspects, this time on a less usual quest: to find gold on their land...or rather, to plant gold on their land to con a con man. And so Cal finds himself needing to decide just how involved he wants to get in some local crime, and how best to protect the people he cares about, and just how dangerous the new faces in town are.

[She] may be doing Ardnakelty's bidding, but her aims and her reasons are all hers. She's not the townland's creature in this, or Lena's, or Cal's: she's rising up as no one's creature but her own. (410)

I'll be honest: Some of the plot points in this one stressed me right out. When Cal is deciding how involved to get, he's also aware that he can't necessarily decide what it will cost him or when to get out...especially as the stakes get higher and higher. Eventually there is a catalyst, and that catalyst provides instant relief...but it also raises other stakes.

It's a slow burn of a summer in The Hunter, and a slow burn of a book. I'm enjoying how much this series is about community, and the ties that bind, and the things that tear people apart—there's a mystery and a murder, sure, but what moves me forward and keeps me reading is wanting to know what happens to Trey, to Lena, to Cal.

Review: "My Life on Standby" by Heather Smith

My Life on Standby by Heather Smith
Published 2023
★★

A quick collection of the author's experiences growing up as a third-culture kid. There's a lot of interesting material here, but the stories trend towards anecdotes rather than fully fleshed-out...well, stories. My rating is actually pretty neutral, as far as these things go—it's just that this feels like a great book to pass down to children or grandchildren, and as a random reader who likes books about far-off places and experiences that are not my own, I wanted a great more detail and plot and character development. (And...I chose this partly on the basis of "Lesotho Flying Doctors" on the cover, but of course Smith doesn't really have stories about that because she was only a wee child when her father was part of the flying doctors!)

Smith wrote another short memoir about teaching in Uganda, and I might yet pick that up; sometimes more recent memories make for more detailed stories.

Review: "See You at the Summit" by Jordyn Taylor

See You at the Summit by Jordyn Taylor
Published January 2026 via Gallery Books
★★★

Simone is finally out of the closet and ready to live her best bi life—new job at a gay museum, new coming-out post, new clothes, new...boyfriend? That wasn't part of the plan.

I picked this up for, well, the hook. Bi erasure is well documented, and the struggle to portray bi characters well comes in numerous forms—you get side characters in books who seem like they're bi for the sake of diversity; you get main characters who are bi in a "realized she was bi in college and this book is all about her het relationship" way; you get main characters who are bi in a "realized she was bi in college and this book is all about her queer relationship" way; and on it goes. I know there's a lot out there that I haven't read, but in my reading at least it's been really rare to see the sort of thing that Simone struggles with throughout the book: that now that she's bi, she doesn't feel queer enough if she's dating a man; moreover, some people around her think that she's only bi if she's dating a woman. It's a little unsubtle in See You at the Summit (Simone is trying really hard to embody "messy bisexual"), but I can't mind that much because it's the sort of thing that I want to see more characters talking about openly. It's something that I thought about a fair amount when I took up with a man, actually; in many ways it feels as though, in doing so, I exited the queer community, even though I'm as queer as ever. The difference between me and Simone (erm...one of several) is that I'd been well and truly out for years by then, and had dated people across the gender spectrum, and had gotten over any need I might have felt to establish...I don't know...queer cred.

Plot-wise, the book is kind of divided in three conflicts—first there's Simone's feud with Ryan (more on that in a moment); then there's Simone's internal struggle to see herself as queer enough (fueled by some family drama); then there's a separate biphobia plot. It's valuable to have both the second and the third plotlines in terms of exploring the bi erasure theme; we see how that affects Simone both inside and outside of the queer community. I think I would have liked a little more overlap, though, as I kept checking how far along I was because it seemed like everything was wrapping up, only to find that there was plenty of book left (telling me that there must be another conflict just around the corner).

Character-wise, I found Ryan easier to take than Simone. They have a rocky start: Simone has one of many her-flaw-is-clumsiness moments (combined with the terrible choice of timing her coming-out for just hours before her first day on the job, despite knowing that coming out will be incredibly stressful and that her mother will react badly) and damages something Ryan has been working on for weeks...plus injures him slightly, plus dumps coffee all over him. Ryan's reaction is unnecessarily rude, but his frustration makes some sense. And to her credit, Simone feels awful and tries to apologize...but when Ryan doesn't immediately accept her apology, she decides that he's her work nemesis (and complains about him, repeatedly, to their mutual coworkers, which is not a great look ever, but especially in the first couple of weeks of a new job?) and then decides to kill him with the fakest kindness she can summon. By then she's decided that everything's his fault anyway, so when he doesn't fall over himself to apologize for being a grump (Simone thinks she's the sunniest sun that ever did shine), she resorts to things like having an intensely personal phone call, in which she recounts her less-than-sunshine-and-rainbows coming-out experience, while Ryan is a captive audience...and then gets huffy because Ryan doesn't fall all over himself to express his condolences for the stuff in the conversation she subjected him to.

