Rating:
★★★★☆
by Samantha Shannon
Started: 25.07.2025. Finished: 25.07.2025.
Summary: (taken straight from GoodReads) In the perilous heart of Scion London, a dangerous and valuable poltergeist is on the loose – and it must be caught before chaos erupts on the streets of the capital. Here, the clairvoyant underworld plays by its own rules, and rival gangs will stop at nothing to win such a magnificent prize.
Sixteen-year-old Paige Mahoney is working for Jaxon Hall, the most notorious mime-lord in the city. He thinks she is hiding a powerful gift, but it refuses to surface. Maybe this is the opportunity she needs to secure her position in his gang, the Seven Seals…
Review: I will start this off by saying that I might be a bit biased with the reviews for this series, since I am absolutely obsessed with Samantha Shannon's Roots of Chaos , and can not wait for the third book (technically the 2nd book chronologically as far as we know of now, but third in release order). The Pale Dreamer is the prequal to The Bone Season , the first book of her first series (of the same name). It is really short - just four chapters + an epilogue contained within 83 pages, but in my opinion it is more than a solid start and a good introduction to the universe. We learn a little bit about Scion and the way the government operates. We also learn about the existence of supernatural members of society, which are hunted by Scon and called "voyants" - people who can somehow interact with the spirit world. We learn about London's underworld, ran by voyant crime lords. Honestly, it is giving me very Six of Crows vibes so far, including what I have read so far from The Bone Season , which I have started, but have not had much time to read since coming home from vacation due to artfight. Perhaps now that it is over I will have more time to indulge in my bookworm tendencies. And I do make this comparison as a compliment - I adore Six of Crows and sometimes wish I could erase my memory and reread it without knowing what happens next. I didn't like Shadow and Bone though, didn't read past the first book, but that is besides the point.
I can not wait to get more into this series and to learn more about the world and the characters.
Rating:
★★★☆☆
by Kristy Boyce
Started: 23.07.2025. Finished: 24.07.2025.
Summary: Quinn Norton moves into a new town with her parents and brother, not only to live closer to her grandma, but to get away from the traumatic friend/D&D group breakup that happened in their old town. On the first day of school (for her. in reality it is the middle of the school year) her grandma, who is very excited for Quinn and her brother's first day, drives them to school and wants to take a picture with them. Her brother ends up running away, so Quinn is left to bear the embarassment alone. Her grandma asks a group of nerdy looking kids (the girl in the group has d20 earrings, which immediately makes Quinn want to be her friend) to take their pic. A boy named Logan, who Quinn immediately gets a crush on, does. Quinn eventually ends up befriending this group, starting with the girl with the d20 earrings, whose name is Kashvi. She joins their D&D sessions which they stream every Saturday (might be misremembering the day). The one rule of the group - no dating (as they had had trouble before). Quinn is fine with this, as the reason her old friend group fell apart was because her best friend had a crush on the boy who was flirting with her, and she is lowkey traumatised about it and worried it will happen again. Quiinn is fine with this, but overtime it gets harder and harder for both her and Logan to stay away from each other.
Review: A very light and fun read, very low stakes. I've read Dungeons and Drama by the same author and enjoyed it a lot, although I am not usually a person that reads romance. (Though I did also enjoy Marissa Meyer's Instant Karma dulology haha). The thing about ya contemporary romance is that it always follows the same plot flow -> love interests meet, there is some sort of conflict keeping them apart, but they eventually fall in love and get together. It's all good fun, and I honestly especially needed it after reading Behind Her Eyes , the review for which you can find below. I liked it. That is all I have to say. It wasn't spectacular, the stakes were a little bit too low for my liking (a reason why I liked Dungeons & Drama more tbh, the conflict was a bit more aggressive, but not too much.) In my opinion it would have been better if they focused more on the trust issues and anxiety Quinn's old group left her with, than the "No dating" rule that the new group had, since in the end they literally just shrugged it off and Quinn had worried for nothing. I recommend it if you like D&D and would like a silly, fun and quick read. Oh also! There was also a nonbinary character in the group, which was really fun! Gotta love the enby who crochets representation lol
Oh, speaking of the nonbinary character... I was insanely disappointed to check out the goodreads reviews and find not one but TWO insanely bigoted ones which took off stars simply for this character. Both of these reviews misgendered the character, one of them going so far as to CROSS OUT their pronouns in her book... I am so absolutely disgusted, you have no idea. I have reported both of the reviews but am still waiting for a proper review of them from staff.
Rating:
☆☆☆☆☆
by Sarah Pinborough
Started: 21.07.2025. Finished: 22.07.2025.
