Rosh's Reviews

AUTHOR: Rachel Walkley GENRE: Dual-Timeline Mystery PUBLICATION DATE: August 4, 2026 RATING: 2 stars. In a Nutshell: A dual-timeline novel set in Barbados and England. The storyline had great potential but the writing style – with the constant headjumping, overreliance on telling, and the unclear narrative angle – wasn't my cup of tea. This is an outlier review.  Plot Preview:  Amy has newly taken over as the chief conservator at the historical Terrington Hall. When an heirloom vanishes, she appoints Harrison as a security advisor. However, Harrison isn't there only for his professional assignment. He has ties with the Hurly family who owned the Hall, and he is determined to learn the truth behind an old-standing family scandal. Unknown to them both, there is yet another presence at Terrington Hall, one carrying more secrets than either of them are aware of.  The story comes to us broadly in the first-person perspective of the mysterious character over two timelines....

AUTHOR: Annie Proulx GENRE: Short Story PUBLICATION DATE: October 13, 1997 RATING: 2 stars. This story has its good moments ( the final scene was particularly poignant ), but I think my poor experience was a case of expectation mismatch. Based on the little I had heard about the movie, I thought this was a sensitive love story. So the crass words, the lustful portrayal of the relationship and the darker content such as physical violence caught me unawares. The conversation-dominant narrative also didn't help. This might be a good story for some readers ( especially those who favour strong prose ), but it wasn't my cup of tea. Mine is clearly an outlier opinion, so just make sure you go in with the right expectations if you wish to give this award-winning story a go. The story was first published in the New Yorker, for which it won the National Magazine Award for Fiction in 1998. The expanded version has been published in book form, but if you wish to read the original, you can...

AUTHOR: Cynthia Pelayo GENRE: Historical Fantasy PUBLICATION DATE: June 9, 2026 RATING: 2 stars. In a Nutshell: A historical fantasy-horror combining ‘Peter Pan’ and ‘IT’. Lyrical writing and vivid imagery. Extremely slow-paced in the first half. Repetitive. Confusing shifts in timeline. More about atmosphere than about gore. The final quarter is the strongest. Recommended to those who don’t seek instant gratification. The official blurb is inaccurate. Plot Preview: 1914. Twelve years after the incident that changed her life and her family forever, Wendy Darling works as a school teacher and also volunteers with a local hospital, reading to soldiers who have returned broken from the Western Front. One patient in particular is her regular subject; he is unable to wake up from his sleep despite all the care. One day, when he utters the name ‘Peter Pan’ in his sleep, Wendy is taken aback, recollecting the dark days from the past when multiple children went missing from Kensington Park and...

AUTHOR: Ella King GENRE: Contemporary Literary Fiction PUBLICATION DATE: August 23, 2022 RATING: 2 stars. In a Nutshell: A contemporary literary fiction novel portraying a highly toxic mother-daughter relationship. Character-oriented. Dark and disturbing. Plenty of triggers. Too much of deliberate secret-keeping and miscommunication, which sullies the overall impact. Might be a decent one-time read, as long as you aren’t looking for characters with redeeming qualities. But to me (and to my present state of mind), this felt like trauma p0rn. Plot Preview: Greenwich, UK. Seventeen-year-old Lily has just graduated from high school and is waiting to start college at Oxford. She is constantly on tenterhooks around her volatile Singaporean mother May. As her British father Charlie also can't keep his wife’s temper in check, it is up to Lily as the only other resident of the house to handle May’s devious tantrums, her elder siblings already having moved out. As May’s behaviour grows incre...

AUTHOR: Peter S. Beagle ADAPTOR: Peter B. Gillis ILLUSTRATORS: Renae De Liz & Ray Dillon SERIES: The Last Unicorn Comics 1-6. GENRE: Graphic Novel PUBLICATION DATE: January 25, 2011 RATING: 2 stars. In a Nutshell: A graphic novel adaptation of the classic fantasy story. Fabulous illustrations, but the story execution was too uneven to comprehend well. Perhaps I'd have liked this better had I read the actual novel instead of this illustrated version. This is an outlier review. Plot Preview: A beautiful unicorn has been living around in a forest for as long as she can remember. But when she overhears some wandering humans talking, she finds out that they believe there are no other unicorns in the world. To know the truth of whether she is indeed the last unicorn, she sets out on a journey. But it turns out to be a far more dangerous and revelatory quest than she had anticipated. The fifty-year-old children's classic novel was adapted in a comic series of six volumes. This gra...