Things get better from there, at least for a while. But I really struggled to get past Simone's early-book brattiness (especially when she then keeps needling Ryan about how he was soooo mean to her at first). In a romance featuring a queer lead, I never want the bulk of my sympathy to go to the straight man. It's not the last time she makes herself into the victim, and it's just not always that fun to be stuck in her POV.

All of this is an unnecessarily long way of saying that I love the intent here; I love the themes; I don't love the characters. I don't know how marketing people envision their target readers, but for this one I'm going to imagine the target reader as a cis-woman in her late teens or early twenties who self-identifies as a bisexual disaster, emphasis on disaster. (I knew someone once who talked a huge game about how much she hated drama, all the while being one of the most dramatic people I knew. We did not stay in touch. She and Simone would get along great right up until the point that they had a gigantic, messy falling-out.)

Tropes: #EnemiesToLovers, #BisexualDisaster, #OneBed, #GrumpyAndFauxSunshine #HerFatalFlawIsThatShe'sClumsyAndKeepsFallingIntoHisArms

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

Review: "Better Catch Up, Krishna Kumar" by Anahita Karthik

Better Catch Up, Krishna Kumar by Anahita Karthik
Published January 2026 via HarperCollins
★★★★

Krishna had a goal for her summer in India—get out of her comfort zone, have adventures, and obtain her first kiss so that she isn't the only first-year college student in the history of the universe to have Never Been Kissed status.

The problem, part I: Summer's almost over, and she's done, well...none of this.

The solution: a last-minute road trip from Mumbai to Goa, where her summer crush is attending a wedding and just might be down to give her that first kiss.

The problem, part II: The road trip involves Krishna's cousin Priti, who is her best friend turned enemy, as well as a boy who makes her question who she's interested in after all...

This is one of those 3.5-stars-or-4-stars-and-a-caveat books for me. I absolutely love seeing a classic YA road trip book that takes place somewhere other than the US or, for that matter, other western, heavily white countries. Karthik is originally from Pune (ohh, suddenly it makes more sense why Krishna & co. detour through Pune!), so she's writing from some experience, though her story is definitely not Krishna's. Better Catch Up, Krishna Kumar shows a side of India that I haven't seen a lot of in fiction or in the media; Krishna's cousins (and friends/acquaintances in India) are contemporary and urban teenagers; they're confident and adventurous; they're not interested in being pigeonholed. Most of the people I know from India (partner included) are older than the characters in this book and/or they grew up in smaller cities, where change is—as in smaller cities everywhere—slower.

Two things I would have liked to see: first, some of the dialogue is in Indian languages (Hindi, Marathi, etc.), and though there are footnote translations I'd have loved rough pronunciation as well; I can sound out just enough Devanāgarī to absolutely butcher it, and it would have been nice to know just how far off I was. Second, more descriptions of the food—there are many mentions of different dishes and how delicious they are, but unless it was something I was already familiar with there wasn't always much to go on in terms of figuring out what was what. But that being said: on both points, I'm aware that I'm writing this as a white person from the West; this book is being published for an American market, but it would be wildly unfair/US-centric of me to expect that everything be explained in more detail than an Indian or Indian-diaspora reader would need (as, I'm sure, much of it already has been without me noticing). So I can class both of those as "if I can look it up, who am I to complain?"

The caveat: Some of the characters are so often drama-llama-ding-dongs.* I know—they are teenagers, and is both their right and a rite of passage for them to be drama-llama-ding-dongs, but that didn't stop me from cringing a bit every time Krishna or Priti (but mostly Krishna) picked another fight. They do have their moments—e.g., Priti acknowledging that at some point being rude just became habit, and it might take some time for that to even out—but I could have used a little less drama at times, and a few fewer misunderstandings. (On the plus side: Krishna is well aware that at least part of her shifting attraction is down to teenage hormones, which entertained me quite a bit.)

