Offbeat Offline: December 2025 (Plus Announcing the First Hiatus of the Year)

Welcome to Offbeat Offline, where I bring you up-to-date with what went on in my life during the month just gone, give you a sneak peek of my next shenanigans, and share my favourite posts of late!

Hello sweeties! and Happy New Year! 🎉

What happened last month to yours truly?...Nothing. I read a little, reviewed a little (adding to my string of under-4-star books), beta-read a little, dined out for my birthday but couldn't eat what I wanted, gave Christmas a wide berth (as per tradition), suffered from the usual ailments, regretted my life choices one time too many. All pretty depressing, right?

📚 WELCOME TO THE BETAVERSE. I didn't read/review much in December, but not because of the holiday frenzy. You should know me well enough by now to know that I'm the Grinch's long-lost sister LOL. But I was busy with my end-of-the-year wrap-up, and I spent some time reading the revised version of Erin Callahan's new effort (a thriller-meets-time-travel adult novel titled The Beach Key), one of whose early draft I had already read. Also, I was tired (what's new?) and didn't want to treat my reading/reviewing as a chore, especially at a time of the year when most people seem intent on being lazy and having fun. Here goes my small book list then...

Approvals (1):

• They Call Her Regret by Channelle Desamours (YA, supernatural/thriller)

Every year horror-loving Simone Washington throws an epic Halloween party for her classmates. Party-planning is her favorite escape from the dark secrets in her past, and this year, she’s taking things up a notch with an invitation-only event to celebrate her eighteenth birthday—something that will leave the halls of Pinegrove Academy flooded with gossip about the big ghoulish bash. The overnight stay at Doll’s Head Lake will be filled with spooky pranks and scary stories told by the fire—including the legend of a local witch named Regret.

But those dark secrets from Simone’s past are forced to the surface at the party when her best friend Kira dies under questionable circumstances. The witch appears and offers Simone a deal: if Simone can figure out how to release Regret from the curse trapping her at the lake within fourteen days, all of Simone’s regrets will be erased. If Simone accepts, Kira’s life will be immediately restored. But if she fails, Kira will die again—and Simone will be the one to kill her.

Note: a funny thing happened with this one - under its title, NetGalley had a different book (it wasn't even one that was supposed to be available on the site, because I couldn't find it listed, so it wasn't a case of mix-up). I tried to reach out to the publisher on Twitter and Bluesky to tell them they had uploaded the wrong book, but they paid me no heed (I guess they don't read their notifications...), so I emailed NG about it. They said they'd let the publisher know, and a couple of days after, NG had the right copy. In the meantime, I had found an address for the publisher and emailed them about the issue myself, but again, they never replied. The weirdest part of it is that I can't believe no one who had been approved for the book had noticed the mistake before I did...unless people only download/start to read their approvals when the release date is approaching...

UK/AUS cover, since I got it from Bloomsbury...

Reads (4):

• The Beast You Let In by Dana Mele (YA, supernatural/thriller)

If the first half had been on par with the second, this would have been an easy 4-star novel, instead of a 3.5 one. Midway through, some changes occur, and you feel like you're reading a completely different (and much better) book. Worth a read for anyone who enjoys horror-tinged mysteries, legacy of blood, queer identities vs. toxic environments, and complicated sibling relationships.

• They Call Her Regret by Channelle Desamours (see above)

A Pandora's box of buried secrets, trauma, grief, guilt and, unsurprisingly, regret, and if (like in the Greek myth) hope is what is left at the bottom of the container, it comes with a generous side of eleventh-hour twists that I didn't see coming. Some things I appreciated, some I side-eyed a bit (also, I think I've read one supernatural book too many where a bunch of teens have to crack an old mystery), but all in all, it was good.

• What the Woods Took by Courtney Summers (YA, supernatural/thriller)

I just finished it, so I haven't had the time to write a review that I can quote from yet, but it's very atmospheric and creepy, with monsters that resemble a type of aliens I saw on Doctor Who once, and with a group of damaged kids you'll grow to love while they do the same with one another - and themselves. And I didn't expect that twist!

• Getting Even (Cheerleaders #2) by Christopher Pike (YA, contemporary)

Catty girls, volatile romances and cheerleading, what can go wrong? 😂 I only read this one because I'm a Christopher Pike completionist, but this isn't my scene, and this '80s stuff doesn't fly well nowadays LOL. I mean, a number of Pike's YA novels stood the test of time, or at least can still be read without shuddering...but there are 47 books in this series (all very short BTW, but longer than novellas), written by a bunch of different authors, and Pike (here on his second novel) got to work with the characters and material already established by Caroline B. Cooney in Book 1 - so it's not like he could do much better than this. Mini review to come...

Reviews (1):

• They Call Her Regret by Channelle Desamours (see above)

Mini review coming closer to pub date.

