It Looks Like You in the Dark by Mathilda Zeller is an atmospheric Indigenous horror debut set in a remote Iñupiat village in Alaska. It will be published October 13, 2026.
The story follows Tapeesa, a young woman newly out of high school who works at a fish processing plant in her small village. I loved the setting—Alaska is not somewhere I encounter often in fiction, and Zeller creates such a strong sense of place. The isolation, darkness, wilderness, and tight-knit community all work especially well for a slow-burn horror story.
At the center of the novel is a creature from Indigenous folklore, the kushtuka, which can appear in the form of someone you love. That becomes particularly terrifying for Tapeesa because her sister, Esther, has recently gone missing. At the same time, outsiders continue to descend upon the area, and some of them have disappeared as well. The novel weaves supernatural horror together with the very real history of outsiders exploiting Indigenous land and communities.
This is definitely a slow burn, and I think readers who particularly enjoy folklore-driven horror will appreciate it more than I did. I liked the story and thought it was a solid debut, but it never quite grabbed me enough to move beyond a three-star read.
I also had mixed feelings about the audiobook performance. Zorga Qaunaq has a pleasant voice, but the narration felt somewhat restrained to me. I tend to prefer more vocal variation and differentiation in tone, especially in a story with this much atmosphere and tension. Because of that, I suspect I might have connected more strongly with this one in print.
Overall, It Looks Like You in the Dark is an interesting debut with a wonderfully unusual setting, a compelling use of Indigenous folklore, and a strong sense of atmosphere. I’ll be interested to see what Mathilda Zeller writes next.
Thank you to Macmillan Audio for gifting me the advanced listening copy.
Trust Issues is my favorite of Kasie West’s adult rom-coms so far—and I’ve read all three! Also, can we talk about these covers? The cover art on her adult books is incredible, and I keep wanting to buy physical copies based on the covers alone.
This is an enemies-to-lovers romance with truly elite banter. I sometimes struggle with this trope because the characters can spend so much time genuinely disliking each other that the eventual romance feels like it comes out of nowhere. That isn’t the case here. West does a particularly good job pacing Parker’s relationship with her love interest, allowing their antagonism to gradually shift into chemistry and something more.
The setup is also hilarious. Parker suspects her boyfriend is cheating while she’s out of town, so she orders DoorDash to his house—and then messages the driver through the app to investigate whether there’s another car in the driveway. There isn’t, but Parker’s trust issues ultimately contribute to the end of the relationship anyway.
Three months later, that same delivery driver unexpectedly walks into Parker’s workplace. Turns out, he’s a reporter too, and now the two of them have been assigned to work together.
My favorite part of this book is easily the dialogue. Nearly everything I highlighted was a line of dialogue because these two have such good chemistry. The exchanges are clever and genuinely funny—“I was couch asleep, not bed asleep” made me laugh—but West also gives them quieter, more tender moments. I especially loved the sentiment that you can still have had a hard time even if someone else experienced a different kind of hard.
For me, Trust Issues feels like Kasie West really settling into her voice as an adult rom-com writer. YA still feels like her greatest strength, but this is easily my favorite of her adult books. It’s clever, funny, fast-moving, and an excellent palate cleanser. Her adult romances remind me a little of Tessa Bailey, and I’d especially recommend this one to readers who enjoy Sarah Adams.
3.75/5 stars.
Trust Issues publishes April 27, 2027.
Thank you to St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for providing me with an electronic advance reading copy.
The Killing of a Chestnut Tree by Oliver Kay Langmead is a short, charming little historical mystery with a cozy atmosphere, a touch of the fantastical, and a queer spin on the classic Sherlock-and-Watson detective dynamic.
Detective Harper travels to Farley to investigate the murder of the Duke of Farley, but upon arrival, things are already considerably stranger than expected: instead of a body, there is a chestnut tree that has been chopped down. That magical element gives the mystery a whimsical quality that fits nicely with just how cozy this story is.