I'll be curious to see the response from readers who are closer to the target age range and also those who have a closer understanding of contemporary India (and, more specifically, the experience of growing up in contemporary India) than I do, but this was a fun and fast read for me. I'd like to see more along these lines.

*I know the song uses lama, but I prefer the mental image of a really dramatic camelid.

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

Review: "Squeak" by Vera Valentine

Squeak by Vera Valentine
Published August 2022
★★★

Welp, I have another temporary Kindle Unlimited deal, and as it has become tradition for me to start one of those off with some of the odder romance/erotica floating around...here we go.

This isn't so much a monster romance as it is a shifter romance—something to do with an omegaverse (I do not know what this is and don't really care enough to find out, so...oh well). The heroes of the story have a fairly intense backstory involving being created by a kind of...wannabe witch?...for her own entertainment, escaping, and trying to find a way to make that escape permanent. Meanwhile, the heroine is an art student who thinks that if she goes to the zoo and only looks up at her subjects (humans who are visiting the zoo, not animals) every few minutes, they'll still be in the same place they were when she last looked at them...but I digress.

I found the story overall to be inoffensive but largely nonsensical, and the end to be rushed to the point where I have to wonder if the author hit fifty pages and thought "okay, that's enough now, I can just chuck in the outline and be done with it". I'm leaving it at three stars because it's on par with the genre as a whole and generally inoffensive (assuming that you aren't offended by the genre in the first place!), but it's one to be read for the novelty, entertainment, and not all that much else.

Review: "Who's All Going (to Die)?" by Lisa Springer

Who's All Going (to Die)? by Lisa Springer
Published September 2025 via Delacorte Press
★★★

It should have been the perfect getaway—Ariana has been invited to the soft opening of a new wellness retreat on a secluded island. She's brought her best friends along, and she's looking forward to a break.

That is...until a girl disappears, and nobody seems concerned. And then the bodies start to pile up...

I loved Springer's first book (nice and gory) and was looking forward to this one, since it promised more gore (I don't know, man, sometimes my reading habits are weird) plus a pretentious-as-hell wellness-culture island, which is always good fun. Ariana's sharp enough to notice early on that things aren't...quite...right...and that, for example, the newish friend who invited her to take part seems to have invited almost exclusively newish friends. Ariana seems to have at least some sort of online following (back to this in a moment), but she's not in this to build her profile; she just wants a free week of vacation and pampering. She does not want to be pressured into spending money that she doesn't really have to "level up" her wellness commitment, or her commitment to this specific brand of wellness.

The influencer thing ended up confusing me more than anything, though. None of Ariana's circle seems to be online-famous, though they (and everyone else) are encouraged to post a lot about their experience; they're given hashtags to use, and because the retreat already has some big names behind it, those posts get a lot of engagement. But: the entire influencer-and-people-posting-things seems to disappear as soon as the bodies start to pile up, and in an odd way that took me out of the story. Like...of course a bunch of teenagers, some of whom seem to want to be influencers proper, are going to post (and post a lot, and post dramatically) when somebody dies. They're also going to post dramatic things when, e.g., they're forced to spend hours doing manual labor in harsh conditions. The potential for the retreat getting a bunch of very publicity, very quickly, is huge with so many of the book's plot points...but that's just dropped. I think I would have preferred some kind of semi-convoluted plot point about there being no reception or wifi on the island (bonus: can't contact anyone to GTFO), so nothing can be posted until later (and the retreat people would still have time to do damage control)...and maybe something like an extensive nondisclosure agreement that most teenagers (most adults!) wouldn't bother to read before signing.

Ariana is also a little inconsistent in what she does with her information. She realizes early on that something is awry...but that doesn't stop her from trying out activities with high potential for someone to make something go wrong. It doesn't stop her from wearing the smartwatch that the retreat has assigned her and that can track her movements. It doesn't stop her from openly challenging people—and while she's generally right, she'd have been much safer if she smiled and nodded and raised hell later, when back in safety.

By the end of the book it's hard to imagine that this wellness retreat ever would have made it past the first round of visitor-guests; there's just too much violence and too many dangerous "treatments" and too much unrelenting pressure to spend spend spend. No subtlety to it—am I being overly optimistic to think that more people would share Ariana's skepticism and distaste for the spend spend spend pressure? Especially when that pressure repeats over and over (and this is a bunch of teenagers, most of whom are not paying their own bills...surely some of them think that they should check with their parents)? Still a very fun read, but as usual I struggled to suspend my disbelief.

