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Book Review: Kentucky Dragon

Author: Michael Park

Release Date: September 30, 2025

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐/5

Note: A big thank you to Victory Editing and Netgalley for an eARC of this title. All opinions are my own.

Haunting and deliciously weird, I loved every moment with this book.

Told in two parts, Kentucky Dragon digs into cultism, body horror, and family secrets. When Mark is young, he meets the chicken man for the first time. A man who isn’t quite a man, the chicken man has come to collect on a debt. As Mark and his brother, Don, work to unravel the mystery of their family’s secrets, they find themselves wrapped in something much large than them with life-altering consequences. Eighteen years later, Mark has been doing what he’s told, putting the events of his youth behind him and not digging deeper. That is, until he receives a call from Germany from a woman that claims to be his should-be-dead older sister. Mark finds himself thrust back into the secrets he’s been avoiding and playing a game he didn’t even know he was a part of.

Kentucky Dragon is one of the strangest books I’ve read recently, which makes it an instant win for me. It’s visceral and gory, so if that’s not your flavor of horror, definitely steer clear. It doesn’t hold back any of its punches, digging its claws in deep, mixing atmospheric weirdness with bloody mutilations and lingering questions. The novel, especially the beginning, gave very classic horror vibes, in the line of something like The Auctioneer or Rosemary’s Baby. Something about the tone and the complete unflinching, but not overdramatic, descriptions really harkened back to that ‘60s-‘70s horror-lit vibe.

The best part of the novel, other than the weird, of course, was the pacing. The book ramps up the tension gradually, keeping its secrets locked close to its chest, while managing to unleash a barrage of horror with each consecutive chapter. Little innocuous details from Mark’s childhood come into play later in the book, leaving us interconnecting strings to follow into the present.

While the book only has a short cast of characters, they were all enjoyable. They each have personality and distinct motives. I understood why the characters were doing what they were doing. I’m also a stickler for a good villain, and the chicken man gave me that. He’s just normal enough to have that edge of uncanny valley. He talks smart, doesn’t baby Mark or Don, and has a general air of calm inevitability that made him a great character on the page.

Things that didn’t resonate as well? The focus on Nazism, especially toward the end of the novel. There was some strange (not in a good way) Nazi-apologist rhetoric that made me uncomfortable in a way that a horror novel shouldn’t do. Might just be me being sensitive or missing some context, but it made me uncomfy in a bad way.

This novel also struggles overall by having just a not-good ending. Not in a way that horror novels sometimes have bad endings, but the ending just wasn’t good. If it’s setting up for a sequel (which I’d definitely read), that can be forgiven. It feels like the setup to a sequel sort of ending, so I can forgive it if that’s the case.

Overall, loved it. Great premise. Fantastic villain. Slow bleeding of secrets.

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Book Review: Nowhere

Author: Allison Gunn

Release Date: March 25, 2025

Rating: ⭐⭐/5

Note: This review is based on an eARC generously provided by Atria Books and Netgalley. All opinions are my own.

I wanted so much to like this book. It’s exactly up my alley with a remote town surrounded by wilderness, and something night quite natural lurking out among the trees. Allison Gunn’s Nowhere had so much promise with lackluster execution.

Nowhere’s point-of-view switches between a few characters but focuses primarily on Rachel and Finn, a married couple trying to hold onto their tattered relationship. The couple moved to small-town Dahlmouth with their three children so that Rachel could advance her career, assigned as the town’s chief of police. Things don’t go well for Rachel or Finn: they’re constantly ostracized by the town, their son is killed in a drunk driving incident, and their relationship begins to fall apart. Rachel ices out her husband and engages in a number of affairs while Finn stays home, taking care of their children and trying to ease his own guilt over the state of their relationship.

When a mysterious hiker is found dead in the woods and the children of Dahlmouth begin to go missing, Rachel and Finn’s relationship implodes.

