Ian Chorão: "When We Talk to the Dead" (ARC Review)

Title: When We Talk to the Dead [on Amazon | on Goodreads]
Series: None
Author: Ian Chorão [Instagram | Goodreads]
Genres: Thriller/Mystery, Supernatural (more like Paranormal, but I'm using genre labels that match my Reading Rooms, where Paranormal is under the Supernatural umbrella)
Year: 2025
Age: 16+ (please have a look at the WARNING! section though)
Stars: 4/5
Pros: Haunting, tense, almost lyrical at times (horror notwithstanding), with diverse, fleshed out characters and intriguing dynamics.
Cons: A couple of major plot points (not of the supernatural/paranormal kind) require a strong dose of suspension of disbelief. The open ending may not sit well with certain readers.
WARNING! Violence/assault (not of the sexual kind), horror/blood and gore (I can't be too specific in order to avoid spoiler, but TW for drowning). Anxiety, intrusive thoughts, trauma, loss of a sibling, loss of a parent, mentally ill parent. Use of a derogatory term.
Will appeal to: Those who are looking for a blend of very real and psychological horror with a twist. Those who are fond of damaged, yet brave characters and complicated relationships.

Blurb: Though nineteen-year-old Sally remembers nothing about the accident that took place on Captain’s Island and destroyed her family when she was a little girl, she suffers from intense anxiety, pervasive bouts of dissociation, and gruesome nightmares. All Sally knows is that her mother hasn’t spoken since the accident that took the life of Sally’s twin sister. Following the tragedy, her family fled and never looked back. When her mother suddenly dies, Sally and three college friends travel to the island - for her friends it’s an adventure to a strange, abandoned place. For Sally, it’s a desperate bid to recover some of her memories and understand what really happened to her family. But when memories begin to return, Sally is overcome by grief and rage that threaten to plunge her into madness – a madness that is fed by a malevolent presence stalking them on the island. (Amazon excerpt)

Review: First off...DISCLAIMER: I requested this title on NetGalley. Thanks to Crooked Lane Books for providing a temporary ecopy. This didn't influence my review in any way.

GHOST IMAGE

When We Talk to the Dead turned out to be a different novel than I'd envisioned - mind you that's not a bad thing at all, but I want you to have a better idea of what you're getting into if you decide to give it a chance (which you totally should 😉), so I thought I'd give you a heads-up. With very little help from the cryptic cover (though, after reading the book, I realised it was a good fit), and nothing else to go by than the blurb and the title, I thought I was in for a ghost story...which I suppose can be deemed true in a sense, but not the one you would imagine. OK, now it's me who's being cryptic, but I don't want to spoil the book for you either...Suffice to say, there aren't any ghosts in this story...not in the classic sense. But if you think of memories and trauma and lost loved ones and the child you used to be as ghosts, I suppose there are plenty... [...]

Offbeat Offline: September 2025

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!

What happened last month to yours truly? My husband finally venturing out, a medical appointment and a whole lot of laziness. Seriously, one would think that this was one of my hiatus months (which, counterintuitively, were full of reading/reviewing activity)...I barely read (and reviewed) and lost too much time playing tiles games. I need to get back on track...I mean, with my life as a whole...but more of this below.

Tell Me Something Tuesday Round-Up (September 2025)

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 Life, Jen at That's What I'm Talking About, Karen at For What It's Worth, Linda at Book Girl of Mur-y-Castell and Roberta at Offbeat YA. This week's question is... This time I'm doing a round-up of the last month's worth of questions, because I hate how I've been M.I.A. when it comes to the meme!

(Please note: I already did a separate post for the first question of the month, so I'm starting with the second).

September 2025 Round-Up

+ Question of the Day:

IF YOU COULD LIVE IN A DIFFERENT COUNTRY FOR A YEAR, WHICH COUNTRY WOULD YOU CHOOSE?

• September 9th: What’s your favourite room in your house?

I'd say the living room, but only because...

Jihyun Yun: "And the River Drags Her Down" (ARC Review)

Title: And the River Drags Her Down [on Amazon | on Goodreads]
Series: None
Author: Jihyun Yun [Site | Goodreads]
Genres: Supernatural, Afterlife, Contemporary
Year: 2025
Age: 14+
Stars: 4/5
Pros: Honest, raw (yet at times poetical) representation of grief. Fleshed out characters who elicit sympathy even when they make bad choices. Atmospheric writing.
Cons: Gloomy and emotionally though. Delivers a predictable (though powerfully executed) resolution.
WARNING! Parent death, sibling death, animal death/sacrifice, body horror/decay, car crash, drowning/near drowning, strangulation, burns, underage drinking. Parentification, grief, racism.
Will appeal to: Those who enjoy revenant narratives, lyrical horror, Korean folklore and coming-of-age themes. Those who like damaged characters, complicated sibling relationships, and estranged friends' reconnections leading to tentative romance.

Blurb: When her older sister is found mysteriously drowned in the river that cuts through their small coastal town, Soojin Han disregards every rule and uses her ancestral magic to bring Mirae back from the dead. At first, the sisters are overjoyed, reveling in late-night escapades and the miracle of being together again, but Mirae grows tired of hiding from the world. Driven by an insatiable desire to unravel the truth that crushed her family so many years ago, she is out for revenge. When their town is engulfed by increasingly destructive rain and a series of harrowing, unusual deaths, Soojin is forced to reckon with the fact that perhaps the sister she brought back isn’t the one she knew. (Amazon excerpt)

Review: First off...DISCLAIMER: I requested this title on NetGalley. Thanks to Oneworld Publications/Rock the Boat for providing a temporary ecopy. This didn't influence my review in any way.

A STUDY IN SORROW

Yun takes a pretty common trope in YA literature - a teen with powers bringing back a dead loved one, namely a sister - and uses it to its best advantage in order to tell a much larger story, incorporating themes like parentification, selfishness, loneliness, guilt, by way of ancestral magic and Korean myths/culture. Mainly told from the perspective of 17 y.o. Soojin, but including other POVs, mostly resurrected sister Mirae's (one of the touches that make the book stand out in a sea of "came back wrong" narratives), And the River Drags Her Down pulls no punches in exploring the grief that engulfs a broken family (six years prior to Mirae's drowning, when the girls were 10 and 11, their mother died in a car crash) and its consequences - maybe a tad, you know, enhanced by magic, but not less relatable for this reason...if anything, even more. While the power that the women in her family possess was originally born out of very primal needs during a prolonged food shortage (and only meant to resurrect small animals), Soojin has twisted it into a tool to avoid facing loss, even before she employs it to resurrect her sister. Mired in grief and loneliness, she ultimately turns to her gift in order to get her only emotional anchor back, but there will be hell to pay - for her and Mirae both, not to mention, a bunch of other people - and ultimately, a though decision to make. [...]