Rosh's Reviews

AUTHOR: Helen H. Wu ILLUSTRATOR: Zihua Yang GENRE: Children's Picture Book PUBLICATION DATE: January 7, 2025 RATING: 4.25 stars. In a Nutshell: A wonderful OwnVoices picture book about a young girl’s attempt at making the perfect pot for the lunar year. Great story, great life lessons, great illustrations, great representation, great information. Recommended! Plot Preview: Ping and her grandpa have brought home a little tangerine tree for the Lunar New Year. The tree is lovely but the pot it is planted in is plain. So Ping decides to make the perfect pot to go with the special tree. This task turns out to be tougher than she assumed as all her attempts fail in some way or the other. What if she cannot make the perfect pot in time for the celebrations? Will the new year be ruined? I like how the setting isn’t specified in the book. So the story can fit in any Asian location celebrating this special occasion as well as in an Asian-dominant locality in another country such as the...

ORIGINAL AUTHOR: Arthur Conan Doyle ADAPTOR & ILLUSTRATOR: Julien Choy SERIES: Manga Classics Sherlock Holmes Vol. 1 GENRE: Manga PUBLICATION DATE: January 21, 2025 RATING: 4.25 stars. In a Nutshell: A wonderful option for manga lovers to experience Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘A Study in Scarlet’. Faithful to the original. Full-colour graphics. Sherlock and Watson look too young to be convincing, but the rest is great. Plot Preview: The same story as ‘A Study in Scarlet’, the very first novel where ace detective Sherlock Holmes makes his appearance. This manga is faithful to the classic in every relevant way, skipping out only a few of the relatively unimportant scenes. Let me again begin by reminding manga newbies that this book is almost in traditional manga format, with the reverse right-to-left pattern of storyboarding. ‘Almost’ because unlike most manga, this is in full colour. ‘A Study in Scarlet’ is the first of the four Sherlock Holmes novels ( The rest of his detective outi...

AUTHOR: John Wiswell GENRE: Horror-Fantasy-Romance PUBLICATION DATE: April 2, 2024 RATING: April 2, 2024 In a Nutshell: A quirky fantasy-horror-sapphic-romance with a shapeshifting monster as the main character. Not my usual kind of read, but I found the concept interesting, and thankfully, the book mostly lived up to the potential. Recommended to those looking for an eccentric fantasy. Plot Preview: Shesheshen is a shapeshifting monster who had been hibernating in bliss until her sleep was disturbed by hunters intent on killing her. Using her present skills and her past kills to construct a body for herself, she somehow fools the hunters, even eats one of them, and escapes out of her home. Unfortunately, she ends up falling off a cliff, where she is rescued and nursed back to health by Homily, a kind human woman who has no idea about Shesheshen’s true identity. Unfortunately, the cliff isn’t the only thing Shesheshen fell over. She also falls in love with her saviour. But not the way ...

AUTHOR: Wallis Kinney GENRE: Fantasy-Romance. PUBLICATION DATE: October 8, 2024 RATING: 2 stars. In a Nutshell: An adult fantasy-romance about a witch who doesn’t know her true power. Lightly inspired by the myth of Persephone and Hades. Good enough ‘magic’, but plenty of ‘secrets’ and not enough ‘dark’. Too much of romance, not enough of fantasy. Gets a bit repetitive, though the ending works for the plot. This is an outlier review. Plot Preview: Thirty-one-year old Hecate Goodwin, ‘Kate’ to her close ones, is a hedge witch who, after her mother’s death a few months ago, lives with only her black cat for company in a secluded cottage. She enjoys the solitude sometimes, but her craving for human company makes her spend more time at an apothecary she co-owns. When her elder sister Miranda asks her to host the annual Halloween gathering for their coven, Kate’s sheltered life turns into chaos. As the date also happens to be Kate’s birthday, she needs to ensure that the gathering lives u...

AUTHOR: Lee Geum-yi TRANSLATOR: An Seonjae GENRE: Korean Historical Fiction PUBLICATION DATE: October 5, 2022 RATING: 2.8 stars. In a Nutshell: A historical fiction about a young girl from Korea who is sent to Hawaii as a “picture bride” and learns to navigate life in a new land. A good plot but somewhat disconnected writing. Not sure if the emotions were lost in translation. Still, a fairly informative read for those who enjoy this genre. Plot Preview: 1917. When young Willow is approached by the local matchmaker to become a ‘picture bride’ for a young Korean in Hawaii, she never imagined that the promises would not be entirely truthful. Though sad at leaving her mother and siblings behind, the eighteen-year-old sails for Hawaii with starry dreams in her eyes, along with a few other Korean girls who have also obtained grooms through posted photos. Life in the Hawaiian Korean community isn’t exactly as they envisaged, but with no chance of returning home, Willow has to make the best ...