I loved the premise of this book (and the cover). It reminded me a lot of Sharp Objects and the Woods are Waiting, both novels that I enjoyed, so I thought I’d be able to add Nowhere to my collection of spooky, woodsy novels. Nowhere starts off strong with its mysterious, unsettling atmosphere. A pair of deputies driving through Dahlmouth, finding it completely abandoned, a hiker found gruesomely nailed to a tree in the woods. Already, Nowhere’s suspense is building, and just as quickly, it’s popped as the thing in the woods makes an early reveal. While the scene sets the novel into the supernatural, it also removed all of the suspense. Now, the reader knows what’s out in the woods and what it can do. While the characters still have to piece everything together, instead of building my anxiety with that of the characters, I just felt annoyed that they weren’t piecing things together. Then when they’re told what’s happening, by Lucy, by the Wise girl, by Jeremy’s grandmother’s stories, they completely disregard it.

If you’ve heard me talk about books, my favorites are always those with strong, realistic, and driven characters. Nowhere felt very plot-driven. That’s not a bad thing; there are plenty of novels driven by the plot instead of the story. In horror particularly, characters tend to be shoved around by what’s happening to them, unable to stop the horror once its begun. The problem with Nowhere is that the characters are stagnant. They don’t do a whole lot of changing between the beginning and the end and when their opinions or thoughts or feelings do change, their emotions just don’t feel organic. So many of the characters are driven by anger and guilt, and frankly, it just made them unlikable. Jeremy was the only character that felt likable, and even then, had a few moments where he was also deeply unlikable. And just like novels not needing to be character-driven, novels don’t need to have identifiable characters either. It’s important to have characters with flawed or unlikable traits; it makes them more real and tangible. My only problem is that I had such a difficult time identifying with any of them. They all just felt so angry, so self-righteous all of the time. (I also have feelings about the fact that Finn would drink and drive with the children in the car being completely overshadowed by the supernatural monster.)

So, the suspense is gone, the characters forgettable, the storytelling needs to be real solid to keep a reader engaged. Like I said at the beginning, I really loved the premise of Nowhere (and I still do!). That said, there’s a number of loose ends that are flying in the wind. I found myself asking questions that were never resolved. There were so many loose ends, I could have made a shirt out of all the different threads.

The real redeeming point for Nowhere is that the ending is real solid. Definitely my favorite scene in the whole novel; I found the ending to be a good closure on Rachel and Finn and the story of Dahlmouth. The ending called back to the opening scene, giving the novel two nice bookends. It brought back the suspense, the uncomfortable unsettledness that the book had when I’d just cracked it open for the first time.

If only the entire novel could have kept me as drawn in.

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March 2025 Roundup

Top Reads of March

Kentucky Dragon

Age: Adult Fiction

Genres: Horror, Supernatural Horror

When Mark is a boy, he meets the chicken man for the first time. A man that isn't quite human, the chicken man has come to collect on a debt. When their parents refuse to say anything, it's up to Mark and his brother, Don, to uncover their family's secrets. Solidly in the categories of weird and horror, Kentucky Dragon takes the reader on a wild ride from Kentucky to Germany, and deep into the debts that we owe.

2. Seeds

Age: Adult Fiction

Genres: Fantasy, Romance

There's about a million takes on the Hades and Persephone myth, and Seeds is another one for you. Until the fateful day when she is kidnapped by the god of death, Persephone has lived with her mother as a mortal in the upper world. Suddenly, Persephone finds everything she's ever believed to be a lie as she comes to terms with her own status as a goddess and what exactly she wants her life to be. Seeds is the story of two lost souls, trying the make the most of the hands that they've been dealt as well as delving into themes surrounding family, the ones we're born with and the ones we create ourselves.

3. Mysteries of the National Parks

Age: Adult Nonfiction

Genres: Nonfiction

With as many acres of land as the United States Parks Service oversees, there's bound to be some mysterious happenings, from missing persons to buried histories, Mysteries of the National Parks covers just over two dozen of them. Each chapter delves into a specific strange happenstance that occurred in one of the many National Parks across the United States. From missing persons to daring adventures, each chapter holds something different. At a time when the National Park Service is under attack, this is a great piece on why those park areas are so important to the history of the United States.

