Annie Knows Everything

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by Rachel Wood
First sentence: “Statistically, the most common days of the week to be fired are Monday or Friday.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy provided by the publisher.
Release date: April 7, 2026
Content: There is swearing, including a few f-bombs and some on-page sex. It will be in the Romance section of the bookstore.

Annie’s life is unraveling: her sister, Shannon, is engaged a second time to a man that Annie hates. And Annie was just laid off from her job. She can’t deal with the idea of being unemployed, so she coerces her best friend in HR to get her a job in Data Strategy – a department that Annie isn’t remotely qualified to be in. But, her new boss, Connor, is cute. So it’s all good. She manages not to implode her sister’s engagement party, and she manages to get on the good side of Connor and the boys in DatStrat. So life is back to being good. Until she falls in love with her boss (uh-oh), gets into (another) huge fight with her sister, and spills some confidential company information, which gets her fired. Will she figure her life out?

This was… cute. When I started, I was hopeful it would be more. Fun, whimsical, charming, sweep-me-as-the-reader-off-my-feet. But in the end, it was just cute. Which isn’t bad. I liked it enough to finish it.

Which isn’t a bad thing. It’s just not what I hoped.

Audiobook: Fever Beach

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by Carl Hiaasen
Read by Will Damron
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Or listen at Libro.fm
Content: There is a LOT of swearing, including many, many f-bombs. There is also talk of sex toys. It’s in the Mystery section of the bookstore.

Dale Figgo got kicked out of the Proud Boys, and so he started his own right-wing, white supremacist group. Vida Morales, off of a bad divorce, is renting a room from Dale (unfortunately) and working for the (corrupt) Mink Foundation. She bumps into environmental activist Twilly Spree and somehow they get involved in trying to stop Figgo and his (very stupid) men from doing the bidding of a (corrupt and stupid) congressman to rig an election.

I think that about sums up the plot. This wasn’t a deep book, but it was an entertaining one. We listened to it on a long drive, and it had both of us cracking up at points. Hiaasen has NO respect for the Proud Boy-type or the corrupt congressman (as he should), dragging them as often as he possibly could. Vida and Twilly were both entertaining characters, with small scenes that just had us laughing. It’s all very Florida Man, and a very silly story.

So, not deep or probably worth reading, but I had a good time with it.

Canon

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by Paige Lewis
First sentence: “On the day God arrived with His Big Mission, He found Yara preparing to leap, fully clothed, into the Spring River.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy provided by the publisher.
Release date: May 19, 2026
Content: There is reference to sexual assault, some swearing, including f-bombs, and lots of violence. It will be in the Fiction section of the bookstore.

This is a hard one to describe. It’s an Epic Story, the story of a Final Battle and a Quest to stop it, of Discovery and of God and Humanity. There is a plot: there’s a Bad Guy and Yara is tasked by God to kill him. They go on a journey to get there – and the journey is the point. There is also a Prophet, Adrena, who wants to be a part of the Battle and goes on her own Journey to reach the end.

It’s a Lot of a book. I really liked it at first – there’s a lot of humor (the whale named HOWBIG is quite amusing) and just a lot of the over-the-top-ness of it all. But, I think this is meant to be read quickly (and it goes fast, despite its length), because I put it down for a couple of days, and it lost momentum. I thought it kind of lost direction near the end (but it may be that I missed the satire of it all); it wasn’t as satisfying as I was hoping it would be.

That said, it was unlike anything I’ve ever read before, and I think Lewis is a brilliant writer. It’s worth reading for the experience of reading it.

Heated Rivalry

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by Rachel Reid
First sentence: “Shane Holland was as close to losing it as he ever allowed himself to get.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: Oh. So much sex. So. Much. Every chapter, on page, lots and lots of sex. All the spice. It’s in the Romance section of the bookstore.

Shane Hollander is one of the best hockey players in the NHL. The only player who even comes close is Ilya Rozanov, who has been Shane’s nemesis since their rookie year. He has also, for better or worse, been Shane’s obsession. And his secret lover. What happens when their secret threatens to get out? Will it ruin their careers? Can they move their relationship into something more? (Do we care?)

Okay, yes, I picked this up because of the TV show and everyone is talking about it and I got curious. I am not proud of this decision. It is, objectively, by many measures (one being the couple of times they repeated entire paragraphs on the same page…) not a good book. This writing will not win awards. The chapters (for more than half of the book!) went hockey, sex, shame. We’re playing hockey against each other; we’re so angry and aroused. We have sex. But it’s bad to have sex with another man, we feel ashamed. For more than 100 pages. And yet, I kept reading.

Why? No idea. Except that I was still curious, and it wasn’t bad enough (or maybe it was the right kind of bad?) for me to put down. And the character development did happen somewhat in the second half of the book. Shane got a clue about his sexuality. Ilya stopped being Tough Russian Guy all the time. It’s never going to make my best-of list, and I do feel less intelligent for having read it, but I have to admit: my curiosity about the gay hockey thing is satiated.

Thistlemarsh

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by Moorea Corrigan
First sentence: “The war did not bring the Faeries back to England.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Release date: April 21, 2026
Review copy provided by the publisher.
Content: There is talk of war, some mild swearing, exactly one (well-placed) f-bomb. It will be in the Science Fiction/Fantasy section of the bookstore.

It’s after World War I, and Mouse is returning home to England because her uncle – Lord Dewhurst – has died and reluctantly left his Faerie-blessed house, Thistlemarsh Manor, to her. Only because his son was killed in the war, and her brother, the next-logical heir, is incapacitated with PTSD, and doesn’t recognize his surroundings. Mouse is reluctant to take on the taste of being Lady of the manor, especially after she hears her uncle’s conditions: restore the house and grounds to their former glory in one month (or get married), or the house goes to a distant (and despicable) cousin. It is an impossible task, except that Mouse is offered help by the faerie Thornwood. It’s tricky to bargain with a faerie, but Mouse is desperate. The question is: what will she uncover?

