Skip to main content

Featured

The Graceview Patient by Caitlin Starling

Margaret lives with a rare autoimmune condition that has destroyed her life, leaving her isolated. It has no cure, but she’s making do as best she can—until she’s offered a fully paid-for spot in an experimental medical trial at Graceview Memorial. The conditions are simple, if grueling: she will live at the hospital as a full-time patient, subjecting herself to the near-total destruction of her immune system and its subsequent regeneration. The trial will essentially kill most of, but not all of her. But as the treatment progresses and her body begins to fail, she stumbles upon something sinister living and spreading within the hospital. Unsure of what's real and what is just medication-induced delusion, Margaret struggles to find a way out as her body and mind succumb further to the darkness lurking throughout Graceview's halls. PUBLISHER: St. Martin's Press YEAR: 2025 LENGTH: 320 pages AGE: Adult GENRE: Horror RECOMMENDED: Highly Queer Rep Summary: No canon queer rep. *I...

Binti: The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor (Binti, #3)

Binti: The Night Masquerade is a fitting end to the Binti trilogy by Nnedi Okorafor. The combination of action-packed climax with a lot of cool-down and aftercare makes the trilogy, and this stage of Binti's journey, feel complete in a way I wasn't expecting, but I appreciate.

The pacing is strange to me. I like how it concluded, but I was startled by spending almost half the book on what felt like falling action and conclusion, with the dramatic high-point nearly dead center. This, for me, cements my feeling that these shouldn’t be read as three separate books, but read together in short succession as one large story. When taken that way, the proportions feel better for every part of the story. After so much trauma, it felt good to have so much aftercare and literal healing be giving a large section.

Overall, I liked this book in particular and the trilogy in general. Though, I kept feeling off-kilter because I haven’t read a story that felt like this before, and I think that’s a good thing for me as a reader, especially when it was done so well.

The therapist’s perspective was relayed so directly in the end that it was a little jarring, but I think it makes sense when part of Binti’s problems were that so much that was important was unsaid, and she had a lot to process. It works, but I definitely didn't expect the tone, nor the brevity of that interaction right at the end.

It’s far from my favorite series, but I would recommend it.

Comments