Author: Angie Miale

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 4/5

After loving Gary Shteyngart’s novel Vera, or Faith, I was really curious to see what he would do with nonfiction, and The Sensualist was such a fun introduction to another side of his writing.

This is Shteyngart’s first collection of personal essays, but it almost reads like a memoir assembled in pieces. The essays span travel, family, politics, food, watches, clothes, his childhood, his experiences as a Russian Jewish immigrant, and all sorts of other observations about modern life. It feels a little like getting the greatest hits from an extremely funny blog he’s been secretly writing for the last decade.

And Shteyngart is really funny. More than anything, I love what he can do with the English language. His sentences regularly caught me completely off guard.

At one point, after a parrot tells him not to conduct business on Saturday, he writes:

“I am stunned by [the parrot’s] ability to identify my ethnicity. Do I really look that Jewish?”

Then there is possibly the greatest opening to a discussion of a botched circumcision:

“My penis was shaped by the Cold War and God’s covenant with Abraham.”

And in an essay titled “How to Love Your Parents Even If You Hate Their Politics,” he writes:

“Many people I know have parents who are suffering from early Fox News dementia, ranting about the perfidy of Anthony Fauci and the possibility of catching critical race theory from an open jar of mayonnaise.”

That pretty much tells you whether Shteyngart’s particular brand of humor is going to work for you. It definitely works for me.

There are moments when he can come across as a little snobby—this is, after all, a man capable of devoting serious attention to very expensive watches, the perfect suit, and the perfect martini. But then an essay will circle back to his childhood, his parents, immigration, Jewish identity, or what it meant to arrive in the United States from the Soviet Union as a young child. Those experiences give the more indulgent parts of the collection an interesting counterweight. His fascination with beautiful and expensive things feels different when placed alongside memories of having once had very little.

I also think that tension is part of what makes the title work. These essays are ultimately about paying attention to pleasure: food, travel, clothes, family, beautiful objects, ridiculous experiences, and those small moments in life that are worth savoring. Shteyngart is ridiculous. Sometimes touching. Frequently he manages to be both in the same paragraph.

If you enjoy smart, irreverent personal essays and writers who can turn an ordinary observation into something completely unexpected, I definitely recommend this one. I already knew I enjoyed Shteyngart as a novelist after Vera, or Faith. Now I know I enjoy simply spending time inside his brain, too.

The Sensualist: Adventures in Pure Pleasure will be published November 17, 2026.

Thank you to Random House for providing me with an electronic advanced reading copy.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫 4.5/5 stars

I really enjoyed this one! You Made Me Do This is definitely a slow-burn thriller, but for me, the payoff was absolutely worth the wait.

Before the story even begins, Jesse Q. Sutanto dedicates the book to women everywhere—and after finishing it, I think the book lives up to that dedication. This is a very female-focused thriller, and that was one of the things I appreciated most about it.

I’m already a huge fan of Sutanto’s writing. Her cozy mysteries are top-tier for me, and I’ve also really enjoyed several of her romances. I love that she can move between genres that are so wildly different and make each feel distinctly her own. Her thrillers have been a little more hit-or-miss for me, though, particularly when it comes to the way women are portrayed. You Made Me Do This is easily my favorite of her thrillers so far.

Sienna Langley is a marriage therapist whose self-help book, The Three Marriages, was originally only moderately successful. The book argues that our first marriage is to ourselves—the relationship we have with ourselves before we can have a successful relationship with someone else. Then an influencer discovers the book, declares that it changed her life, and suddenly Sienna is wildly successful. She and her husband, Colby, become a famous online couple with plenty of money, followers…and scrutiny.

When Sienna and Colby travel to Bali for a luxurious vacation, things begin to feel increasingly unsettling. Sienna has been receiving disturbing messages from a stalker, and somehow a letter from this person has followed her all the way to their resort. Add in their young butler, Cassidy, who seems unusually interested in the couple, and there’s a growing sense that something is very wrong in paradise.

This is a true slow burn. Most of the action happens toward the end, and I can absolutely see some readers feeling that the beginning is too slow and the ending too action-packed. Personally, the pacing worked really well for me. I enjoyed spending time with these characters and letting that sense of unease build before everything finally exploded.

