Gav Reads

A Web Log of Reading

Tag: book-review

  • Novel Review: The Unfathomable Curse (The Undetectables #3) by Courtney Smyth [2025]

    Spoilers: None
    Genre: Paranormal Mystery / Urban Fantasy Detective
    Format: Paperback
    Source: Bought
    Rating: Liked (4★)

    Smyth is growing as a writer with each book, and The Unfathomable Curse is the best in the series so far.

    In this instalment, The Undetectables detective agency faces its most personal case yet, and they are on the clock to solve it before a fatal deadline.

    Will they solve the mystery in time, or will they be left with more questions and corpses?

    That depends on whether they can get the Ghoul Council to react without first holding a meeting about it.

    From the opening pages, Smyth is whisking the characters between gravesites, witness interviews, and stakeouts, while coping with a still-not-right Theo and running two investigations.

    What is brilliant is that this book focuses on Cornelia. I was a bit miffed reading the last one because Smyth moved Mallory away from the centre of attention and made Diana the main focus.

    Though this didn’t occur to me until I was a good chunk in, I now see that each book gives one of them their moment in the spotlight. I can see this choice means the reader gets to know and understand each of them better by getting into their heads. I want to go back and re-read the earlier books now that I know Cornelia better.

    Now I understand why this is a four-book series.

    It’s one of those books where it’s better not to think too deeply about the structure of the world-building.

    For example, the Ghoul Council burying itself in paperwork rather than addressing the crisis directly explains why Cornelia’s relationship with her family is the way it is (her parents head the council) and helps move the plot along by their inaction, so the detectives can investigate without their help. I can understand why Smyth chose to do this, but it can feel off because they seem constrained by the plot rather than by their own behaviour.

    The only other issue is that sometimes scenes with the main characters turn into isolated bubbles where the side characters are forgotten. There are moments where the other people in the scene should be having quite a strong response to what has just been revealed to them.

    For example, late in the book, actions have been taken that I would demand be repaired, but no one demands anything, and no one talks about it. Instead, those other characters just seem to vanish from the conversation and the scene itself – to be fair, I might have missed the description of it happening, but it shouldn’t have been a throwaway line if it was mentioned.

    Given this book’s ending and Theo’s behaviour throughout, the final instalment will almost certainly focus on his thoughts, feelings, and motivations.

    It’s one of those books where you get towards the end and wonder why you’ve got so many pages left. It’s because Smyth has more surprises to spring. The revelations are well thought out and presented in surprising and shocking ways.

    The ideas introduced here also cast the earlier mysteries in a new, disturbing light.

    My love for Mallory, Diana, and Cornelia is only getting stronger. Though I wonder if I’ll ever like Theo again.

    If you, too, were captivated by the lives of Mallory, Diana and Cornelia and enjoy seeing them work a case, then you’re going to enjoy this.

    I have no idea what the final book will reveal. Smyth has put many pieces in play by seeding them throughout the books. I predict I’ll be pleasantly shocked by what the 4th and final book, The Unsolvable Case, reveals.

    Rating Scale: Loved/Inducted (Personal Canon, 4.5-5★) • Liked/Passing Through (Not Quite Canon, 3.75-4.25★) • Impactful but Flawed/Missed Swings (2.75-3.5★) • Reshelved (Soft DNF) • Not for Me (1-2.5★ or Hard DNF)

  • Novel Review: There is No Antimemetics Division by qntm [2025]

    Spoilers: None
    Genre: Weird/Cosmic Horror
    Format: Hardback
    Source: Bought
    Rating: Inducted (4.5–5★, Recommended)

    What if something was eating your memories? You were also aware that it was happening but didn’t know what it had taken, or what you were doing to stop it, because it wasn’t just your memories it was taking, but everyone else’s too? And what if it wasn’t just one thing but lots of ‘things’ that could affect people’s memories? Then what would you do?

