I Am Not Done None of This Is True and I Have Thoughts That Cannot Wait

Disclaimer: This is not a review. I have not finished this book. I am writing this from the middle of it, slightly unhinged, with a cold coffee going warm beside me. No spoilers for anything I haven't reached yet — but also, do not come to me with the ending. I am not ready. I will never be ready.

Lisa Jewell wrote a slow burn so slow it takes half the book to realise you're already on fire. A mid-read dispatch from someone who should be sleeping.

There is a specific kind of book that does something quietly sinister in its opening chapters. It does not alarm you. It does not grab you by the collar and announce itself. It simply pulls up a chair, sits across from you, and begins talking in a very normal, pleasant voice while your brain slowly registers that something in the room has changed and you cannot identify what it is or when it happened.

None of This Is True by Lisa Jewell is that book.

I am not done it. I want to be clear about that upfront, both as a disclaimer and as an explanation for why I am writing this at all. I cannot wait until I finish it. I have things to say right now, in this moment, while the tension is still sitting in my chest like a stone I accidentally swallowed. This is less a review and more a dispatch from the middle of a psychological thriller that has been slowly, methodically, and rather brilliantly dismantling my sense of who to trust for the last two hundred pages.

We will do a proper review when I am done. Assuming I survive.

What This Book Is (The Setup, No Spoilers)

Two women. Same birthday. Same pub. Same night.

Alix Summer is a true crime podcaster — successful, polished, the kind of woman whose life looks assembled rather than lived in. Josie Fair is none of those things. She is quiet, unremarkable, slightly off in a way you cannot immediately name. She tells Alix she has a story to tell. She tells Alix she is on the cusp of great changes. She tells Alix she would be the perfect subject for her next podcast series.

Alix, who is a journalist and therefore constitutionally incapable of leaving a story alone, agrees.

This is, as you may have already gathered from the title of the book, a decision that does not go well.

Josie's life appears to be strange and complicated, and although Alix finds her unsettling, she can't quite resist the temptation to keep making the podcast. Slowly she starts to realise that Josie has been hiding some very dark secrets, and before she knows it, Josie has inveigled her way into Alix's life — and into her home.

That last part — into her home — is where I currently am, and I need you to understand that every page of it is deeply uncomfortable in a way that is completely deliberate and completely effective. Lisa Jewell knows exactly what she is doing. She is doing it to us on purpose. We are not victims. We are willing participants. This is somehow worse.

The Slow Burn, Explained for People Who Almost Put It Down in Chapter Three

I understand the impulse. The first quarter of this book is not fast. It is not packed with incident. It is Alix and Josie having conversations, Josie's life being gradually revealed in pieces, and a low-grade sense of wrongness that hums underneath every scene without ever resolving into anything you can point at.

This is the whole mechanism of the book and it is brilliant and I did not fully appreciate it until I was deep enough in to see what Jewell was building. The beginning builds character and atmosphere, but the pace accelerates dramatically in the second half, becoming unputdownable. The shift from a slow-burn character study to a full-throttle thriller is seamless.

What she is doing in those early chapters is training you. She is teaching you how Josie moves — the specific texture of her, the way she presents herself, the gap between what she says and what sits just beneath it. She is building your instincts about this woman so that when those instincts are confirmed, and then subverted, and then confirmed again in a different way, you feel it in your body and not just your brain.

It starts slow but the sinister feeling tingles beneath your neck, warning you bad things are about to come — and sooner, all hell breaks loose. It's like listening to a concerto that slowly raises its tempo, and as you reach the ending, you hear the crescendo.

I am not at the crescendo yet. I am at the part where the tempo is unmistakably rising and I keep reading one more chapter telling myself it's fine and it is absolutely not fine.

On Josie Fair, Who Is a Lot

Josie is the kind of character who would register immediately as a red flag in real life and whom you would clock within minutes of meeting. She is too eager. Too interested. Too available. She mirrors Alix's energy back at her with just enough delay that it reads as admiration rather than calculation — and it is only because you are reading a psychological thriller that you see it for what it is. In real life, you might not.

That is the uncomfortable truth at the centre of this book. The reason Josie gets as far as she does is not because Alix is naive. It is because Josie is very good at this — and because the qualities that make Alix good at her job (curiosity, openness, the inability to leave a story unfinished) are also the qualities that make her vulnerable to someone who knows how to exploit them.

If you have ever read anything we've written about how emotional predators actually operate — the mirroring, the gradual boundary erosion, the way they make you feel responsible for their wellbeing before you've noticed the shift — Josie Fair is a case study. She is fiction, but she is not invented. People like this exist. They are just rarely this well-written.