The mystery itself is approachable and entertaining, and I really enjoyed the characters, particularly the relationship between our two central men. The LGBTQ+ representation adds something fresh to a very traditional historical-mystery setup. This is definitely more interested in being charming than dark or gruesome.
I listened to the audiobook, which is quite short and makes this an incredibly quick read. I thought the performance was good, with a wonderfully pronounced, Margaret Thatcher-level British accent that only added to the overall atmosphere.
Ultimately, though, I found the story a little shallow. With such a short runtime, there simply wasn’t enough space for the characters, relationships, or mystery to develop as deeply as I would have liked. I enjoyed my time with it, but I wanted just a little more substance.
Still, if you’re looking for the coziest of cozy historical mysteries—especially something short, queer, whimsical, and easy to settle into—The Killing of a Chestnut Tree is a lovely little read.
⭐️⭐️⭐️ 3/5 stars
The Killing of a Chestnut Tree is expected to be published October 27, 2026.
Peter Clines has such a signature style, and The Off Season is a perfect example of what he does so well: blend genres in a way that keeps the story moving. I was initially drawn to this one by that fantastic cover, but once I started reading, I was quickly pulled into the story itself.
This is definitely horror, but like a lot of really good horror, it doesn’t come charging out of the gate as a full-on slasher. What makes a Peter Clines novel different, though, is that the journey toward the horror never really feels like a traditional slow burn. Instead of simply waiting for things to get progressively creepier, you’re having an adventure along the way. There’s action, mystery, and a constant sense of momentum before the horror elements really take over.
Ben Getty is a disgraced LAPD officer who has essentially been banished to rural Maine, where he’s been given another chance as a police officer in the tiny town of Little Enoch. Unfortunately, there’s also the small matter of a serial killer who has been hunting in the surrounding woods for decades. The killings stretch all the way back to a massacre at a summer camp fifty years earlier—which raises some pretty obvious questions. Is this really the same killer? Has this person just been wandering around the Maine woods murdering people for half a century? And if so…how old is this guy now?!
That mystery is part of what makes the book so much fun.
I ultimately landed at 3.5 stars. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and even when the story hadn’t reached its full horror mode yet, I was entertained. Clines is particularly good at writing books that refuse to stay neatly inside one genre, and The Off Season delivers that combination of mystery, adventure, action, and horror that I’ve come to associate with his work.
The Off Season publishes April 20, 2027. (Macmillan)
Thank you to St. Martin’s Press for providing me with an electronic advanced reading copy in exchange for an honest review.
The Names of the New World by Kawai Strong Washburn is an ambitious work of climate science fiction that imagines what life might look like as climate change reshapes not only the physical world, but where and how people are able to live within it.
Set largely in Minneapolis, the novel uses multiple points of view to explore displacement, adaptation, and what it means to become a refugee in a world where the places we once considered home may no longer be sustainable. I appreciated the creativity behind Washburn’s vision of this future and the questions the book raises about what humanity might be capable of accomplishing—and what we may have to sacrifice—as we adjust to a new normal.
Amari was easily my favorite character, and I also found Naomi compelling. Unfortunately, the novel as a whole fell a little flat for me. There was quite a bit of repetition, and despite really liking the setup, I never felt as invested in the larger plot as I wanted to be.
I listened to the audiobook, which features multiple narrators to match the book’s multiple perspectives. While I generally enjoy a full cast, the rhythm and cadence of Naomi’s narration didn’t quite work for me, and that affected my connection to her sections of the story.
Ultimately, this was a case where I appreciated the imagination and ideas more than I enjoyed the execution. Climate fiction feels increasingly relevant as writers grapple with what our changing planet could mean for migration, community, and the way we live. I suspect we’re going to see much more of it in the years ahead, and I’m glad authors like Washburn are imagining those possible futures—even when this particular version didn’t completely land for me.
The Names of the New World is expected to be published October 6, 2026.
Thank you to Macmillan Audio for providing me with an advanced listening copy.
This had such a promising premise, and I really wanted to love where it was going. Unfortunately, while I think the concept has a lot of merit, the execution never quite delivered on everything the book seemed to be setting up.