    We are used to ideas (memes) breaking containment.

    …an internet meme is a concept or piece of media that spreads via the internet. It could be anything – a video, hashtag or image…They can come from social interactions, pop culture, or political views.

    Source: MEMES: WHAT ARE THEY?

    Memes change the world, and anti-memes do too. qntm’s There Is No Antimemetics Division explores what happens when ideas don’t spread, but instead resist being remembered and slip from the mind.

    An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it.

    Source: Antimemetics Division Hub – SCP Foundation

    It opens with Marie Quinn walking into a meeting that feels wrong, and from there, everything feels out of place.

    qntm takes the weirdness of VanderMeer’s Area X novels, combines it with the government bureaucracy of Stross’s The Laundry series, and puts it in a pressure cooker, releasing the results in a series of intense, interlinked sections.

    As a novel that plays with memory, it has its own logic, but it also has jarring moments. It takes what you’ve been told from earlier scenes and twists and changes them, which doesn’t automatically mean you’ve misremembered them.

    It originated as a web serial, and I wonder if that’s why it occasionally feels fragmented. Whether the fragmentation is accidental or deliberate, they add to the uncertainty and enhances the creeping horror signposted throughout.

    As a reader, I don’t think you’re expected to ‘keep’ up with the changes, but you do need to accept that the reality you now see is the one in that moment.

    Cosmic horror is, at its heart, about the uncaring nature of the universe and the entities who are bigger than us, but qntm makes this personal for Quinn, and by extension, the reader. Quinn is perhaps cruelly given back memories she’d lost, only to have them taken away again.

    This is a clever novel; it may frustrate and infuriate, but it builds toward a moment via the mantra:

    No, this is not your first day.

    Recommended for readers interested in the 2026 Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist and for fans of Jeff VanderMeer, Charles Stross, and creeping existential horror.

  • Review: The Somewhat Wicked Witch of Brigandale by C. M. Waggoner [2026]

    Spoilers: None
    Genre: Fantasy
    Format: Hardback
    Source: Bought
    Rating: Adored (6★)

    I impulse-bought The Somewhat Wicked Witch of Brigandale after tylersshelf posted a TikTok review saying, ‘This book is so silly, so campy. It gives you all those fairy-tale vibes but with adult themes.’ Given the heavier reading I’d been doing, I bought it and bumped it right up my TBR. It’s rare that humour works for me in a novel.

    His review was spot on — I loved it for being fun, and now I’m keen to read another of his recommendations, The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer.

    It’s a 6/5 ⭐️ read that has set the bar high for the rest of my 2026 reading.

    It’s brilliant. Waggoner takes the leave-a-baby-that-is-probably-a-king-with-a-witch-to-raise trope and has fun with it. Drawing on humour and concepts that feel schooled by Pratchett’s approach to fairy tales and witches (with their practical approach to problem-solving combined with keen-eyed observations on human nature), Waggoner cranks up the narrative snark and uses it to tell the story of a mother (Gretsella) who will bring down a kingdom just to see her son (Bradley) happy. 

    The playfulness begins in the chapter subheadings and extends into the footnotes and descriptions, all of which are carried by the narrator’s voice, which reminds me of a sassy magical mirror.

    The characters have substance, the cast is varied, and Waggoner sticks with fairy-tale‑like scenarios, adds twists so they feel fresh, and it works. The key reason for picking this up was the queer love story, which is sweet, doesn’t dominate, and lets it be just two people in love. It is utterly cosy.

    The pacing, with the interludes and asides, feels like it’s always moving things forward or giving you fun snippets. It’s smart, charming, and cosy, and at 210 pages, it doesn’t outstay its welcome. The ending hints that further tales of Gretsella and Bradley may follow. I, for one, vote they do.

    As you can tell, I was charmed — maybe enchanted — by it. Regardless, I now feel compelled to enjoy it all over again, as I’ve never giggled this much at a book, and I hope you do too.