Normally at this point I would list the reviews I plan on posting and the TMST prompts I plan on answering in January, but I'll be offline for a while, at least for what concerns my blogging activity, in order to take a breath and focus on housekeeping (or better, steer my life back on track, at least a tiny bit). I originally planned a two-month hiatus, but then I settled on a one-month-ad-a-half one because I want to do a TMST recap post before I tackle the last question of February (a.k.a. the monster TBR list for the season 😅) - plus I don't want to miss out on my friends' posts for too long. So, I'll resurface on Tue. 17th for a TMST January-February round-up. In the meantime, here's the TMST prompt list for the months of January and February, in case you want to join in:

• January 6th: What are your blogging/reading goals for the new year?
• January 13th: What's a food you're obsessed with?
• January 20th: What are your favourite snow/winter-themed books?
• January 27th: What's your favourite decade and why? (You do not need to have lived through it!)
• February 3rd: If you could invent a holiday, what would you celebrate?
• February 10th: Share some romance book recommendations
• February 17th: Are there any books you've read that changed your perspective on a subject? (a question I submitted)
• February 24th: Which books are you looking forward to reading this spring? (Mar-May)

🎂 BIRTHDAY FIASCO. I went out to dinner for my birthday (on the 14th) for the first time in three years...and got cheated on the menu. I had done my research online, and finally selected (and booked) a restaurant that was 1) accessible to my husband (not many of those, because most are in the medieval part of town, where you can't park near enough and the streets are paved with cobblestones) and 2) supposed to serve squid ink risotto. Except when I got there I found out that they had changed the menu recently (stupid me, I should have asked on the phone, but it didn't occur to me that they could have switched up things since the summer). So I didn't have many options left, given that nowadays restaurants are fond to put provola cheese on fish or dark chocolate powder on octopus or pistachio pretty much everywhere 😶. I ended up selecting fish-fry, which was...ordinary. The funny thing was, my husband got cheated too - he had his eyes on the Bolognese lasagna, but go figure, it wasn't on the menu anymore either. So (since he hates fish and didn't like the other meat options) he landed on fried chicken cutlet with potato chips, after having eaten roasted chicken at home for two days in a row...the last time being at lunch on the same day. (On top of that, the place is accessible enough - unless you are on a wheelchair, that is 🙄 - but he still struggled to get there...).

😬WHEN YOU CAN'T STOMACH CHRISTMAS (LITERALLY). (NOT TMI, I SWEAR! 😁). I kid you not...the only concession me and the hubs made to the festive period was buying a few seasonal sweets and eating takeaway on the 25th, but it didn't go well. For lunch, we ate two different first courses (the takeaway ones) and a really small selection of sweets (I only ate two ricciarelli and 25 g/approximately 0.88 oz of dark chocolate, because I don't have a sweet tooth). Then we had a very light dinner (different courses again, not the same things we ate for lunch) and no sweets at all, because we felt still full even if we had had a frugal meal at lunch, all things considered. But we both ended up with different digestive issues before bedtime. See? We can't even THINK to celebrate (a tiny slice of) Christmas like normal people, for goodness' sake 😂 😭.

Doctor, save me from Christmas...😂

😐 GREY AREA. Apart from the Christmas incident, the whole month was as ordinary as my birthday dinner. Maybe one day I'll explain to you why I don't like Christmas and make a point of not celebrating it, but this is not that day (New Year's Eve is a different thing altogether - I would love to mark the occasion, but I don't have anyone to celebrate it with...). So I didn't do anything different than I would have in any other month, if you don't count feeling even more depressed because another year was coming to an end and I had nothing to show for it. If anything, I felt even sadder and angrier than usual, because at Christmas, everyone and everything seem intent on forcing a festive atmosphere on you even if you don't have anything to feel happy and grateful for (one of the reasons why I hate that time of the year). So, I just...survived the month, basically. Sorry to be such a downer, but...if I can't be honest on my own blog, where else?

PUBLISHING NEWS/TIPS

• From Publishers Weekly: Edelweiss price hike roils industry.
• From Reactor Magazine: New Kindle feature uses AI to answer questions about books - and authors can’t opt out.

THINK-PIECES, DISCUSSIONS, ORIGINAL FICTION

• Author B.C. Johnson presents his award-winning short story Dollhoused (free to read or to listen to).
• Cee Arr shares her poem Today Hurts.
• Lissa shares her story Wishes and Hurricanes. 

REVIEWS/RECOMMENDATIONS

• Ryan reviews Rough Pages by Lev AC Rosen.
• Erin reviews The Uninvited by Nancy Banks.
• Barb reviews I'll Make a Spectacle of You by Beatrice Winifred Iker.
• Sam recommends her favourite backlist books and under the radar books of the year.
• Jen lists the new mystery and thriller books for January, some of which she's already reviewed (links to her reviews are embedded in the post).
• Author B.C. Johnson shares the second half of his favourite-books-of-the-year list.

OTHER

• Lissa (again) shares the second batch of her art from Scribtober 2025.
• Hannah highlights her 2025 stationery shop faves/discoveries.

That's it for now. My next post will be up on February 17th, and it will be the TMST round-up I mentioned above. In the meantime, I'm going dormant for a while! but you can still find me on the usual SM, if sporadically (I usually check in once a day).

So, what were your highs/lows in the past month?