Summary: Louise - a single mom and a secretary, accidentally hooks up with her new VERY MUCH MARRIED boss, David. She then bumps into Adele, who is new in town and needs a friend, but is also David's wife. Nevertheless, Adele and Lousie hit it off, but meanwhile David and Lousie keep hooking up. Louise uncovers more and more dark secrets about their marriage and gets herself stuck in a very convoluted web of nonsense which ends with the worst plot twist ever written.
Review: This book left me so enraaged I actually wrote a review of it on goodreads. I only usually do that to books I have enjoyed, so this was a feat! I don't even know where to start honestly. It was fine in the beginning, although I found the first two chapters insanely pretentious. I decided to give it a try nonetheless, especially since it was a gift from some colleagues who kept pushing me to read it, with the promise that it's good and that I would like it (in their opinion). Mind you, I had barely known these people for two weeks before they gifted me this book, since my birthday is near the start of the academic year. Maybe this should have set off some alarms, but we move on.
Let me set up the characters first, please.
Louise: A single mother, who is struggling to cope with being single and with the fact her ex-husband has a new family. One night she hooks up with this man at a bar. The next day she learns he is not only her boss, but is married. Lives in a shabby little flat.
David: A psychiatrist. Him and Adele just moved into town with the pretense of a "New beginning". They are lowkey rich and have a big house with a nice garden. Gets crazy moodswings around Adele, because she pushes his buttons like crazy and also has an alcohol problem. Has burns on his right arm from saving Adele from a fire when she was like 16?17? something like that. Comes from a poor-ish farmer family who worked for Adele's family.
Adele: Comes from a really rich family. Lost her parents in a house fire (the cause for which is unknown) when she was 17. She is sad she couldn't save her parents as she was astral projecting when the fire started. Got saved by David and sent to a wellness facility to get help for her mental wellbeing. Has had psychological problems since she was very young. The book makes it seem as if David is very controlling of her - she has no phone, and he also has control of all of her assets (which in reality was a mutual agreement after the house fire as she was young, a wreck, and since David is five years older than her she trusted that he would be more financially responsible than her, and besides he was going to university at that time and she wanted him to use the money to pay his tuition. As soon as she got out of the wellness retreat, David wanted to give her her money back, but she refused, with the reasoning that they would be getting married soon anyways so it didn't matter.). And yes, the age gap is five years - might sound problematic, but in reality their ages are not of much importance in my opinion. Age doesn't play any matter in the plot, with the only exception of showing the fact that Adele has had problems in the past as well.
Now that we have went through that, let's carry on.
Honestly, I found some interest in the book at first. I lowkey enjoyed it the same way one would enjoy trashy TV dramas. The same way I enjoyed Ginny and Georgia - it's so bad that it's kind of camp-y, but you still hate the characters. You just want to see how their mess unfolds. I did even gain a little bit of genuine interest - the way Lousie just walked into this messy, falling apart marriage, and is lowkey uncovering the whole thing sounded interesting enough. The book makes you inclined to believe one of two things - that either David is an abusive, manipulative asshole, or that Adele is abusive, manipulative and mentally unstable (because David, who is a psychiatrist, prescribes her medication to help her - this supports both of the possibilities).
And then.... for some fucking reason lucid dreaming and astral projection are introduced to the plot, absolutely ruining the potential this had to be an interesting (if it redeemed it's trashiness that is) and realistic thriller. Louise has awful sleep problems - night terrors, sleep walking, the works. Adele learns of her troubles and shares that she too had these issues when she was younger, but then found a way to fix it. She then gives Louise a notebook, which is written by a dear friend of hers named Rob (who she met at the wellness retreat. he was there for a heroin addiction). In it are instructions how to achieve lucid dreaming, which presents itself as a door in the original dream which is not under your control. And then eventually in the lucid dream Louise gets another door - a white sparkly mystical one. She asks Adele, but she denies knowing what it is. Spoiler alert - she is lying!
Now, the thing is, while Louise is getting closer to Adele, she is also continuing her hookup with David. Meanwhile, while this is all happening, since this is a dual pov book, we get Adele's pov as well. In her pov she constantly talks about how she KNOWS and SEES what has gone down in Lousie's apartment (which is where they hook up. If you're wondering how, considering Louise has a son - the son is on a trip to France with his dad for most of the book). As soon as she said it the first time I just KNEW the astral projecting bit was coming. Knew what the ending would be right away.