  • Review: Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman [2020]

    Spoilers: Mild (premise, themes, and early plot developments)
    Genre: Science Fiction, LitRPG
    Format: Hardback
    Source: Bought
    Rating: Liked

    On my copy of Dungeon Crawler Carl (DCC), under the dust jacket, it says, ‘You Will Not Break Me’. Whatever else you think of Carl, this sentiment holds true through book one and, based on what happens here, through the series as a whole.

    DCC is one of the most popular titles in the relatively new genre label of LitRPG, and it deserves that status.

    It focuses on Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, who just happen to be outside in the right place when the game commences and wipes out most of humanity.

    As a reward for surviving this near-extinction-level event, all new players, Crawlers, must survive a series of puzzles, skirmishes, and occasional boss battles against “things” that are solely there to kill them. Their survival mostly depends on getting stronger and killing “things”, even if those things turn out to be their fellow humans. 

    I had to pause reading DCC around 1/3 of the way in, as I grew uncomfortable with Carl’s initial portrayal.

    I am very much a ‘I care about the people more than the system’ person. Carl kills a confused, mutated woman and a crèche of goblin babies, showing little reaction to either his actions or his foes’ deaths.

    I may have prematurely concluded that ‘I understand what DCC is trying to do, and I don’t think finishing it will change that—but maybe I’ll come to like it.’

    But thinking more about the fact that it falls within the system-apocalypse microgenre, and reading around the subject, I wanted to push on and see if I was getting the full picture. 

    After picking it back up and reading more, I did. I saw Carl as stoic and practical in his response — he later reflects that they are all there to die. Given Carl’s background as a Coast Guard veteran, I wondered if that’s just how they make them. His cat does act like an arsehole. But that’s a cat for you, especially one with trophies and rosettes, though even she acknowledges that Carl is trying to do the right thing in challenging circumstances.

    Given his mantra of ‘You Will Not Break Me’, I started taking notes on when Carl was sympathetic or heroic in the face of everything he’s been pitted against. I feel the evidence shows he’s a ‘good guy’ in a bad world, and it makes you wonder what you would do. Just wait to die? Or try to survive and hope?

    The ‘cleverness’ of this work, and perhaps of the genre, is that it takes the core mechanics of an RPG and reveals the brutal reality behind them. The system is against him—he’s there to kill and, ultimately, to die, in an entertaining way.

    And that’s what video games do: they work in the abstract; they are pixels on a screen, and now there’s blood on the dungeon floor.

    This isn’t a game. It’s real life, with all the complexities and the games within games that we all experience.

    Carl gets to see that as he’s introduced to more than one of the Wizards behind the curtain. And in later scenes, Matt draws Carl into what the game represents: the politics, the promises and the control it exerts over everyone, because almost everyone is a victim. 

    As a video game-to-page adaptation, I can’t fault it. The explanations of weapons, bosses, and other baddies are good, and the AI overseer is funny, often inappropriately so. It feels like a video game experienced through all five senses.

    You have to assume that everyone is going to die, including the crawlers and the NPCs (non-playable characters), even if they themselves might not know it. It’s a story told against that injustice, focusing on a character who’s trying his best, given his upbringing and background.

    There is a lot to enjoy. The interactions, the characters, the system, the politics, and the backdrop against which it’s set. 

    Am I going to read the next one? Yes. And the one after that. I’m told that books 2 and 3 need to be read together to get the point Dinniman is trying to make. 

    I don’t think it’s a celebratory story; it’s brutal and shows the reality of RPGs while trying to satirise late-stage capitalism, which values money and entertainment over anything an individual might experience. 

    Do I expect it to soften its use of problematic gazes (see below)? Hopefully. I hear that it does as the series continues. 

    I guess we’ll see. 