And when it does? The ending is SO satisfying.

The surprises landed exactly when they needed to. There were moments when I started putting things together just before the reveal, which is actually my favorite kind of thriller experience—I want the author to give me enough clues that I could figure something out without making the answer obvious from the beginning.

This is less of a jump-scare thriller and more of a thoughtful, twisty popcorn thriller with a strong focus on women, marriage, identity, and the difference between the life we present to the world and what is actually happening behind closed doors.

Basically: give me a fireplace, a bowl of popcorn, and this book on a cold winter weekend.

One of my first favorite thrillers of 2027—and definitely my favorite Jesse Q. Sutanto thriller yet.

⭐️ 4.5/5 stars

You Made Me Do This publishes February 9, 2027 from Thomas & Mercer.

Thank you to Thomas & Mercer and NetGalley for providing me with an advanced listening copy!

I’ve really enjoyed several of Lucinda Berry’s books in the past, but unfortunately, The Golden Child is not one of her best for me.

Ava and Bentley are siblings born just eleven months apart, but they couldn’t be more different. Ava is the family’s “golden child”—successful, driven, and headed to Amherst—while Bentley has always been considered the screwup. Then one night, Ava is driving after a party and hits the star quarterback as he’s walking along the road. She calls Bentley for help, and he convinces her to let him take the blame. After all, everyone already expects the worst from him. What follows is a web of lies that involves their entire family as they try to figure out what really happened that night.

The story is told from all four family members’ points of view, which sounded like a great setup for a psychological thriller about family dynamics, favoritism, and the lengths parents will go to protect their children. Unfortunately, I found it incredibly repetitive. We revisit the same events and conversations from different perspectives without learning enough new information to make those multiple POVs feel worthwhile.

I also struggled with how flat the characters felt, particularly the parents. For a story built around such a huge moral dilemma, I wanted to feel much more emotionally invested in this family and the choices they were making. Instead, I eventually found myself skimming because I mostly just wanted to know how everything was going to end.

And then I got to the final few pages.

Friends, I practically rolled my eyes into the back of my head. 😂 I obviously won’t spoil anything, but that ending did NOT work for me.

That said, this is a quick, accessible psychological mystery without a lot of gore or a high body count. If you’re looking for something you can fly through without having to think too hard about it, this might make a perfectly fine library read. Berry has written books I’ve enjoyed much more, though, and I’d recommend starting with one of those instead.

⭐️⭐️ 2/5 stars

The Golden Child will be published January 12, 2027.

Thank you to Poisoned Pen Press and NetGalley for providing me with an advanced reading copy. All opinions are my own.

Well, friends, this one just wasn’t for me.

I usually enjoy enemies-to-lovers, but it can be a tricky trope to pull off, and I never really bought into the relationship between Maggie and Cooper. Maggie spends so much of the book genuinely angry with Cooper—not just irritated or bantering with him—that it was difficult for me to make the leap from enemies to romance. Cooper, meanwhile, felt like a bit of a non-entity. I finished the book without feeling like I knew him particularly well, and unfortunately, I didn’t feel much chemistry between them either.

The central conflict revolves around Cooper wanting to take over the radio station Maggie runs while Maggie is determined to keep it. But I wanted a stronger sense of why the station mattered so deeply to her. Without that emotional foundation, the conflict didn’t have quite the weight I think it needed.

I really like the concept of this series paying homage to beloved ’90s rom-coms, and Longtime Listener is clearly giving us a You’ve Got Mail setup: Maggie and Cooper are messaging each other without realizing who is on the other side. That should have been completely up my alley! But I was confused about how and why their anonymous correspondence began in the first place, and the storyline never felt fully developed. It seemed like the book borrowed the premise without quite committing to everything that makes it so much fun.

I also wish there had been more humor! With a radio-station setting, workplace enemies, and a ’90s rom-com inspiration, there seemed to be so much potential for genuinely funny moments.

I was happy to check in with the other couples from the series, and I can absolutely see this working better for readers who especially love workplace romances and a pricklier enemies-to-lovers dynamic. For me, though, this was a disappointing installment.

