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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

This might be the most rich people behaving badly book I have ever read. And I mean that as a compliment.

Rebecca has just married Preston Wexley, the younger son of an extremely wealthy family, and instead of disappearing into newlywed bliss, she finds herself aboard a mega yacht off the Amalfi Coast with her new husband’s entire deeply dysfunctional family.

Although, we are informed that rich people apparently don’t call them yachts. They call them boats. So: they’re on a boat.

And these people behave VERY, VERY badly.

They slap each other. They punch each other. They throw each other overboard. There are affairs, betrayals, grudges, power struggles and approximately 47 secrets that absolutely should have been discussed before everyone agreed to spend a week trapped together at sea.

There are also a LOT of characters. Early on, I actually made myself a little diagram to keep track of who was married, divorced, related and only tangentially connected to the Wexley family. This worked beautifully…until the secrets started coming out. I kept crossing things out and drawing new lines until my family tree was looking suspiciously more like a family circle.

So yes, taking a few notes on the characters might not be a terrible idea.

Once everyone is aboard, the whole thing has the energy of a particularly unhinged soap opera crossed with Succession. If you ever watched The Young and the Restless and thought, “This could use a mega yacht, Italian detectives and a murder,” I have excellent news for you.

I also appreciated having this one on Kindle because the Italian detectives use quite a few Italian curse words, and being able to immediately translate them added a delightful little bonus to my reading experience.

This is fast, dramatic, messy and tremendously entertaining. It knows exactly what kind of book it wants to be and fully commits to the chaos. If “rich people behaving badly” is one of your favorite thriller tropes—or you just love a deeply dysfunctional family with enough secrets to sink a boat—this is an easy recommendation.

Publication date: March 30, 2027
Publisher: William Morrow/HarperCollins

Thank you to NetGalley, William Morrow/HarperCollins, and Kristina Kamen for the advanced reading copy. All opinions are my own.

This is not a romance, exactly. But it is absolutely a love story.

Wife & Wife begins in 1955 with Ruth Wolf, a young Jewish wife and mother living the kind of life women were expected to want. She is married to Nathan, they have two children, and Ruth is a devoted mother. Then she meets Sylvie Fein—another housewife, and eventually her best friend—and falls deeply in love with her.

What makes this book so powerful is that Ruth and Sylvie don’t have the language, freedom, or cultural framework that later generations would have for understanding themselves. Ruth especially has spent her life understanding love, marriage, motherhood, and family entirely through a heteronormative lens. She knows that she loves Sylvie. Figuring out what that means—and what she’s willing or able to do about it—is something else entirely.

The novel follows these characters across decades, through marriages and divorces, motherhood and estrangement, secrecy and enormous cultural change, eventually reaching 2011, when New York legalized same-sex marriage.

I loved the scope of this story. Harris allows us to see just how dramatically the world changes over the course of one person’s lifetime. The book moves through the history of gay rights in America and the AIDS crisis, including those terrifying early years when so little was understood about how HIV was transmitted and there was no effective treatment. The historical details never felt like they were being inserted simply to teach the reader something; instead, they shape the choices these characters are able to make at different points in their lives.

And those choices aren’t always good ones. There are secrets here—so many secrets—and sometimes keeping them only causes more pain. There are consequences to loving someone in a world that tells you that love is unacceptable, and those consequences don’t disappear simply because the world eventually changes.

I was also reminded of Sarah Goodman Confino’s historical fiction because Jewish identity is so naturally woven into the characters’ lives. The traditions, family dynamics, expectations, and culture aren’t incidental details; they’re part of who these people are and how they understand family.

For a story that contains so much sadness, though, Wife & Wife is surprisingly funny and ultimately incredibly hopeful. I laughed. I definitely cried. And I absolutely loved the ending.

Most of all, I loved these characters. There is something extraordinarily moving about following people who were born into one version of America and lived long enough to see possibilities that would have seemed unimaginable when they were young.

If you’re interested in LGBTQ+ history, particularly what the enormous cultural and legal changes of the second half of the twentieth century actually meant in the life of an ordinary person, I highly recommend this one. It’s a story about love and loyalty, but also about identity, family, secrecy, survival, and how profoundly the world can change within a single lifetime.

I’m really grateful I got to read it. Ruth and Sylvie are going to stay with me for a long time.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Publication date: February 23, 2027
Publisher: William Morrow
Thank you to NetGalley and William Morrow for the advanced reading copy.

Was it good? Not really. Was I entertained? Absolutely. (Credit:@shelfbytheshore, instagram)

And sometimes, that is exactly what I want from a thriller.