    Addendum:  

    As a satire on capitalism, it’s complicated. Carl and probably the author, Matt, see the world through a white male gaze. I know more about the anatomy of his encounters with women than I wish. I’m not sure he ever mentions the guns, pecs, and thighs of any of the men he encounters.

    As other commentary has pointed out, it’s great to call out what capitalism represents, but it might still rely too heavily on the language and framing of the worldview it’s trying to satirise, which makes it hard to distinguish between commentary and ingrained bias. 

  • Review: Cosmic Love at the Multiverse Hair Salon by Annie Mare [2025]

    Spoilers: Mild (premise, themes, and early plot developments)
    Genre: Science Fiction  
    Format: Paperback 
    Source: Bought 
    Rating: Loved

    Would you fight for a love that feels right, even if it’s for someone you’ve never met? Not because you don’t want to, but because time has separated you by 6 months? Sounds crazy, right? But that’s what happens to Tressa Fay Robeson in Cosmic Love at the Multiverse Hair Salon.

    Tressa Fay is a successful and popular hairdresser known for giving her clients life-changing hairstyles. She is still recovering from a break-up when a random text message sends her across town on a date, only to be stood up at the bar. Well, not exactly stood up. Her date tells her where she is, but they aren’t there. And they didn’t stand each other up. They were both at the bar. It’s just that Tressa Fay is in the present and her date (Meryl) was waiting for her six months ago. Tressa Fay tells her friends that she’s texting a hot woman in the past, and they believe her.

    From there, you and the characters enter a trust bubble. You have to trust that Meryl and Tressa Fay can communicate via text as the characters do, and believe that it’s really happening. We spend the opening section of the book focusing solely on Tressa Fay in the present. This shows us that, in the past, Tressa Fay hadn’t met Meryl and confirms she wasn’t supposed to. But Meryl doesn’t want to be trapped in a future where she disappears and doesn’t get to love Tressa Fay, even if it has consequences.

    I think Annie Mare does an outstanding job not only of bouncing between timelines but also of guiding the reader through complex scientific concepts. Mare navigates them expertly because she’s hyper-focused on the emotional connections shared by all the characters.

    This is Mare’s and the book’s strength. She was happy to hold my heart in her grip. I cared about all of their futures with all my heart. I teared up, held my breath, and crossed my fingers for the right things to happen.

    But the science isn’t the driver of the story; the driver is two people who are passionately in love, desperate to meet and desperate not to lose each other, but it’ll only happen if they play the science right.

    With seemingly nothing to lose but everything to gain, they start messing with time.

    All their pasts and futures become tangled; their connections are so tenuous because the present could be changed, and they could be severed from each other at any moment.

    They have the power to tell Meryl her future, and I kept wondering which upcoming past event they would choose to change and how it would manifest in the present. This tightened her fist around my heart like a vice for almost the entire time.

    It’s a hard premise to land — how much of the mystery do you explain? Do you go where the readers expect, or where you expect? I think the concept for resolving the overlapping time was masterful; I was expecting one last dramatic revelation, and it didn’t come, and what happened as a result didn’t work for me.

    Mare, I think, wanted a specific tone for the ending, but instead of leaning into the danger of their experimentation, she played it too safe. All the tension I had been holding slipped away, leaving me slightly deflated.

    Cosmic Love at the Multiverse Hair Salon, to me, is a meditation on the nature of love. The story itself feels like an instructor. I was its student. Because Meryl doesn’t want to be trapped in a future where she disappears and never gets to love Tressa Fay, every observation felt like something I needed to study and hold onto. There were so many observations I felt compelled to write down to study later. I loved watching them and taking notes as I explored, changed, loved and laughed — I just can’t promise you’ll like the last few pages.

    Recommended for anyone who enjoys (or thinks they’ll enjoy) a mix of sapphic yearning and science fiction.

    Note: I rate on a four-tier scale: Loved (4.5–5★), Liked (3.75–4.25★), Mixed (2.75–3.5★), and Not for me (1–2.5★).