The Fix takes place in a world exactly like ours—with one enormous exception. There is now an injection that can reverse aging. Think Benjamin Button, but medically induced.
Our main character, Julia, is a 45-year-old journalist who agrees to take the treatment for free in exchange for documenting the experience. She has a longtime husband and two daughters: 22-year-old Zoe and 12-year-old Lottie. As Julia begins physically growing younger, she experiences firsthand just how differently the world treats her based solely on her perceived age.
And that idea is fascinating.
As the treatment becomes more widespread, age itself starts becoming almost impossible to determine. Your cardiologist might look like a teenager. Parents and children can appear to be peers. All of the visual cues we use to make assumptions about someone’s experience, authority, attractiveness, vulnerability, and place in society suddenly become unreliable.
There is so much to explore there.
That was ultimately my frustration with The Fix: I kept waiting for the novel to really dig into the enormous questions its premise raises, and I never felt like it quite got there. Levy creates this massive societal disruption, but the story felt smaller and more scattered than I expected. The themes were clearly there, but the message never fully landed for me.
I also wanted more from Julia. At times she felt unfocused as a main character, particularly considering how extraordinary her circumstances were. I wanted a deeper exploration of what becoming younger would mean for her identity as a woman, wife, mother, professional, and person who has already lived 45 years.
What did work for me was how surprisingly realistic much of it felt. If this treatment actually existed, I absolutely believe people would rush to take it—and that our obsession with youth would create consequences we hadn’t remotely considered.
Ultimately, The Fix gave me a terrific premise and a lot to think about, but I was left wishing the novel had pushed its own ideas much further.
Thank you to St. Martin’s Press for providing me with an advance reading copy.
Tiger’s Mouth by Lucy Tan is a beautifully written novel about complicated friendship, ambition, competition, and the strange intimacy that can exist between two people who are simultaneously rooting for each other and measuring themselves against each other.
The novel spans 2013 to 2019, which somehow already feels almost like historical fiction. The technology, the optimism surrounding it, and the conversations about where it might take us feel remarkably different viewed from 2026.
Jack Owens is the son of the founder of KO Systems, entering the company through an internship with all the privilege and expectations that come with his name. There he meets Jack Chen, who comes from much humbler beginnings in Queens but possesses an extraordinary intelligence and ambition. The two develop a friendship that becomes the heart of the novel. They admire each other, compete with each other, disappoint each other, cheer for each other, and continually find themselves pulled back into one another’s orbit.
Lucy Tan is an incredible writer. She earned her MFA at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and there is such care in this prose without it ever feeling overly polished or precious. This is literary fiction that is intensely readable—I finished it in a single night. There’s also a surprising tenderness in the way these men speak to and understand each other.
Underneath their friendship, Tan is exploring some enormous themes: class, capitalism, technology and AI, privilege, masculinity, ambition, and the ways we look to other people to measure our own success.
I was also struck by how male this novel is. There are women—Samantha, Owen’s sister, and Katie, an early love interest for Chen—but they remain minor characters whose interactions are largely with the men. It’s unusual to read a contemporary novel by a woman that so thoroughly centers male relationships, and I think Tan is doing something interesting with that choice. She examines the ways men are permitted to love and need their friends while still treating those same friends as competitors.
In that sense, Tiger’s Mouth feels like a coming-of-age novel, except these characters aren’t simply coming of age. They’re coming into success and discovering what that success does—and doesn’t—give them.
This is thoughtful, tender literary fiction about friendship and the communities in which we try to find meaning. I’d especially recommend it to readers who love character-driven novels about complicated relationships, ambition, class, and the emotional costs of success.
Thank you to Ballantine for the advance reading copy. Tiger’s Mouth will be published November 17, 2026.
Every once in a while, when you read as many books as I do, a book comes along that completely blows you away. All Together Now by Julie Buxbaum was that book for me.
I’m writing this in September 2026, when there are still only a handful of reviews out there, and I’m already calling it: this is going to be one of my favorite books of 2027.