⭐️⭐️½ — 2.5/5

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 4/5 stars

The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw is dramatic, messy, juicy, and incredibly entertaining. If you took an old-school primetime soap opera like Dynasty or Knots Landing and dropped it into the world of a Black Southern megachurch, you would get something close to this book—and I mean that as a compliment.

Scharisse Freeman is the wife of a powerful megachurch pastor and therefore a “First Lady,” but she has never quite felt accepted by the other pastors’ wives. She grew up on the east side of town, wasn’t raised in the church, lost her single mother when she was young, and has spent much of her adult life trying to overcome other people’s assumptions about who she is and where she came from.

Now she has been invited to participate in a pageant for First Ladies, and what follows is an absolutely WILD ride involving secrets, scandals, money, power, sex, faith, and a whole lot of protecting people who probably shouldn’t be protected.

Scharisse was easily my favorite part of this book. She is complicated and sometimes messy, but I loved following her. I also really appreciated how Philyaw incorporates scripture and faith into a story that is deeply critical of the institutions built around them. There is an important distinction here between criticizing faith and questioning what happens when people become more committed to protecting a church, its reputation, and its powerful leaders than they are to holding those leaders accountable.

The book also digs into the megachurch industrial complex—the enormous amounts of money involved, the celebrity status afforded to pastors and their families, and the systems that can develop around keeping powerful people powerful. There are strong #ChurchToo themes throughout, particularly around the ways religious communities can silence people in the name of protecting the church.

And then there is the MESS. 😂 There are so many secrets and revelations that I don’t want to say much more about the plot because discovering them is half the fun.

One warning for readers whose tastes are similar to mine: this is NOT a romance, but there are some surprisingly spicy scenes. They came out of left field for me and definitely had me blushing and clutching my pearls. 😂 I know plenty of my friends are going to consider those the good parts, and absolutely no shade to them! They just aren’t my particular cup of tea.

I listened to the audiobook narrated by Janina Edwards. The story itself was very easy to follow on audio, even with all of its twists and drama. I thought the narration was solid, although the performance felt a little flatter to me than some of my favorite audiobooks when it came to differentiating voices. I enjoyed listening, but I don’t think audio is essential for this one—I think it would work equally well in print.

What is especially impressive is that this is Deesha Philyaw’s debut NOVEL. She is already an acclaimed short-story writer, but this is her first full-length novel, and what an entrance. It’s bold, funny, scandalous, thoughtful, and compulsively readable.

If you like big Southern family dramas, stories about complicated women, examinations of church culture, or the gloriously messy energy of an old-school soap opera, put this one on your list.

⭐️ 4/5 stars

🎧 Thank you to Mariner Books and NetGalley for the advanced listening copy.

📚 Publication date: September 29, 2026
🎧 Narrated by Janina Edwards

⭐️⭐️⭐️ 3/5 stars

I really enjoy Jenny Proctor’s writing, and honestly, I like her as a person even more, so I’m always happy to pick up one of her books. Here We Go Again wasn’t one of my favorites from her, but there was still quite a bit here that I enjoyed.

This is another romance set around the Atlanta hockey team we met in the previous book. That story focused on Carter Williamson, while this one follows his twin brother, Theo, and his high school girlfriend, Becca.

Becca is now a travel nurse who takes a contract in Atlanta with her best friend, Mia, putting her back in Theo’s orbit years after their relationship ended. Theo, meanwhile, is a professional hockey player working his way back from a hand injury. Naturally, old feelings start resurfacing.

One of my favorite parts of this book was actually Becca and Mia’s friendship. I love a female main character who is truly a girls’ girl, and Bekah is such a supportive, loving friend. I also adored the fact that Becca and Theo’s moms play pickleball together. 😂 There are lots of sweet little details like that throughout the story.

Second-chance romance can be tricky for me because the original breakup has to be something I can believe the couple can—and should—come back from. There were a few aspects of Theo and Becca’s breakup and what happened afterward that gave me pause, and I never completely got past them.

I also had some complicated feelings about the way sex and intimacy were discussed. I genuinely appreciate low-spice and closed-door romance, and I certainly don’t need explicit scenes for a relationship to feel romantic. But occasionally, books at this end of the romance spectrum can swing so far in the opposite direction that sex begins to carry an enormous amount of moral or emotional weight.

