Category Archives: Bestseller

March 16, 2026 · 1:47 pm

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil: In which I try to convince myself this vampire book is something more than a vampire book

Victoria Schwab’s Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is the kind of book you will see on racks promising it will be an absorbing read (and it sort of is) and that is also literary (I’m less convinced) and also important or thematically rich (not really). But if you want a bit of a romp through lesbian vampires who are also complex because they Hunger (and at what point does hunger erase the vestiges of humanity?) and because they extract and exact Power – then sure, go for it.

I guess the parts most interesting are the way the different women-turned-vampires experience power and control. Sabine, the oldest and most badass of the vampires abuses her lover-turned-vampire-companion, Lottie. Lottie then exercises the limited control she has as an abuse victim – reckoning with her powerlessness against Sabine and demonstrating the oft trod adage that ‘leaving is rarely an event,’ which is to say, leaving an abusive relationship takes (according to the AI overview), on average, seven attempts. This part of the book – the reasons people stay in abusive relationships that are real (money, security, even love), the cycle of remorse and honeymoon and building tension and trigger, the way in which the past can haunt (in this case literally) – was the most interesting to me.

That said, I found it – in the end – over-the-top and as satisfied with itself for being intense as if it could just be the book without being so sure of its darkness and thematic complexity. I guess a similar reaction to reading The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue – same themes there (tortured immortality and the disintegration of self). So while a million places will recommend this book to you, take it from me and skip it – it is not nearly as interesting as it wants you to think it is.

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March 16, 2026 · 1:23 pm

Flesh: Weird and great

It’s hard to describe the narrative style of David Szalay’s Flesh, except maybe to say it’s unsettling? Other reviews describe it as ‘sparse,’ which I guess is a nod to the matter-of-fact descriptions and the abrupt changes to our protagonist, István’s, life. Like between two paragraphs he murders a man (accidentally?) and then in the gap between chapters goes to prison or war or or or.

I happened to enjoy the (somewhat jarring) jumps in time and the oddity of István as a protagonist (like he seems primarily motivated by whatever holds his attention in the moment, and achingly insecure), but I can see how another reader might find the narration hard to settle in to or missing something (though not the Booker jury who awarded it the 2025 prize).

There’s probably an undergraduate essay or thesis to be made of the representation of women in the novel – from the opening older woman (a gasp, 40 something) who first seduces István and then teaches him how to be an attentive lover until he (problematically) falls in love with her to the rich woman he chauffeurs around before (series of spoilers and events) marrying her and settling into a life of wealth and leisure (though it’s a stretch to say he settles in because isn’t he always a bit at odds with it all). Women then are tempting and distracting and absorbing – and (understandably because the book is about István) represented as in service to István’s character development.

Anyway, I liked it though I’m not sure I’d recommend it? Like maybe you have to be in the right mood for something kinda weird and different. If you’ve read it, let me know what you think.

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February 13, 2026 · 1:52 am

The Correspondent: The courage to connect

I know I’m late in praising Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent. It’s on a million best-of lists and many of you have recommended it to me. What can I say. I was busy reading romantacy novels and separating from my soon-to-be-ex-husband (whee!). Fun fun.

But actually go get The Correspondent. It is fun (or at least in its formal elements) and helpful. Epistolary (that is to say, written in letters) the novel follows the aging life of Sybil through her correspondence with all manner of people.

A book in praise of human connection – not just the letter writing kind of connection, actually this is only a tiny part of it – more a book about how bravely reaching out to someone (sometimes a stranger, or a famous stranger, or a family member, or a friend, or a salesperson, or anyone) to tell them you’re thinking of them or what you like about something they did or what they’ve done to hurt you or what you admire about them or what you are reading or really anything (write about anything, Sybil says) is courage and connection and what we all need most.

The courage to connect at a time of intense loneliness for so many. The courage to say oh hey, yes, me? I was thinking of you and am just writing to say as much. And then the shock – the shock that never tires – of having this desire for connection reciprocated.

What Evans does best (I think) (and truest to my experience) is to have Sybil instruct young people in this art of courageous connection. She promises them that sometimes people will not write back (and this may be for many reasons and the arrogance of assuming it is you) and that is fine. The joy is in casting the line and that in knowing that sometimes – enough, actually – there is response, and sometimes – enough, actually – there is reciprocation and deep connection.

That these lines can – enough, actually – become thick connections that can hold us over years, through the hardest things, through the most joyous.

Sybil teaches these young people (and through them the reader) of the arrogance of assuming we can Go It Alone, or the cowardice of expecting others to come find us. We find one another when we bravely say ‘oh hey’ and then write back.

It’s a book about many other things – grief (of dead children or lost marriages or lost time), friendship, motherhood, guilt, romance, aging bodies, and trust – but for me (for me the reader right now) it was most of all this message of courage and connection. Certainly when I the individual human have needed it most, but no less, no less, when we the world most urgently do.

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January 24, 2026 · 1:51 pm

Silver Elite: Romantasy for Your Broken Attention Span

If you are concerned that you can no longer read a full book because your attention has been fragmented and blown apart by social media and the internet, you are not alone. The feeling that sitting and slowly absorbing a dense novel might be a kind of torture – or an impossibility akin to a couch to marathon pace – is shared. And you can make arguments about whether long form reading needs to be privileged over something like long form listening or watching (though if my experience is any guide, I don’t bring focused attention to those tasks either – I long form listen while I’m also running or cleaning, and I haven’t watched a full length movie without scrolling at the same time in years). But for me there is something particular about the long, deep read – distinct from audiobooks (and I know some of you will want to fight me on the hierarchy of physical book v audiobook – ‘it’s all a story!’ whatever whatever). Something to the mindfulness that requires (invites? encourages?) doing nothing but reading.

So if that’s a hard(er) experience for you than it used to be let me offer that you are not alone. And that for some, the answer to the challenge of concentration has been romantasy. The portmanteau genre bridging romance and fantasy first came to my attention with Fourth Wing (which I read but can’t find the review) and at the time I thought “this is ridiculous,” and also “I cannot put this down.” Is it the erotica? Maybe. Or the relentless plot pace of Something Is Always About To Happen That Is Very Dramatic? Maybe. It certainly isn’t the quality of the writing or the character development.

The same is absolutely true of Dani Francis’ Silver Elite a sort of hunger games meets fifty shades of grey meets harry potter (in that there are elements of near-children battling while at school while also having explicit sex). Though to my credit (*she said with some defensiveness*) I came to this book through the recommendation of the New York Times and so had some vague sense that it would be #literary and #worthy

If you are okay to free yourself from ideas that reading need be an entirely intellectual exercise – or that you need focused thematic development for something to be good – you might just find true enjoyment in Silver Elite. There’s a bit of work to get oriented to the world building and some gymnastics to sort out the character hierarchy, but once you’re through that it’s just a fun romp through plot and romance. A bodily exercise of enjoyment rather than a brain one.

And the strangest thing will happen. You’ll be standing in line, or waiting between meetings, or finished putting the kids to bed and instead of reaching for your phone to scroll as if there might be an answer to the abyss at the bottom of the feed, you instead want to reach for your book. And you start to read promising yourself just a few pages before you get on to doing X or Y and that beautiful, magical feeling of two hours disappearing happens and you return to this world reminded of what it is to be focused, absorbed and transported.

Now for suggestions for books that do the same without requiring me to blush deeply while reading it in public. Or better still, the things I need to do to finally, at last and fully break my phone addiction. Yes, I’m open to throwing it down a well and never using the internet again.

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