Hazel Stein was born in 1975, and every decade or so, something impossible happens. She spends one night aboard a party bus with different versions of herself—from eight-year-old Hazel all the way through Hazel at 77. They’re all there together, at different stages of the same life, knowing different things about what has happened and what is still to come.
Eight-year-old Hazel keeps making paper airplanes. Eighteen-year-old Hazel is perpetually embarrassed. Forty-nine-year-old Hazel is bald. Sixty-eight-year-old Hazel may have had a little too much plastic surgery. 😂 Some versions of Hazel immediately understand one another; others absolutely do not.
And yes, there’s a magical-realism element here. But if you’re hearing “mysterious party bus filled with versions of the same woman” and thinking, Nope, I hate magical realism when nobody explains it, let me put your mind at ease: the bus is the device, not the point.
The point is Hazel’s life.
This is a story about joy and grief. Friendship and love. Tragedies, disappointments, triumphs, and all the ordinary moments in between. It’s about the different people we become over the course of a lifetime—and the strange realization that every one of those people is still somehow us.
I’m only a couple of years younger than Hazel, and I think that made this book hit me particularly hard. How could you not wonder what it would be like to sit across from your eight-year-old self? Your eighteen-year-old self? Which version of you would become your ally? Which one would look at your life and think, THIS is what we became?!
And what would you want to ask the woman you’ll be at 77?
There’s something profound about that idea. Think about going to someone’s funeral and meeting a person who knew her when she was sixteen, while you knew her when she was seventy. You both loved the same woman—and yet, in some ways, you knew entirely different people. All Together Now captures that beautifully.
It’s also genuinely funny. I laughed out loud several times, particularly when the various Hazels are interacting with one another. Hazel also has wonderful people in her life, including two incredibly supportive friends, and I loved the way the people closest to her simply accept this bizarre thing that happens to her every decade.
But this book also made me cry. A lot.
I’ve seen comparisons to The Wedding People, and that always makes me nervous because that is an awfully high bar for me. But I’m here to tell you: I really did love this as much as The Wedding People. I’d also put it alongside One & Only by Maurene Goo, Into the Blue by Emma Brodie, and Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt by Ben Reeves. They’re very different books, but each explores some version of the same enormous questions: Who are we at different stages of our lives? How do our relationships shape us? And how do we keep choosing joy when grief and loss are inevitable?
One of the questions in this book that stopped me cold was: “How are we all able to live knowing that we and everyone we love will die?”
And somehow, for a book so interested in mortality, All Together Now never feels hopeless. Quite the opposite. It made me think about how astonishing it is that we get to be so many people during one lifetime.
I suspect this will hit especially hard for women around Hazel’s age—those of us in that sandwich-generation stage of life, looking backward at who we’ve been while becoming increasingly aware of our own mortality. We’re watching our children grow up, watching our parents age, and starting to look at time a little differently ourselves. But I certainly don’t think you have to be a middle-aged woman to find something meaningful here.
This is deeply emotional, unexpectedly funny, and ultimately a beautiful meditation on what it means to get a life—and then actually live it.
I cried. I laughed. I sobbed. And when it was over, I knew I would read it again.
One of my favorite books of 2027. Calling it now.
Thank you to NetGalley and Avid Reader Press for providing me with an advance reading copy.
Reading the Bible Through Queer Eyes by Brian G. Murphy and Shannon T. L. Kearns is a lovely book written for a very specific audience—and I’m giving it 4.5 stars in large part because I am so grateful that a book like this exists.
Both authors grew up in evangelical Christian environments, and they write from their own experiences as queer people of faith. Kearns is a transgender man and ordained priest. What struck me most about this book is how accessible it is. This isn’t dense academic theology. It is warm, readable, pastoral, and deeply rooted in the belief that LGBTQ+ people don’t merely need to be allowed into Christian spaces; they deserve the opportunity to see themselves fully within their faith and within Scripture.
There are plenty of books that make theological arguments for LGBTQ+ affirmation within Christianity. This really isn’t one of those books.
Murphy and Kearns make their position clear very early: they aren’t interested in arguing homophobes into affirmation. LGBTQ+ people are so much bigger than the handful of Bible verses that have been used to debate their identities.