For me, some of the messaging here edged a little too close to purity-culture ideas that can equate a person’s sexuality with their worth or make physical intimacy feel like the defining measure of a relationship. That’s something I’m personally sensitive to, and it made parts of Theo and Becca’s relationship harder for me to connect with.

That said, their relationship is portrayed as very respectful, and I think plenty of readers will feel completely differently about the elements that bothered me. If you love second-chance romance, hockey romance, and sweet/closed-door love stories, this could absolutely be a winner for you.

There was a lot to like here, and while it wasn’t one of my favorite Jenny Proctor books, I’m still glad I read it—and I’ll definitely continue reading her work.

Bad Words is a smart, contemporary enemies-to-lovers story set inside the publishing industry—and as someone who spends a whole lot of time thinking about books and writing reviews, I found the premise especially interesting.

Selina Chan is a respected literary critic who wrote a scathing review of author Parker Navarro’s debut novel. Four years later, Parker is back with his sophomore effort…and Selina pans him again. When their animosity spills into public view, their feud goes viral. Suddenly, readers are following every exchange between Parker and Selina, and all that attention turns out to be surprisingly good publicity for both of them.

And, of course, somewhere between publicly despising one another and privately getting to know one another, things become a little more complicated.

I really enjoyed what Robinson had to say about criticism, creativity, and the publishing industry. How much power should a critic have over the success or failure of someone’s work? How do you separate “this book is bad” from “this book simply isn’t for me”? And how much of our own taste and experience inevitably finds its way into the reviews we write? As a reader and reviewer, I found all of that fascinating.

There’s also quite a bit here about ambition, career expectations, and the pressure to live up to what our parents—or even our younger selves—thought our lives would look like.

The biggest strength, though, is Selina and Parker themselves. Both are exceptionally well-drawn characters, particularly for a debut novel. Their careers matter to them, their conflict feels legitimate, and I believed the emotional evolution of their relationship. I also appreciated that neither character had to become an entirely different person for the romance to work.

I did have a few reservations. At 400 pages, this felt about 50 pages too long to me, and some of the ideas and conflicts became repetitive. I also would have loved more development from the supporting characters. And then there is my old nemesis: the third-act breakup. I simply do not enjoy this trope, and this book did not magically convert me.

Still, there is a lot to admire here. The characters are memorable, the publishing-world setting is terrific, and Robinson has some genuinely interesting things to say about what it means to create something, put it into the world, and then allow other people to judge it.

I listened to the audiobook, performed by Katharine Chin, Major Curda, and Ríoghnach Robinson, and thought it worked especially well in audio. The performances were engaging and easy to distinguish, and despite the length, this was an extremely easy story to follow while listening.

Bad Words is already receiving a lot of enthusiastic early reviews, and I can understand why. While it wasn’t quite a five-star read for me, this is an impressively assured debut, and I will absolutely read whatever Ríoghnach Robinson writes next.

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

Thank you to Macmillan Audio for gifting me an advance listening copy. Bad Words will be published October 6, 2026, by St. Martin’s Press.

Wow. What an engaging—and deeply unsettling—read.

I have thought about Campbell’s debut, Sky Full of Elephants, so many times since I read it, so I was thrilled to get an early copy of his second novel. I’m happy to say Wells Without Water is every bit as intriguing as his debut…and possibly even more terrifying.

In a strange way, this reminded me of S.A. Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland. Not because the stories themselves are particularly similar, but because both are so deeply rooted in a Southern Black community where family, politics, religion, race, social justice, and sudden eruptions of violence are all tangled together.

Carmichael Franklin returns to his hometown of Loblolly Grove, where tensions are already simmering. His brother, Everett, has followed in their father’s footsteps and become a bishop, while Carmichael has gone in the opposite direction and is an atheist.

Then Everett brings Carmichael to see a young girl he believes is possessed.

And this is where things get DARK.

Campbell digs into Southern mythology, Black history, religious fanaticism, and the legacy of Nat Turner’s rebellion, while asking some fascinating and disturbing questions about faith and what can happen when religion becomes twisted into something dangerous.