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Book Review: Botticelli's Apprentice

Author: Ursula Murray Husted

Release Date: May 11, 2025

Rating: ⭐⭐/5

Note: Thank you to Quill Tree Books and Netgalley for an ARC of this title. All opinions are my own.

A historical fiction graphic novel perfect for junior readers.

Botticelli’s Apprentice follows a young girl named Mella who loves to paint and is determined to eventually become one of Sandro Botticelli’s apprentices.

While Mella and her story are works of fiction, the graphic novel does a great job of really capturing Renaissance Italy and all of the social aspects of the time. From the walls of the Sistine Chapel to the countryside, young readers get a taste for the past life of Italy. Ursula Murray Husted weaves together a nice and engaging tale really rooted in the time and culture of the 1400s. The book covers a variety of themes from lying to the struggles of womanhood to grief; Husted really packs in the lessons in this relatively short graphic novel.

That being said, I found this graphic novel to be rather sad? The characters feel constantly at ends with one another, and even when Mella and Datus start working together, they still constantly snap at each other and take one another for granted. I understand Mella’s frustrations in not being taken seriously, but she seems to take her anger out on those around her rather than railing against the systemic problems causing them. Maybe that’s a bit too much to expect from a book for younger readers, but I’m not sure this imparted any true lessons like it meant to. Overall, I just didn’t like the mood or tone this graphic novel set. The characters themselves were rarely happy, creating an overall dour mood.

Additionally, I found the art style to be rather amateurish. Could I draw even half as well? Absolutely not. But from a polished, ready-for-print graphic novel, I expected more refinement. It’s ironic that sections of the novel talked about perspective while simultaneously not feeling like they were drawn with the same dedication. Maybe I’m missing some context here as someone who generally lives outside of the art scene. That said, I don’t think young readers will necessarily be as put out by the art style as I found myself.

As an introduction into the Renaissance, women’s rights, and the making of art, I think this book does an admirable job. There’s a real focus in the latter half on introducing new art-focused vocabulary that is great for expanding the palate of new readers. However, as far as storytelling goes, I found this graphic novel to be less than inspiring.

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Book Review: The Last Morning

Author: Camden Baird

Release Date: September 16, 2025

Rating: ⭐/5

Note: Thank you to Thomas & Mercer and Netgalley for an ARC of this title. All opinions are my own.

A fast-paced thriller with constantly switching perspective. This book is perfect for a quick weekend or getaway read.

Sadie hates the idea of sending her only daughter, Emma, to her first day of kindergarten. Sadie just knows something bad is going to happen, and all her worst fears are realized when Emma gets on the school bus but never arrives at school. Cue a storm descending down on her family as the police rush to find the missing girl and Sadie learns that those living around her may harbor their own dark secrets.

The Last Morning has everything you'd expect out of a psychological thriller: a variety of suspects, each of them keeping secrets, and many twists and turns as the days tick away. With short, propulsive chapters, the novel races from start to finish as everyone rushes to find the missing five-year-old. The plot is succinct and with each chapter switching perspectives, the reader gets a look into all of the lives that Emma touched.

The novel does a great job of holding in its secrets, bleeding them out slowly as the tension builds. If you're looking for a quick, surface level read, this one might be for you.

Because other than the plot and pacing, this book lacks just about everything else. The writing is dry and melodramatic, the characters just caricatures of real people, and, well, I'll get to my last criticism in a moment. If I'm honest, I would have DNF'ed this after the first chapter if I hadn't been graced with an advance reader copy.

The writing. It's very formulaic; if I didn't know better, I'd almost guess it had been written by AI. Sadie does this. Allen does this. We both do this. Over and over and over again. I needed some variety, some spice, some active voice. I'd expect this variety of writing from someone who writes as simply a spare time hobby; it's not what I expect from a standalone, published piece.

