May 27, 2025

Tell Me Something Tuesday: Which Books Are You Looking Forward to Reading This Summer? (June-August)


Tell Me Something Tuesday is a weekly meme created by Heidi at Rainy Day Ramblings in order to discuss a wide range of topics from books to blogging (and some slightly more personal matters throw in for good measure). After Heidi stopped blogging (apparently for good), five of us took over as hosts while providing new questions. The current team is composed of Berls at Because Reading Is Better Than Real LifeJen at That's What I'm Talking AboutKaren at For What It's WorthLinda at Book Girl of Mur-y-Castell and Roberta at Offbeat YA. This week's question is...

WHICH BOOKS ARE YOU LOOKING FORWARD TO READING THIS SUMMER? (JUNE-AUGUST)

I don't know if I'll ever get around to buying all these books or when, since 1) early reviews and excerpts might cause me to change my mind in the future, and 2) given my current situation (see: unemployment status), book money is scarce...(also, please note: as I'm posting this, I only have two of these novels in ARC form). Anyhow, I wanted to give a bit of exposure to all the summer books that caught my eye, so here's my list (complete with pub dates)...

May 22, 2025

Taste the Books: Review Morsels #61 Peyton June, Kelly Murashige, Anna-Marie McLemore


Intro


Hello beauties!

Welcome again to my own brand of mini reviews! I never thought I'd do minis, until I recapped a few of my long reviews in some digest post in 2014, and then guest-posted some shorties for a blogging event in 2015. And Karen from For What It's Worth started praising my short recs/recaps 😊. Just to be clear,  I'm NOT taking a break from writing long reviews - no such luck LOL (though for anthologies, shorter books or books that I didn't enjoy/I don't have enough to say about, I decided to stick to minis). But while I'm making up my mind about a new book I've read, I might as well give you the short version ðŸ˜‰. Just be warned - this feature will be VERY random!

Note: all the mini blurbs (in italics) are of my own creation.

May 17, 2025

Taste the Books: Review Morsels #60 Dete Meserve, Samantha Mabry, Kate Alice Marshall


Intro


Hello beauties!

Welcome again to my own brand of mini reviews! I never thought I'd do minis, until I recapped a few of my long reviews in some digest post in 2014, and then guest-posted some shorties for a blogging event in 2015. And Karen from For What It's Worth started praising my short recs/recaps 😊. Just to be clear,  I'm NOT taking a break from writing long reviews - no such luck LOL (though for anthologies, shorter books or books that I didn't enjoy/I don't have enough to say about, I decided to stick to minis). But while I'm making up my mind about a new book I've read, I might as well give you the short version ðŸ˜‰. Just be warned - this feature will be VERY random!

Note: all the mini blurbs (in italics) are of my own creation.

May 12, 2025

Chuck Wendig: "The Staircase in the Woods" (ARC Review)

Title: The Staircase in the Woods [on Amazon | on Goodreads]
Series: None
Author: Chuck Wendig [Site | Goodreads]
Genres: Supernatural, Thriller/Mystery
Year: 2025
Age: 18+
Stars: 4/5
Pros: Brilliant, exciting twist on a popular urban legend and a beloved horror trope.
Cons: The characters aren't easy to like, for different reasons (though it's kind of the point). The political tirades feel random and out of place. The somehow-open ending may not sit well with some readers.
WARNING! Violence, hate speech, suicidal ideation, self-harm, sexual abuse (off-page), emotional abuse, parental abuse, parental neglect, drug and alcohol addiction, bullying, animal abuse. Lots of blood, gore and disturbing imagery, bug horror, vomiting.
Will appeal to: Those who enjoy mind-blowing (and hard-hitting) portal fantasies with a psychological angle. Those who like double-timeline narratives.

Blurb: Five high school friends are bonded by an oath to protect one another no matter what. Then, on a camping trip in the middle of the forest, they find something extraordinary: a mysterious staircase to nowhere. One friend walks up - and never comes back down. Then the staircase disappears. Twenty years later, the staircase has reappeared. Now the group returns to find the lost boy - and what lies beyond the staircase in the woods...(Amazon)

Review: First off...DISCLAIMER: I requested this title on NetGalley. Thanks to Random House Worlds/Del Rey for providing a temporary ecopy. This didn't influence my review in any way.

STAIR STRUCK

Apparently, staircases to nowhere in the middle of the woods aren't a rare sight, and in time have become an object of fascination spawning whole threads on sites like Reddit or Quora. Wendig drew on the urban legend according to which these staircases would be portals to other dimensions, wove it with a beloved horror trope (estranged childhood friends reunite to get closure and defeat an old evil), and produced a deliciously disturbing, nightmarishly captivating and completely addictive haunted-house maze, where friendships are tested and individuals must rise above their fears and flaws if they want to get out. (Mind you...don't expect actual ghosts - there are other ways for a house to be haunted...). Told in a now-and-then narrative across a twenty-something-years divide (the author references Covid, so I'd say, more like twenty-five than the twenty accounted for in the synopsis), the story introduces us to five friends who, as teens, swore an oath to always have each other's back, and after a drugged and drunken night in the woods when a member of the group vanished at the top of a supernatural staircase, slowly drifted apart, only to band together as adults in order to solve the mystery when a similar structure reappears.
Now, if you're into (hellish) supernatural mazes, literal twists and turns, videogame-style challenges and psychological horror, it doesn't get much better than this. Granted, this book is disturbing and gross at times (well, MOST times), but it's also creative and addictive and sort of exhilarating. The ending, while not coming with a pretty bow, gives you closure about the things that matter most. If it were only for these aspects, TSITW would be a 5-star read for me. [...]