Mother Daughter Sister Stranger centers on Eliza Ramsey, a literary assistant working for an agent in Manhattan. Eleven years ago, Eliza and her sister, Bea, were the sole survivors of the plane crash that killed their parents. Every year, they mark the anniversary as Remembrance Day—so when Bea leaves her daughter, Piper, with Eliza and then mysteriously fails to return for her, Eliza immediately knows something is very wrong.

What follows is Eliza’s increasingly frantic search for her sister, and—as any seasoned thriller reader will suspect—the story of that plane crash and the Ramsey family is considerably more complicated than Eliza believes.

This is one of those thrillers where everything is eventually a plot point. A character who seems incidental? Remember them. A random piece of information? File it away. A strange conversation? Oh, we’re definitely coming back to that.

There are secrets upon secrets upon secrets.

Did I believe all of it? Absolutely not.

Did I keep listening? Absolutely yes.

My biggest issue was Eliza herself. There were moments when she was so slow to put things together that I was practically yelling the answers at my audiobook. And listen—I am NOT the reader who usually figures out thriller twists. Authors fool me constantly. So when I’m several steps ahead of our protagonist, we may have a problem. 😂

On the other hand, there is something strangely satisfying about feeling smarter than the main character for once.

Where this worked particularly well for me was on audio. Mysteries and thrillers are my favorite audiobook genre, and this one is very easy to follow. There’s enough repetition and reminding of important details that I never felt like I needed to rewind or keep track of an enormous cast of suspects. Stevi Incremona gives a strong performance, and the missing-sister setup kept me engaged throughout.

I did think the resolution felt strangely rushed, especially considering how many revelations are packed into the final stretch. Although I’ve started wondering if I say this about thrillers because I’m racing through the last 20% to find out what happens and then immediately sitting down to write a review. Maybe I’m the one rushing. 😂

This wasn’t one of my favorite mysteries of the month, and I wouldn’t examine the plot mechanics too closely afterward. But as a twisty, secret-filled popcorn thriller that kept me entertained for eleven hours? It did its job.

Sometimes that’s enough.

⭐️⭐️⭐️ 3/5 stars

🎧 Audiobook narrated by Stevi Incremona
📚 Publication date: September 1, 2026
🎧 Thank you to Macmillan Audio for the gifted advanced listening copy.

3.5 stars

I jumped at the opportunity to listen to Look What the Cat Dragged In because Jason Rekulak’s Hidden Pictures is an absolute classic of the supernatural thriller genre for me. This one didn’t quite reach those heights, but it has such a fresh and unusual setup, and the pacing is excellent.

Penny Padgett is a cartoonist who writes children’s books about the adventures of Penny and her beloved cat, Popcorn. Penny is exactly the kind of cat owner you would expect her to be: Popcorn is spoiled, adored, and absolutely central to her life. She’s also been dating her boyfriend, Dean, for about six months. Her agent would love for Penny to add a love interest to her books, but Penny isn’t sure she wants to put Dean into them. After all, once she does that, he becomes part of her fictional world forever—and that feels like a very big commitment.

Then Popcorn goes missing, and Penny is devastated.

Not long afterward, Penny gets the opportunity to cat-sit Godfrey, a peculiar cat belonging to a very bizarre older woman. Godfrey initially seems affectionate enough, but once he comes into Penny’s life, things begin getting increasingly strange.

And then increasingly disturbing.

And then increasingly gross.

This is a supernatural horror novel, and it eventually goes very firmly in that direction. There are demons and some fairly grotesque moments, so readers who prefer their horror grounded entirely in reality should know that going in.

What impressed me most was the pacing. This is a true slow burn, but I never found it boring. Rekulak creates that wonderful horror-novel sensation of sinking into quicksand: things are getting worse almost imperceptibly until suddenly Penny is in very, very deep.

I also really liked Penny as a protagonist. She changes considerably over the course of the story, and there is a genuine character journey underneath all of the supernatural chaos.

The ending is where things get VERY big. It is over the top. It is a little cheesy. But sometimes cheese tastes good! I was willing to go along for the ride even when it became completely bonkers.

I listened to the audiobook narrated by Stephanie Neméth-Parker, and her performance is fantastic. She has quite the assignment here because the voices aren’t limited to ordinary humans, and she handles the human, feline, and supernatural elements wonderfully. Even as the story becomes increasingly strange, the narration remains very easy to follow.

This probably won’t make my top ten books of the year, especially given how much I had been anticipating it after Hidden Pictures, but I definitely enjoyed it. For readers who like slow-burn supernatural horror—and particularly horror involving cats—this is a very fun addition to the spooky-season reading list.

Rating: 3.5/5 stars
Publication date: October 13, 2026
Format: Audiobook

Thank you to Macmillan Audio for the gifted advanced listening copy.