The characters. They were all cardboard cutouts and simultaneously all the same cardboard cutout. They don't act like real people. Their actions are over the top, and they never have real conversations with one another, just surface level chatter. Once again, they act exactly like I'd expect an AI would design them to act. They follow a sort of cookie-cutter mold of their title: the mom cries, the dad's hiding an affair, the half-brother hates his sister for existing. We see into the character's thoughts quite a lot in this novel, and they all think almost exactly the same. There's so much hate and secret vendettas in each of the characters. I suppose it could make the novel as a whole more interesting, but I just found them all to be deeply unlikable. I don't think any of the characters ever had a nice thing to say (or think) about one another.

The characterization is really my biggest gripe about this book, and the second is how deeply unsettling I found mental health to be portrayed. It's not uncommon to see mental health used as a plot device in books and tv, especially in thrillers like this one. The perpetrator had this disease and it caused them to do x, y, and z. Of course, the media always cranks that concern up to 100 and shows the absolute worst of the person who has it. This novel does the same thing, except it felt like every character had something going on with them, and they were never portrayed in anything but a heinous light. Instead of moments of, hey, maybe we should get this person help, they're called weird or off or problems. Even when they're not the big bad at the end. I don't know. Mental health is definitely a plot device, and when used correctly can still be respectful of the millions of sufferers. I felt nothing respectful about the way the characters were portrayed in this novel, nothing redeeming, and, once again, feels like AI grabbing onto caricatures rather than creating nuanced writing.

I'm not going to get into the ending, but I didn't like it, and I'll leave it at that.

So, the novel had potential. The plot is generic, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. In the hands of someone else, I could have maybe, probably enjoyed it. This book just isn't it, and I recommend giving it a hard pass.

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February 2025 Roundup

Top Reads of February

Lu and Ren's Guide to Geozoology

Age: Junior Graphic Novel

Genres: Fantasy

Steeped in fantasy and heartwarming adventures, this middle grade graphic novel takes the reader on a wild journey of friendship, family, and mythical creatures. With beautiful art and brilliant pacing, Lu and Ren's Guide to Geozoology is a must for fans of soft, cozy adventures.

2. Fantasticland

Age: Adult Fiction

Genres: Horror

Things don't get much darker than the events in Fantasticland. Told through a series of first-person interviews, Fantasticland tells the story of a Disney World-esque amusement park and what the young adult workers get up to when they find themselves cut off from the rest of the world and needing to defend themselves and their resources from one another. Prepare for gore, horror, and unreliable narrators. One of the best horror novels I've read in a long time.

3. Peter Darling

Age: Adult Fiction

Genres: Fantasy, enemies-to-lovers romance

A darker and grittier take on Peter Pan. Peter Pan and Wendy Darling are one in the same. When Peter returns to Neverland, now an adult, he finds that the only person who seems to have really missed him is Captain Hook. As the two return to their games, now much darker and with heavier consequences, Peter finds himself grappling with who he is, the lives he's left behind, and new feelings for his old rival. I really appreciated the way the author presents Peter and queerness in-general throughout the novel. The book softens as it goes, and I highly recommend.

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Book Review: Darkness at Dreamer Mountain

Author: Ryan Wolf

Release Date: April 1, 2025

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐/5

Note: Thank you to Rosen Publishing Group and Netgalley for an ARC of this title. All opinions are my own.

A great starting foray for young readers wanting to begin their novels-in-verse journey.

Darkness at Dreamer Mountain follows the Shiver Searchers, a paranormal hunting group, as they head into the abandoned amusement park, Dreamer Mountain. The characters find themselves confronting by their deepest fears in Dreamer Mountain and can’t get back out again until they face them.

A junior fiction novel, written in verse, Darkness at Dreamer Mountain gives young readers a taste of a more enjoyable side of poetry. In my experience, poetry taught in schools focuses so much on parsing through to find meaning, dissecting poems for meter or rhyme schemes, that the enjoyability of them often gets lost. This novel can be a great way to re-engage with younger readers with just enough spooks to really get them immersed.

Each poem moves smoothly from one to the next, the ending lines pulling a lot of weight in keeping the interest there for the next one. There’s a couple of complimentary pictures scattered throughout, and while the poems themselves are long, the lines are short and engaging.

I would have like to see a bit more variety in the poems’ structures, but as I’ve said, this is a nice introductory piece before students move up to more challenging reads. The poems are easy to digest and focus a lot on imagery.