And yes—this is absolutely supernatural horror. We are not talking about a story where you spend 300 pages wondering whether the haunting is metaphorical. There are paranormal forces at work here, and parts of it gave me serious The Exorcist vibes. It also reminded me of those early seasons of Supernatural, when Sam and Dean were traveling from town to town dealing with demons, possessions, folklore, and things that absolutely should not be lurking in the dark.

Campbell makes Loblolly Grove feel incredibly immersive, and the combination of history, religion, family conflict, Southern folklore, and supernatural horror makes this difficult to put down.

I want to say I “enjoyed” it, although enjoyed feels like a questionable word for something this disturbing. 😂

Either way, I was completely engrossed.

⭐️ 4.25/5 stars

Thank you to Simon & Schuster for the gifted advance copy.

Wells Without Water publishes February 9, 2027.

At 39, Billie makes a New Year’s resolution: this is the year she is going to have a baby.

Then, on that very same night, she meets Arthur.

Arthur is Scottish, works in the environmental/ecological field, and has made an equally firm decision about his future: because of climate change and his concerns about the world we’re leaving behind, he absolutely does not want children.

And there you have the central tension of Rabbit Rabbit. Over the course of the next year, we follow Billie through her attempts to become a mother and through a series of encounters with Arthur as their connection continues to deepen. Eventually, the question becomes increasingly difficult to ignore: What happens when the life you’ve decided you want and the person you might love seem to exist on two completely different paths?

There was so much I loved about this book.

First, the settings are INCREDIBLE. Billie and her two best friends work in the film industry in Los Angeles, but this story hops all over the globe—New York, North Carolina, Italy, Africa, and beyond. Every time the characters land somewhere new, Smith makes the setting feel completely immersive. This is the kind of book that will have you wanting to book a flight before you’ve finished the chapter.

I also adored the supporting characters. Billie’s Gran, who lives in New York City, is an absolute delight and had some of my favorite lines in the entire book. Billie’s two best friends—one married with children and the other single and child-free—also give the story two very different perspectives on what a fulfilling adult life can look like. More importantly, their friendship with Billie feels genuine, funny, and lived-in.

But the dialogue may be the strongest part of the novel, particularly the conversations between Billie and Arthur. Their relationship reminded me so much of the Before Sunrise/Before Sunset films with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy: two people talking and talking and somehow making those conversations feel intimate, romantic, and enormously consequential. This book is incredibly cinematic, and I would not be surprised at all to see an adaptation someday.

And while there are some wonderfully romantic moments, this isn’t entirely lighthearted. Both Billie and Arthur carry trauma from their pasts, giving their decisions about love, family, and the future much more weight.

My biggest hesitation was the ending. Without spoiling anything, I wasn’t completely sold on how the plot ultimately got us to its conclusion. There were also a few moments when behavior that was presumably intended to feel sweeping and romantic landed a little closer to 🚩 for me. Billie and Arthur have SO MANY obstacles between them that I occasionally wondered whether some of the intensity of their relationship comes from the very fact that it seems so impossible.

Still, even when I wasn’t entirely convinced by the plot, I was invested in these characters. Jennifer E. Smith’s writing is lovely, the dialogue is fantastic, the friendships are wonderful, and the central question—what happens when two deeply desired versions of your future can’t easily coexist?—gave me a lot to think about.

A beautifully written, globe-trotting, cinematic love story that has more on its mind than romance alone.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 4/5 stars

📖 Rabbit Rabbit
✍️ Jennifer E. Smith
📅 December 15, 2026
📚 Ballantine Books

Thank you to Ballantine Books and Thousand Voices for the advanced reading copy.

I ate this preview up! I can’t wait to hear the rest. Helen Laser puts in a great performance of Zara. She is a fitness influencer and married to the founder of Uplift, a cult like workout/social media enterprise owned and operated by her husband Essie. Zara wants to have her IUD removed and start trying for a baby at 39, but her husband wants her to keep working and gaining followers and members.

There are big questions going on…

…is Essie being unfaithful? Something sus happening there
…is someone stalking her?
…weird things start happening both at work and inside her body.

I have NO idea where this is going but I am INVESTED!!

#macaudio