Oh also, meanwhile, while Louise in her POV is just... a wreck, kind of. She is worried about Adele's wellbeing, because she is convinced David is abusing her, and meanwhile she is still hooking up with him and feels awful about it, and she knows she needs to cut one of them out of her life, but she literally can't make herself do it. And then Adele's POV is just 3 things 1) Her saying everything is going according to her plan. 2) Her fatshaming Louise (Oh yeah, there is like... so much fatshaming in this book. It's insane. If I took a shot every time it was mentioned that Lousie was a bit heavier, or that she needed to lose some weight, or how she had potential but needed to lose a couple of stones, I would have a fucking health emergency.) and 3) Her waging psychological warfare on David, who is just... fucking scared of her (for reasons I will talk about in a second)
In the end we discover that Adele's friend Rob died of an overdose when over at her house and she panicked and threw his body down the well of her parents' estate. When she was doing that she was wearing David's watch - one he had given her after getting his arm severely burned while saving her. He couldn't wear it and also wanted her to have something to remind her of him and make her feel better while at the retreat. The watch fell down the well and this is why David is scared of her, but also can't leave her - she has leverage over him. He would get in trouble if the corspe was found. David comes clean about all of this to Louise. Also tells her the pills he gives Adele are like... antipsychotics, I think? I don't remember. We also learn that Adele has a severe jealousy problem and in the previous city they lived in killed a girl's cat for simply befriending David. She also killed the pet cat they had when they moved into the new house. Anyways, he decides to go to this detective in Adele's hometown who had been investigating the fire that killed her parents, and "admit" to killing Rob. That is because the detective has had his eyes on him for a while, because he thinks it is logical that the poor farm boy would burn down the rich family's mansion and then conveniently save the heiress. Adele tries to convince him otherwise, but he is set in his decision - he might get falsibly convicted, but he would finally be free from Adele and from the weight on his consciousness over knowing about the dead boy. Meanwhile while he is driving to Adele's hometown, Louise decides to call Adele and tell her what David is doing as a way to convince her to come clean about it all.
Adele, of course, has everything under her control. This is all according to plan. She tells Louise that it wouldn't matter since she will be gone anyways and then goes on to fake a suicide. Louise panics at this and goes to the house in an attempt to save her. However, when she arrives the house has started blazing, the door is locked, and she can see Adele asleep in a bed in one of the rooms through a window. BUT Louise knows Adele isn't asleep. By now she has learned of the fact that Adele can astral project - one time when she was over at her place she found her dead asleep in an armchair, and upon trying to wake her up she was cold and lowkey lifeless. Waking her up was hard - she barely did. And when she breathed in it was as if she was coming back to her body. The first time Loise properly astral projects her son (who has recently came back home) finds her asleep on the couch and tries to wake her up and panics. Louise, who had spiritually went outside, comes back and hears her son crying and comes back to reality. Afterwards she realises that Adele lied about not knowing anything about the astral projection door.
So she decides to attempt something crazy and possess Adele's body to get her out of the house. She does it and then realises... Adele had drugged herself and was unable to move.
Then we learn Adele hopped into Louise's body. From now on I will be calling her Ladelle for the sake of making this more understandable (hopefully). We learn this because we see a scene of Ladelle and David talking to a police officer about it. And we learn she knows what was on the suicide note Adelle left, because spoiler - it's her in the body next to David. She set the fire when Louise arrived at the house and then puts heroin in her gums or between her toes or something and when Louise hopped in she couldn't move because of the drugs. This is when the body swap happens.
And then we get the worst plot twist in all of writing. In the last chapter/two chapters we learn that it was ROB all along. Rob in Adele's place. Rob then going into Louise's body. When he was visiting Adele at the estate David was also there for a day and he fell madly in love. He was obsessed. And then one night Adele and Rob were hanging out - smoking weed and him doing heroin. One of them suggests they try to swap bodies for a minute but this ends up with Adele dying in Rob's body, because of the drugs he was taking prior - he had overdosed on purpose.
Honestly... I am not even going to go into the lowkey homophobic undertones I am getting from this. I will set that aside for my own sanity. But hoooly shit, this plot twist was so outlandish it's actually insane that it is in a real book that got published. Like... there are good "You never could have called it." plot twists and then there is this. To top it off in the last paragraph Rob yaps about how with Adele it was hard getting used to a female body, especially since David had known the real Adele's behaviours since they had been close for ages. With Louise it would be easy since it's the second time he is pretending to be a woman, and also David barely knew her. Her one friend was easy to cut off. However, her son would be trouble, so it is lowkey implied Rob intend to get rid of the kid (I assume by killing him). Just... what the fuck?