I look forward to adding this to our library’s collection to give our young readers more variety in their poetry options.

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Book Review: Lu and Ren's Guide to Geozoology

Author: Angela Hsieh

Release Date: May 27, 2025

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐/5

Note: Thank you to HarperCollins Children's Books and Netgalley for an ARC of this title. All opinions are my own.

A delightful and artistic graphic novel about family, friendship, and learning to be your own person. Also, mountain-sized guinea pigs.

Lu’s adventuring grandmother has gone missing. When they receive a letter for her from a nearby village asking for help with their local wildlife, Lu and her friend Ren set out to help the village and find Lu’s grandmother.

I can’t describe exactly how this book makes me feel but from the fantasy elements to the art style, I couldn’t get enough. I’m so glad that this wasn’t a short blink-and-you’ll-miss-it graphic novel, but long, lavish, and soft.

My favorite parts were definitely seeing the fantasy critters, called geofauna. A fascinating mix of geological features and familiar, but larger than life, animals. From giant axolotls to dogs made of sunlight, the graphic novel introduces the reader to a variety of its fantasy wildlife. I’m so glad that instead of focusing on one creature, we were introduced to many through Lu and Ren’s travels. I’m blown away by Angela Hsieh’s creativity, and I want more.

Overall, I think the art style speaks for itself. The cover displays Hsieh’s beautiful style, and it’s maintained throughout. Each of the images are soft while also being bright and colorful. She utilizes backgrounds and space brilliantly. I particularly loved the way she used space to emphasize the terrain or the panels that relayed Lu’s frustration in translating her grandmother’s journal.

The graphic novel felt like the perfect length and managed to pack in a variety of messages for young readers. The main messages focused around family, Lu running to find hers while Ren tried to run away from the pressures of hers. The two girls learned independence traveling on their own and how to make amends for the hurt they cause. They learn to see things from new perspectives and overall, how to recognize and atone for their mistakes. I felt that Lu’s journey of growing and realizing that all people have faults and can’t be perfect was particularly well done. Each of these lessons come naturally and don’t feel forced into the narrative.

I can’t say enough good things about this book and don’t have any active criticisms. Hsieh has crafted a masterpiece here with real and engaging characters and environments, excellent pacing, and a compelling narrative and art styles.

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little booklets i made for bindeary using scraps i've been collecting for years! :)

yellow birds: empty stationnery case

elderberry and moss: publishing booklet

sun and stars: wrapping paper

paint palette and herbs: tea box

i shan't show you my pages because i've yet to aquire a press and a chisel... but soon!

[faitzreviews]

Book Review: Deerstalker

Author: Nicole M. Zaunbrecher

Release Date: April 15, 2025

Rating: ⭐⭐/5

Note: A big thank you to Indigo River Publishing and Netgalley for an ARC of this title. All opinions are my own.

The cover and the marketing blurb for Deerstalker do a lot of the heavy lifting because, frankly, this book doesn’t have a lot else going for it.

Deerstalker is the story of Jacques and Wendell, two young men in 17th century Germany. When Jacques stops in a small town during his travels, he discovers that the village has been cursed. As the book unravels, Jacques and his newfound friend, Wendell, must grapple with the town’s curse, its unwelcoming people, and a growing connection between the two of them.

While toted as a supernatural horror, I found this book to be rather soft. There’s some violence, but overall, the story glosses over those moments to delve deeper into the budding connection between Jacques and Wendell. The character’s interactions with one another are soft and indulgent, and the novel really plays into themes around friendship and found families. The novel is thick with the supernatural and delves into those aspects really well. Using the phases of the moon as a timeclock gave the novel solid grounding and a mystic edge.

