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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...
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The Reptile Room by Lemony Snicket (A Series of Unfortunate Events #2)

Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire are intelligent children. They are charming, and resourceful, and have pleasant facial features. Unfortunately, they are exceptionally unlucky.

In the first two books alone, the three youngsters encounter a greedy and repulsive villain, itchy clothing, a disastrous fire, a plot to steal their fortune, a lumpy bed, a deadly serpent, a large brass reading lamp, a long knife, and a terrible odour.

In the tradition of great storytellers, from Dickens to Dahl, comes an exquisitely dark comedy that is both literary and irreverent, hilarious and deftly crafted. Never before has a tale of three likeable and unfortunate children been quite so enchanting, or quite so uproariously unhappy.

TITLE: The Reptile Room
AUTHOR: Lemony Snicket
PUBLISHER: HarperCollins 
YEAR: 1999
LENGTH: 208 pages
AGE: Middle Grade
GENRE: Mystery
RECOMMENDED: No

Queer Rep Summary: No canon queer rep.

The Baudelaire Orphans are moved to live yet another relative and they are briefly able to enjoy reading, inventing, and biting things before Count Olaf makes another odious appearance.

One strength of the narrative style is that it places interesting and (assuming a younger reader) new vocabulary and concepts in a context where they're explained in a way that conveys what they literally mean and why it's important right now in the story. It's a kind of whimsy that takes seriously the reader's desire to know more and meets it with an okay story told in a memorable way.

This is the next stage in the children's terrible non-adventure and it doesn’t wrap up anything specific from THE BAD BEGINNING. It features a new storyline with several things that are introduced and resolved. It leaves a big thing for later books to pick up. The narrator is consistent with the last book. The story makes sense if you start here, but it’s likely better to start at the beginning.

It has more of a mystery/hijinks vibe in the middle when the children are trying to figure out how to avoid being alone with Olaf and how to make him reveal himself as a fraud. It's not amazing, overall, but it mostly dodges the big problems from the first book. 

CW for cursing (brief), ableism (brief), fatphobia (brief), transphobia (brief), grief, child abuse, emotional abuse, blood (not depicted), car accident, murder, major character death, death.

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A large snake is coiled around a small baby, the baby is biting the snake. Three people stand behind the scene, wearing terrified expressions


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