On the one hand: I haven’t read a sweeping faerie story like this in a long time. It reminded me of books I’d read 15-20 years ago (was that just the early 2000s?), where the fae were cruel, but not unreasonable. Where deals could be made between the fae and humans, and kindness would win out in the end. It has a luxury to it – it only takes place over a month, and yet the pace is slow enough to allow the reader to luxuriate in the setting. I liked Mouse as a character (even though I have quibbles with the ending; but I suppose a human woman couldn’t take on the fae all alone, no matter how smart she is). I just didn’t love the writing. It was basic. Pedantic. Maybe it’s because I just finished A River Has Roots (also a faerie story), where the writing was so lovely, that I felt its lack. That said, while I didn’t utterly love it, I liked it enough to finish, and if you’re looking for a decent faerie story, this is a good one to read.

My Best of 2025

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By the numbers:

Middle Grade: 17
Young Adult: 16
Graphic Novels: 11
Adult Fiction: 68
Non-Fiction: 18
Total: 130

Let’s have fun with Storygraph! Like always, I read more fiction than nonfiction:

The top five I turned in for work didn’t quite reflect that…

The authors I read most:

I took to calling it my Maggie Stiefvater Year! (I’m currently reading Shiver…). I also reread a LOT, more than I usually do!

I branched out and read two books digitally!

The 12 books I read for the 2025 #ReadICT Challenge

My top genres:

I read a lot some months, not so much others:

All in all, it was a good year:

And my personal top 10 (in no particular order)

I need to read more BIPOC books next year, and I need to up my YA/MG books again, since I’m doing the children’s buying again for the store. But, that said, I’m happy with my list and with the reading year I’ve had.

Monthly Round-Up: December 2025

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And we come to the end of another month, another year. It’s a good thing I don’t make goals; I don’t want to feel like I didn’t do them. I did have a favorite this month, coming in as the last book I read this year:

The River Has Roots

Such an excellent book.

As for the rest:

Non-Fiction:

One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (audiobook)
Bread of Angels (audiobook)

Adult Fiction:

We Burned So Bright
Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter
This Book Made Me Think of You
Christmas Fling (audiobook)
American Fantasy
The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, Volume 6 (unreviewed)
On a Night Like This (audiobook)

Middle Grade:

Queso, Just in Time

YA:

All the Crooked Saints (audiobook)

Stay tuned tomorrow for my year in review!

Audiobook: The River Has Roots

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by Amal El-Mohtar
Read by Gem Carmella
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Or listen at Libro.fm
Content: There is a murder, and some suggested abuse. It’s in the Science Fiction/Fantasy section of the bookstore.

Esther and Isabella are sisters, and as Hawthornes, their job is to sing to the willows, to enhance their magic. They are happy, except Esther is more interested in Faeire, and has picked up a lover – Ren – from there. That is all fine and good, except a local man has his sights on Esther, and when she chooses Ren over him, there is consequences.

One of my co-workers mentioned in passing, when this one came out, that it was a delightful experience on audio, and I remember picking it up after she mentioned that. I needed something short to read on our way home from Wisconsin, and downloaded this just to see.

Oh, it was delightful. Not just the story – I love a feminist fairy tale with queer undertones! – but the performance of it was stellar. The use of sound and music enhances the story and makes the story that much better. And the short story that follows was just as engaging. I’m definitely a fan of El-Mohtar’s work now, and I know I need to pick up This is How You Lose the Time War now.

Highly recommended.

Audiobook: Bread of Angels

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By Patti Smith
Read by the author:
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Or listen at Libro.fm
Content: There is talk of drugs and death. It’s in both the Biography and Music sections of the bookstore.

I have no connection to Patti Smith at all – never listened to her music, and only knew who she was because my previous boss adored her. But when we were looking at road trip audiobooks, Russell decided that this sounded interesting, so I was game.

It’s basically her life story – from a childhood in poverty to being in the right places and meeting the right people in New York in the 1970s, to a marriage and early widowhood in the 1980s, through until today. There were some interesting parts, and she’s not a bad writer, though she is a poet and tends to take Meaning in things where others might not.

She’s not a great audiobook narrator, though. She pauses at odd times, and she has weird inflections. I suppose that could give it character, but in the end, it was just mildly annoying.

I suppose if I had a connection to her somehow, I might have liked this one more, but as it is, it was just kind of meh.

Audiobook: On a Night Like This

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by Lindsey Kelk
Read by Carrie Hope Fletcher
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Or listen at Libro.fm
Content: There isn’t any on-page sex, and there’s only kissing. There is talk of an affair, and swearing, including multiple f-bombs. It’s in the Romance section of the bookstore.

Fran has been down on her luck the past few years, after moving back with her fiance to his hometown. However, on a whim, she decides to call her old temp agent, who just happens to have a job for her as an assistant to a celebrity. For a short five days. Except those five days changes the direction of Fran’s life.

It’s a sweet little Cinderella story – circumstances line up that Fran can actually attend the Crystal Ball – an exclusive party for the wealthiest of the wealthy – where she meets Evan, and is swept away. Is she going to have the guts to change the trajectory of her life, or will she go back to the same-old-same-old.

I thoroughly enjoyed this one. It was silly, it was sweet, and Fran’s journey to an empowered woman was one to cheer. And Fletcher did a fabulous job with all the accents!

Recommneded, especially on audio.