That being said, the first half of the novel skips around a lot, beginning with the present and then occasionally jumping back to Wendell’s childhood and upbringing. These flashbacks, if you want to call them that, were important to the story, but felt very thrown in and disorganized. Additionally, for a book being propped up as a historical fiction, there were many issues with the novel’s language that really threw that tag aside. Sometimes characters would speak with what I’d call “old timey” language but then be talking like someone I met on the street an hour ago. Neither of those are the wrong way to go, but the novel really needed more consistency. The other thing that really bothered me was when shotguns showed up toward the end of the novel. Sure, early versions of them existed then, but shotgun wasn’t popularized as a term until the late 1770s as far as I’m aware (someone can correct me if I'm wrong here). I know I’m being nitpicky, but instances like these give the whole novel a more amateur feel, not what I would expect from a polished, ready-for-publication draft.

And, of course, I have to talk about the characters. I didn’t like any of them. They all felt like flat caricatures rather than real people that I could empathize with. We did get some emotion from Jacques throughout; he probably felt the least like a cardboard cutout. Jacques in a lot of ways became the reader’s eyes as he learned more about the village he’d stumbled into and its curse along with the reader. It gave him more dimension as he struggled to come to terms with who he was and worked to change into who he wanted to be. Everyone else acts just about how you expect them to with no growth, emotion, or interest.

Finally, I’m not sure who the target audience of this novel is. I’d assume adult (especially given that tantalizing romance is one of the descriptors), but it reads much younger. I’d say middle school, but the violence might bump it up to high school. The romances are all very PG (not that that’s a bad thing), and the language was all rather simplistic (and clean).

Overall, this book was a big miss for me. The cover is beautiful and the description intriguing, but the actual novel just didn’t live up to the expectations those two things set for it.

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Book Review: A Mother Always Knows

Author: Sarah Strohmeyer

Release Date: July 1, 2025

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐/5

Disclaimer: A big thank you to Harper Perennial and Paperbacks and Netgalley for an ARC of this title. All opinions are my own.

A twisting cold-case murder mystery with a splash of cultism for flavor.

Raised by her mother in a backwoods cult, Stella O’Neill has tried to put her childhood behind her. Even now, she has nightmares about the night she found her mother violently murdered in the woods, of the man in the antlers she saw near her mother’s corpse. In the present day, Stella’s mundane life is disrupted when she receives an email telling her that her time may be running out. Now Stella is on the run from the cultists who raised her while trying to uncover just what happened the night she found her mother murdered.

Meanwhile, Priti, a former runway model and now wife to one Ben Winslow, starts to uncover secrets that her husband may not be who he pretends to be. Twenty years ago, Ben was seen arguing with Rose Santos on the night she was murdered. Now, he claims to be wining and dining new potential investors while instead he’s in another state trying to contact Stella O’Neill.

Interspersed with Rose’s actions the night leading up to her murder, A Mother Always Knows follows Stella and Priti as they work to uncover their family’s secrets while trying not to be the story’s next victim.

A Mother Always Knows is a nice take on the traditional murder mystery format. There’s a lot of moving pieces to this story that, for the most part, Sarah Strohmeyer handled deftly. The book throws a lot of information at the reader constantly, and it’s up to the reader to piece them together. The pacing is well done; nothing felt superfluous, and I was constantly waiting on the next big reveal.

I appreciated the use of Rose’s chapters to really lay out the atmosphere and inner workings of the cult. This allowed Stella to have the foggy memory that comes with childhood while still giving the reader the much needed detail and context around Rose’s actions and Stella’s apprehensions. They also give a of humanity to Rose and better justify her actions both in joining the cult and wanting to leave it.

Stohmeyer did fantastic work in keeping the novel twisting and the atmosphere uncertain. When Stella’s paranoia starts setting in later in the book, I felt that with her. I, too, wondered who could be trusted and who couldn’t. I kept anticipating new forks in the road; this novel really takes to heart the idea that things aren’t always what they seem.

My only real criticism of this book is that because there were so many moving pieces, some of them were dropped. While there’s a couple of continuity errors, there are two that really bothered me and kept this from being a five-star read for me.

Characters are allowed to make bad decisions, but the ones made by these characters weren’t even logical.

Overall, a solid four star book for me. It's interesting and fast-paced with a solid atmosphere. A Mother Always Knows is definitely a fun read, especially if you're into the murder mystery genre, and sometimes fun is all that really matters anyway.