And wow, is that an important distinction.
This book is written by queer people for queer people. It recognizes that many LGBTQ+ people remain deeply faithful and deeply in love with Jesus while also carrying wounds inflicted by Christian communities. Rather than asking them to defend their right to belong, this book asks a much more interesting question: What happens after you already know that you belong?
One of the lines I highlighted captures the entire book for me: “It’s okay to be LGBTQ+” is the starting point, not the finish line.
That is exactly what makes this book different.
The authors begin from affirmation and then go deeper—into Scripture, community, our responsibilities to one another, our bodies, and what it means to live a faithful life. They invite queer readers to approach these ancient texts not simply looking for permission to exist but looking for wisdom, connection, liberation, and a deeper relationship with God.
The Bible comes from cultures very different from our own, and we aren’t going to find modern examples of loving, consensual LGBTQ+ relationships represented in Scripture in the same ways we understand them today. But queer people have always existed. Murphy and Kearns offer readers a way to recognize their experiences within these ancient stories and to see Scripture through a lens that doesn’t begin with shame or exclusion.
There is something especially moving about recognizing how hard-won faith can be for people who have been told that some essential part of themselves separates them from God. This book doesn’t simply argue that queer people deserve a place at the table. It moves beyond that argument entirely. It assumes the seat is already theirs and invites them to open the Bible.
I thought this was beautiful. I appreciated both authors and the tenderness with which they approached Scripture, faith, identity, and community. This won’t be a book for every reader, but for the audience that needs it, I think it could be an incredibly meaningful one.
Reading the Bible Through Queer Eyes will be published December 1, 2026. Thank you to HarperCollins for providing me with an advanced reading copy.
Damned If She Does: Why Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religion is a well-researched and well-documented look at the growing number of women leaving American churches—and the many different reasons they are walking away.
Sarah Stankorb talks with women across different Christian traditions, rather than focusing exclusively on former evangelicals. Their reasons for leaving vary enormously. Some experienced sexual abuse or watched churches fail to protect girls and women from abuse. Others became disillusioned with complementarianism, purity culture, the treatment of LGBTQ+ people, or the growing influence of Christian nationalism. And for some, the break was much less dramatic: COVID disrupted the habit of going to church, and they simply never went back.
The interviews were easily the strongest part of the book for me. Stankorb allows women to tell their own stories, and those individual experiences give the book much of its emotional weight. I also appreciated that leaving church isn’t presented as an uncomplicated liberation story. Churches can cause tremendous harm, but they have also traditionally provided community, relationships, volunteer opportunities, and a sense of belonging. When people leave those institutions, they don’t necessarily replace those connections elsewhere.
That actually left me wanting the book to push further. What happens to communities when fewer people participate in institutions that once brought neighbors together? Where do people find those relationships and opportunities for service instead? And why does the decline in church participation matter beyond the future of Christianity itself?
I also wasn’t entirely convinced that the book established a pattern that felt uniquely specific to women. Certainly some of the reasons discussed here—sexual abuse, complementarianism, expectations surrounding women’s roles—are explicitly gendered. But other factors felt like pieces of the much broader American decline in religious participation.
I’ve read quite a bit about evangelicalism, deconstruction, gender, and American Christianity, so there wasn’t much here that surprised me. Books like Jesus and John Wayne have made a stronger impression on me because they offered a more developed argument about why these cultural shifts occurred. Damned If She Does isn’t really a book about theology; it’s primarily about the women themselves, why they left, and where they landed.
That doesn’t make it a bad book. It’s thoughtful, compassionate, sometimes bleak, and clearly the product of extensive reporting. For someone newer to this conversation, I can imagine it being particularly illuminating. For those of us who seemingly cannot stop reading books about the state of American Christianity 🙋♀️, it’s still a worthwhile addition to the shelf—even if I’d recommend several others before it.
3 stars.
I received an advance listening copy through NetGalley. Thank you to Christian Audio for the opportunity to listen and review. The audiobook is narrated by Nan McNamara.