AUTHOR: Frode Grytten TRANSLATOR: Alison McCullough NARRATOR: Colin Mace GENRE: Literary Fantasy PUBLICATION DATE: November 18, 2025 RATING: 2 stars. In a Nutshell: A literary fantasy-fiction set on a fjord in Norway. Introspective, not morbid. Too many characters, too meandering and monotonous for my liking. Some unnecessary triggering and crass content. Better for those who are more about prose than plot. Recommended, but not to all. Plot Preview: One morning, Nils Vik, a ferryman, wakes up and knows that it will be the day he dies. He still wants to follow his routine, so after his morning routine, he looks around his empty house for one last time, walks out, and boards his beloved boat that he has been ferrying on the fjord for many years. As he sets off, his dead dog joins him, and one by one, several other souls also make their way to Nils Vik one by one across each of the ferry stops. Each, including the dog, discusses several things from the past, sometimes offering the ferryma...

AUTHOR: Bruce Holsinger NARRATORS: Stacy Carolan and January LaVoy GENRE: Contemporary Dystopian Fiction PUBLICATION DATE: July 8, 2025 RATING: 2 stars. In a Nutshell: A contemporary drama about a family whose life changes after an accident. Interesting representation of technology (specifically AI) and its impact on real-life issues. Goes overboard on subplots and secrets. I expected to like it better given my antipathy towards excessive AI reliance, but the OTT drama and the annoying lead character were a turnoff. This is an outlier review. Plot Preview: The Cassidy-Shaw’s self-driving minivan gets into an accident when seventeen-year-old Charlie is in the driver’s seat, his father Noah is next to him working on his laptop, and his mother Lorelei (a renowned expert on AI ethics) and tween sisters Alice and Izzy are in the backseat busy with their own phones. The accident results in the deaths of the two people in the other car. Who is to blame for their deaths? The situation gets fur...

AUTHOR: Dawn McMillan ILLUSTRATOR: Ross Kinnaird GENRE: Children's Picture Book PUBLICATION DATE: September 1, 2012 RATING: 2 stars. In a Nutshell: A children’s picture book with some questionable inclusions. My low rating isn't because this talks about butts, but because I found it poorly written. Plot Preview: Written in first person, the young narrator is sad at having discovered a crack in his butt. He wonders where and when he might have broken it. (He’s fairly certain a fart caused it to split.) He then mulls over various butt options he could try as a replacement, going from the arty to the outrageous. But will these options work on a broken bottom? It is a truth universally acknowledged that kids like good butt stories. And this one seemed to have the makings of one. But I don’t get its appeal. Honestly, the title got me cracking up. I was hoping for a cheeky story about how the boy discovers that all butts are cracked. However, while the story started off excellently, ...

AUTHOR: Colm Tóibín GENRE: Short Story Collection PUBLICATION DATE: March 31, 2026 RATING: 2.1 stars. In a Nutshell: A literary short-story collection by the acclaimed Irish writer. Interesting variety of characters and situations. A bit haphazard in plot development. Flat in character development. Bleak. Feels very lengthy because of the slow pacing and meandering structure. Disappointing endings at times. Didn’t work much for me. This collection comprises nine stories, a few of which have been published before in other publications. The stories are set across multiple countries, Ireland included. I had grabbed this collection mainly for two reasons. One, I have enjoyed a majority of the literary works written by contemporary Irish writers and want to explore more Irish fiction. Two, I liked one short story written by this author for Amazon Original Stories. ( ‘The Shortest Day’ ) However, this collection just wasn’t for me. For one, the 300 pages seem endless as each story is terribl...

