Melissa Albert: "The Bad Ones"

Title: The Bad Ones [on Amazon | on Goodreads]
Series: None
Author: Melissa Albert [Instagram | Goodreads]
Genres: Supernatural, Thriller/Mystery, Contemporary
Year: 2024
Age: 14+
Stars: 4.5/5
Pros: Engrossing, twisty mystery. Unexpected resolution. Fleshed-out leads whose relationship is equally well-developed.
Cons: A certain player's involvement becomes clear a bit too early. The supporting characters are little more than tools to advance the plot. The romance feels unnecessary.  
WARNING! Sexual assault/abuse (off-page), self-injury, car accident, parental death (off-page), murder by suffocation, near-drowning. Homophobia, bigotry, bullying.
Will appeal to: Those who like urban legends/supernatural mysteries/witchcraft gone wrong. Those who enjoy fierce, yet messy/toxic friendships.

Blurb: In the course of a single winter’s night, four people vanish without a trace across a small town. Nora’s estranged best friend, Becca, is one of the lost. As Nora tries to untangle the truth of Becca’s disappearance, she discovers a darkness in her town’s past, as well as a string of coded messages Becca left for her to unravel. These clues lead Nora to a piece of local lore: a legendary goddess of forgotten origins who played a role in Nora and Becca’s own childhood games... (Amazon)

Review: I'm late to the Melissa Albert party, but after loving her adult debut, I've made it my mission to read everything she writes. I have some small quibbles about The Bad Ones, but regardless, I found it to be trippy, entertaining and emotional, and I loved its curveball ending.
Just a heads-up before I start...the cover doesn't match the content. There's a weeping angel statue at some point in the story, but don't expect it to mean anything...and if the cover is supposed to represent the goddess (which of course it is), BIG FAIL.

DAZED AND AMAZED

The Bad Ones blends all-consuming (you might very well say toxic) friendship with a supernatural mystery that leaves you enough breadcrumbs to figure out its direction, yet throws you for a loop multiple times before you decipher it, and hits you with a last couple of twists you couldn't have seen coming. Told in three different voices and timelines (Nora's 1st person POV in the present, Becca's 3rd person POV in the past, another character's 3rd person POV recounting even older events), it's an addictive puzzle with minimal gore or violence, but a dark core - though it ultimately ends up in a much healthier place than one might expect. The beginning is atmospheric, intriguing, creepy - unexpected, too. Albert doesn't waste time setting up the mystery, but she doesn't start, as one would anticipate, by introducing her main characters - yet the hook is impossible to resist: three people, apparently unrelated, are accosted by a mysterious female being and vanish into thin air. From there, the wheels in the reader's head keep turning and the theories about what happened to those three (and to Becca herself, later reported missing as well) multiply. I buddy-read this one with my friend Carrie, and we traded a few wild hypotheses along the way, but most of them turned out to be wrong...though at least one of the answers had stared us in the face the whole time 😅. And, considering we're both seasoned supernatural-thriller readers, that's saying something. The final twist had me in awe, especially since it took one of my core assumptions about the plot and flipped it on its head, giving the story a far more original - and tragic - angle (Carrie was a bit less enthused by that turn of events, but I'll let her review speak for itself). [...]

Melissa Albert: "The Children" (ARC Review)

Title: The Children [on Amazon | on Goodreads]
Series: None
Author: Melissa Albert [Instagram | Goodreads]
Genres: SPOILER - revealing the genre(s) would ruin your reading experience...If you want to go into the book without knowing anything vital about it, I recommend not reading the Labels at the end of my review either. No need to worry though - the review itself will be spoiler-free...
Year: 2026
Age: 18+ (but it can be read by mature teens)
Stars: 5/5
Pros: Visceral, immersive, haunting, with a denouement you won't see coming. Makes you care deeply for the characters (especially the protagonist's younger self).
Cons: The writing gets too purple at times.
WARNING! Death, murder, suicide, self-mutilation, fire, bugs. Child neglect/exploitation, pedophilia, infidelity, alcohol abuse.
Will appeal to: Those who like a familial saga with a twist. Those who muse about the relationship between life, art and fame.

Blurb: Guinevere's late mother, Edith Sharpe, needs little introduction. Bestselling author of the unendingly successful Ninth City series, her books brought so much joy and inspired the imagination of countless children the world over. Guin's childhood with her mother, brother Ennis and her actor father was a blissful, bohemian affair, filled with continuous laughter and surrounded by artistic types in their Vermont barnhouse. At least, this is the story Guin presents as she prepares for the press tour for her upcoming memoir about life in the Sharpe family. Now estranged from her brother and her parents long dead after a devastating fire, strange events threaten the veneer of serenity and familial harmony Guin is keen to project. Ennis, now a notorious artist with a troubled past, announces a new installation – his first since a disastrous last show one year prior – simply entitled Mother. And Guin can't help but worry that the truth behind their idyllic childhood is about to blow her world apart. (Goodreads)

Review: First off...DISCLAIMER: I requested this title on NetGalley. Thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (UK & ANZ) for providing a temporary ecopy. This didn't influence my review in any way.

GRIM(M) AND GORGEOUS

I have a confession to make: The Children was my first Albert book. I took a chance on it based by the synopsis alone, not really knowing what to expect (except for dark-fairy-tale vibes, according to the reviews of her backlist) - but upon parting with the last page, I immediately proceeded to add all her previous novels to my TBR list, top priority. Yes, it's THAT good. But you want to know what, precisely, is so good about it, and it's not easy to explain without entering spoiler territory. Anyhow, I'll try...

So: I won't tell you if The Children is a contemporary book with an unreliable narrator, or an exquisite (if dark) exercise in magical realism, or a straight-up supernatural tale, or all these things combined. But I will tell you this: The Children is an ode to the power of art - the power to save, or the power to damn, depending on certain circumstances. It's a dark fairy tale (yeah, indeed - in the vein of Albert's past books) unleashed in the real world. It's the story of a dysfunctional family and a predatory house. It's horrifying and spellbinding, bitter and beautiful, very meta yet unmistakably human (with all that entails). If you're like me, these things alone will probably seal your deal with this novel. But in case you need more practical details, feel free to read on... [...]

Taste the Books: Review Morsels #68 Frances White, Sean David Robinson, Rebekah Faubion

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 STILL writing long reviews too - but for anthologies, shorter books or books that I didn't enjoy/don't have enough to say about, I decided to stick to minis, and I took to writing them also for novels that I can do justice to in a less wordy fashion, in order to ease my reviewing burden. In addition to that, I sometimes write minis for books I don't want/don't have the time to review in full at the moment, but plan on rereading and writing "proper" reviews for later. Lastly, just be warned - this feature is VERY random!

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

Offbeat Offline: April 2026 (Back but Probably Hiatus-ing Again Soon)

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? I made a tiny dent in the chaos at home, went for my routine LLC-related bloodwork (the results are practically the same as the last time - too bad they were worse than the time before that to begin with) and...read. Seriously, a totally uneventful month, which I'll take any day now, because when something happens is always bad (see March recap). In other news, I'm already contemplating another hiatus in June, but this time I'm going to actually schedule my daily activities in advance or I'll accomplish nothing (or next to nothing) as usual (...I mean, June is usually too hot for me already, but a girl can hope). OK, anyhow, let's see what shenanigans I was up to last month...