She’s a Doll is goofy, weird, funny, feminist horror—and somehow, despite beginning with a murder and involving a woman whose consciousness gets trapped inside a creepy old doll, it’s also surprisingly hopeful? I had such a good time with this.

Lucy is twenty years old and has just earned a certificate in business administration through a remote learning program. She should be proud of herself. She should celebrate. Instead, she feels embarrassed that it isn’t a bachelor’s degree and doesn’t even tell anyone. That tells you quite a bit about Lucy, but so does the fact that she shows up to a tea party dressed as the Mad Hatter while everyone else is wearing cute sundresses and pearls. 😂 She is unapologetically odd, and I loved her almost immediately.

Then Lucy is murdered by an idiot named Kyle, the twin brother of her best friend, Krissy.

Not a spoiler! It’s right there in the premise.

Lucy’s consciousness returns inside an old doll, and she eventually discovers that an acquaintance named Nicola can hear her. Naturally, Lucy recruits Nicola to help her take care of some unfinished business.

This is definitely horror, but if you hear “woman murdered and trapped inside a doll” and immediately picture blood-and-guts horror, that really isn’t what this is. It’s much more interested in female rage, friendship, grief, revenge, and the absurdity of its premise. It’s quirky and funny and genuinely fun—which is not a word I use particularly often to describe horror.

On my personal Weird Book Scale, this lives somewhere in the vicinity of Sky Daddy, and I mean that as a compliment. 😂 If you can roll with a woman falling in love with an airplane, you can probably roll with a dead woman bossing around the living from inside a creepy doll.

I tandem read this one, listening to the ALC while following along with my Aardvark hardcover, and honestly: what an Aardvark book. A pink-covered horror novel about female rage and female friendship that is simultaneously dark, funny, bizarre, and heartfelt? It feels like it was genetically engineered for an Aardvark box.

The audiobook was particularly impressive. The narrator has to distinguish between Nicola, Lucy when she was alive, and Lucy after her consciousness inhabits the doll. Lucy’s two voices need to be different enough to reflect what has happened to her while still sounding recognizably like the same person, and I thought the performance handled that brilliantly. I also loved that the Australian setting and voice of the novel came through so strongly.

For all its weirdness, there is also something unexpectedly tender underneath this story. Lucy is dead. That cannot be undone. And yet the book still manages to leave room for friendship, connection, and hope.

If you like your horror light on gore, heavy on female rage, and just a little unhinged, this is an absolute blast.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 4/5 stars
🎧 Tandem read: ALC + hardcover
📅 Publication date: September 15, 2026

Thank you to RBmedia and NetGalley for the advanced listening copy. I purchased my hardcover through Aardvark Book Club.

The Making of a Mad Woman is a dual-timeline blend of historical fiction, women’s fiction, and family drama, and for me, its strongest element was easily its look inside the golden age of advertising.

In Manhattan in 1962, Jo Carmichael is a model who returns to New York to succeed her father as CEO of a Madison Avenue advertising agency. Think Mad Men, but from the perspective of a woman trying to claim a seat at a table that was very much designed for men. (And despite the title, no, Jo isn’t actually “mad”—although trying to run a company as a woman in 1962 might have been enough to make anyone a little crazy.)

This was by far my favorite part of the novel. Cambron explores an interesting contradiction in advertising at the time: men were making the decisions about how products should be marketed, even though women controlled so many of the everyday purchasing decisions within American households. I loved getting a glimpse into how campaigns were created, who was allowed to have a voice in the room, and the ways women had to fight to be taken seriously in the business world. The Mad Men vibes are definitely there, but with a much more female-centered perspective.

In the present-day timeline, we meet Jo’s granddaughter Alex, who has spent much of her life living in the shadow of her formidable grandmother. Jo eventually walked away from Madison Avenue, but Alex doesn’t know the whole story of why. Now running a flower shop in Michigan, Alex finds herself drawn back into her grandmother’s past after Jo makes an unexpected request.

While I liked both timelines and thought the premise had a lot of potential, I never became quite as emotionally invested in the characters as I wanted to be. The characterization felt a little thin in places, particularly for a story centered so heavily on family history, identity, and the complicated relationships between generations of women. A little more depth there could have made the revelations and emotional moments land much harder for me.

Overall, I enjoyed The Making of a Mad Woman, but I’m not sure it will be one that sticks with me for very long. I’d recommend it especially to readers who enjoy historical fiction blended with contemporary women’s fiction, dual timelines, family secrets, and stories about women carving out space for themselves in male-dominated industries.

Thank you to Thomas Nelson Fiction and NetGalley for the advanced reading copy.

⭐️⭐️⭐️ 3/5 stars
📚 Publication date: February 9, 2027