Review: "Sisters of Belfast" by Melanie Maure

Sisters of Belfast by Melanie Maure
Published February 2024 via Harper Paperbacks
★★★

Aelish and Isabel are two peas in a pod. Raised in a Catholic orphanage in Northern Ireland, their paths diverge early: Aelish ever the good student, the good girl; Isabel not so content to be told what to do. We meet them as children, then again as adults, with Aelish—now a nun—traversing an ocean to be with her sister, who is now a married mother of two and seriously ill. They've been estranged for years at this point, and it's only as the story continues that we understand why.

I had high hopes for this book but ended up struggling quite a bit with it. Some of that is style: lots and lots of short sections, switching between viewpoints as the sections change; for me, the sections were too short and the shifts too abrupt. Some of that is structure: I think we're supposed to care deeply about what has torn these two sisters apart, but because we don't see any of that estrangement (just hop from them being children to them reconnecting as adults), it's hard to be all that invested in that storyline.

A significant chunk of the story takes place in the convent in Belfast. It's helpful if you have some idea of what convents in Ireland and Northern Ireland (and elsewhere) were doing at the time; I've done some reading on the Magdalene laundries, and if you have too, there won't be that many surprises here. We see only a few nuns, one of whom is kind but perhaps a bit ineffectual, another of whom is...maybe not evil, but distinctly unkind. (I guess she's supposed to have gotten her comeuppance, because we're reminded over and over again that she's now not only infirm but fat and smelly—not loving the constant fat-shaming of the one "bad" character in the book.)

I think this would have worked better for me with a different structure—more chronological, perhaps, with Isabel's secret not held back until later in the book. Or perhaps with more moments of levity and less Sturm und Drang between Isabel and Aelish. As it was, the book had its moments but wasn't really what I was hoping for.

Review: "Her Beautiful Life" by Brianna Labuskes

Her Beautiful Life by Brianna Labuskes
Published January 2026 via Thomas & Mercer
★★★★

Holland hasn't spoken to Cat in years, not since they lived together in Savannah. Those days, Cat was an up-and-coming chef, irreverent, biting, with no interest in being tied down. Now she's Catriona, a successful tradwife influencer with a passel of children. And Holland finally has a reason to reach out again—and the chance to check whether, really, Cat is okay. Because the Cat she knew would never in a lifetime willingly subject herself to this tradwife life. And she misses the Cat she knew.

It was so strange how much leeway society gave us to mourn romantic relationships but then acted like breakups between friends just never happened or never affected anyone if they did. They could be just as—or more—devastating. (146*)

Like Holland, I'm a little bit fascinated and a lot appalled by the rise of the tradwife movement. Unlike Holland, I don't know anyone who's actually living that life...but I'm intrigued by the parallel rise of the tradwife thriller, so here we are. The book is split between then and now, Holland's perspective and Cat's and that of the detective investigating when (not a spoiler) Cat's husband turns up dead.

The wife, Catriona, was a social media influencer, one of those women who pretended it was 1950 while ignoring the fact that, in 1950, she wouldn't have been allowed to have a career making a spectacle of herself for the public to consume. (2)

Catriona is compelling, electric, ambitious—and also impulsive, selfish, and jealous. Holland knows this; Catriona knows this; they both accept this as the status quo. So do most people in Catriona's life, honestly. Now...this isn't really a book about Catriona's tradwife life. I actually would have liked a bit more of that—the part of her life that Holland, who comes in as a journalist for this reconnection, is allowed to see is fairly limited, and although it's immediately clear to Holland that not everything is as Catriona presents to the Internet, it's all so curated that even Holland, with her inside knowledge, spends much of the book wrestling with what she should believe.

There are twists here, and some of those twists are big. I guessed one of the major ones fairly early on, but others, including related ones, I didn't see coming; better, because the end of the book is not reliant on twists so much as it is reliant on what will happen next and how far each individual character will go, I didn't know how the book would end until, well, the book ends. Love that although some information that the POV characters know is withheld until it's useful, that mostly doesn't happen in a "dun dun dun we're building this up" kind of way; the plotting is something fierce.

I'm not sure that the end would really be as final as it seems—numerous characters seem to be overlooking the use of forensic evidence and the impact that it might have on an investigation. There are also a number of unanswered questions about various relationships (e.g., why Catriona's husband isn't on good terms with his parents). But mostly this was just delightfully, compulsively readable.

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

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