AUTHOR: Anna Rose Johnson GENRE: Middle-grade Historical Fiction PUBLICATION DATE: March 5, 2024 RATING: 2 stars. In a Nutshell: An OwnVoices middle-grade historical fiction about an orphan sent to live with a new family. Great use of the lighthouse setting. Annoying main character. Good secondary characters. Slightly repetitive and bland storyline. Minimal Ojibwe representation. I hope it will work better for the target age group. Plot Preview: 1912, Michigan. As eleven-year-old orphan Lucy Landry has no one to take care of her, she is sent to foster with a family selected by her late guardian. The Martins reside in a lighthouse in the middle of the gigantic Lake Superior. Lucy has been frightened of the water ever since her sailor father died at sea, but she doesn’t have any choice. Though the Martins are strangers to her, they seem kindhearted. However, there are too many of them and there is too much work to do, so Lucy struggles to fit in her new home. But one day, she learns that...

AUTHOR: Luis Amavisca ILLUSTRATOR: Gusti GENRE: Children's Picture Book PUBLICATION DATE: April 21, 2026 RATING: 2 stars. In a Nutshell: A picture book about a young superhero who longs for anonymity and ordinary life. Started relevant, but ended in a direction I didn’t see coming. Cute graphics though. Plot Preview: SuperFreddy is a superawesome superhero who saves someone every single day. This makes him very popular in town, with everyone asking his autograph or wanting him to show off his superpower. SuperFreddy feels sad that he has no privacy and no time for personal fun. When his superhero costume is given to the tailor to be fixed, Freddy has to roam around the city in his ordinary clothes, and no one recognises him. Thus he gets a taste of anonymity and enjoys it. Can he now return to being a superhero? This story was originally published in Spanish in 2025 under the title ‘SuperFede’. This English translation is to be released in April 2026. I loved the concept of a super...

AUTHOR: Tory Henwood Hoen NARRATOR: Barrie Kreinik GENRE: Contemporary Drama PUBLICATION DATE: December 2, 2025 RATING: 2 stars. In a Nutshell: A contemporary drama partly focussing on memory and memories. Expected to like this much more, but it felt more like a Hallmark depiction of Alzheimer’s. Many of the plot inclusions weren't my cup of tea. This is an outlier opinion. Plot Preview: Though twenty-six-year-old Cricket is doing decently at her job with a modern wellness company, she feels like she is weighed down under the burdens of a past tragedy and of a present worry: her father’s Alzheimer’s has worsened. When her elder sister Nina declares that they need to move their dad Arthur into a hospice-care facility, Cricket decides to use his health as the catalyst she needed to make a change in her life. She quits her job and moves to their home in the Adirondacks to become Arthur’s caregiver, and in the process, hopes to heal the old rift between them, though he doesn’t rememb...

AUTHOR: Hans Christian Andersen GENRE: Fairytale, Classic. PUBLICATION DATE: May 8, 1835 RATING: 2 stars. In a Nutshell: A classic fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. Hasn’t aged well, though the comic edition I read resolves many of the issues in the original story. I read this for nostalgia and came away questioning my younger self’s reading choices. 🤭 Reading ‘Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil’ reminded me of the existence of this story that I had read in my childhood. I didn’t recollect anything about the plot except that it had three dogs with huge eyes. So I decided to reread it again after all these years. Oh boy! Present-me is convinced that Past-me was so fascinated by the dogs that she ignored all the other red flags. 😏 This is the first story published by Danish storyteller Hans Christian Andersen in 1835, and it has some elements in common with Aladdin. Reading this tale made me realise why it is not more popular. It is not at all a happy story for anyone except the ...

AUTHOR: Marie-Fleur Borac ILLUSTRATOR: Sonny Lata Yiu GENRE: Children's Illustrated Story. PUBLICATION DATE: November 6, 2025 RATING: 2 stars. In a Nutshell: An illustrated storybook about three unlikely characters coming together for a quest. The story is sadly a bit flat and disjointed. The hand-painted illustrations are the best feature of this book. If parents can add some embellishments to the events, this indie offering might work as a decent readaloud option. Plot Preview: When a butterfly’s treasure is stolen by an evil witch, the distraught butterfly decides to go to her house deep in the forest to get it back. He doesn’t have a plan but hopes to make one soon. Along the way, an anxious chickadee and a vain unicorn join him on his quest, though both of them do it for their own selfish reasons. How can the three work together to outwit the witch and get the treasure back? At the surface level, this book shows a lot of promise. Fighting for what is rightfully yours even whe...