The Podcast Structure Is Doing A Lot of Heavy Lifting

Jewell structures the book as a kind of true crime documentary — alternating between present-tense narrative and interview excerpts from the podcast, interspersed with witness accounts and outside perspectives that slowly fill in what the main narrative withholds. It is a format that works on two levels simultaneously: it tells you something is going to go very wrong (because why else would there be a documentary) while keeping you in the dark about exactly what and exactly how.

Jewell intentionally wants readers to feel unmoored, especially considering the title of the book, because it's preparing us for some major twists or lies to be revealed, so we are constantly on edge.

The title is doing enormous work. None of This Is True is both a statement about the story and an instruction to the reader — do not get comfortable with what you think you know, because the ground is being moved under you at all times and you will only notice it has shifted after the fact. I have noticed it shifting. I am still reading. I have been emotionally outwitted by a Lisa Jewell novel and I am not even embarrassed about it.

This sits neatly alongside our The Housemaid comparison piece as further evidence that the domestic thriller genre, when done properly, is doing something genuinely interesting about women, power, and the particular violence of being underestimated. Josie is underestimated. Alix underestimates her. The reader underestimates her. That is the engine of the whole thing.

Where I Am and What I Need You to Know

I am close to the end. I can feel it in the way the chapters have shortened and the sentences have gotten tighter and Jewell is rationing information the way you ration the last of something good. Every answer she gives me opens two more questions. Every scene I think I understand reveals a layer I missed the first time.

I do not know how this ends. I have theories. I am not sharing them here because putting them in writing makes them feel too real and I am not ready to be wrong in public.

What I can tell you is this: if you are a person who reads thrillers and you have not read this one, you are doing yourself a disservice. If you started it and found the opening slow, go back. The slow is the point. The slow is the whole setup for everything that follows. It doesn't have quite the same wild twists and turns that some mystery-suspense novels do, but it definitely has a few good tricks up its sleeve — and mostly you will find yourself riveted by the story the whole way through.

And if you have read it and you know how it ends: say nothing. I am almost there. I will be back with a full review, a dramatic conclusion, and whatever emotional wreckage Lisa Jewell has left me in.

For now I am going to go finish this book instead of writing about it.

— BrewtifulLiving.com | Brutal truths, Brewtifully packaged.

The Manor of Dreams Review: A House That Remembers Everything You Want to Forget

Some houses are haunted by ghosts.
Others are haunted by unresolved family conversations that should have happened twenty years ago but did not.

The Manor of Dreams is about the second kind.

Written by Christina Li, this gothic family novel opens with death, inheritance, and the kind of silence that makes a house feel heavier than it should. It promises secrets, trauma, and slow-burning dread. It delivers all of that. Sometimes too much of it.

This is a book where everyone is haunted. The house knows it. The characters know it. The reader figures it out by page ten and spends the next several hundred pages waiting for everyone else to catch up.

The Setup: A Will Designed to Ruin Everyone’s Week

The story begins, as many gothic novels do, with a famous woman dying and leaving behind unfinished business.

Vivian Yin was a celebrated Chinese American actress. The first to win an Oscar. A woman whose success came with a carefully curated image and a long list of things she refused to talk about.

When Vivian dies, her three daughters assume they will inherit the family mansion in Southern California. The house is large, decaying, and deeply unpleasant in a way that suggests it has opinions.

They do not inherit it.

Instead, the house is left to another family. A family connected to Vivian’s past in ways that immediately feel uncomfortable and unresolved. The kind of decision that guarantees tension, resentment, and at least one dramatic confrontation in a hallway.

Both families end up living in the house together. No one is happy about it. The house seems thrilled.

The House: Not Just Old, But Judgmental

The Manor of Dreams is less a setting and more a witness.

It creaks at the wrong times. Rooms feel wrong. Doors close when no one touches them. The house remembers things the characters would rather forget, and it does not keep those memories to itself.

This is not a jump-scare haunted house. No one is dragged screaming down staircases. The horror is quieter. The kind that shows up in reflections, dreams, and half-remembered conversations.

The house behaves like someone who has been waiting years for everyone to come back so it can finally bring things up.

Spoilers Start Here, Because Subtlety Is Overrated

As the novel moves between timelines, Vivian Yin’s legacy begins to crack.

Her rise to fame was not clean. It was strategic. She learned early that being talented was not enough. She had to be exceptional, controlled, and careful. She had to decide which parts of herself were acceptable and which would be buried.

She buried a lot.

Relationships. Loyalties. Versions of herself that did not fit the narrative Hollywood wanted. People who reminded her of where she came from and what she gave up.

The family that inherits the house represents those buried choices. Their presence is not symbolic. It is confrontational. They are proof that Vivian’s past never disappeared. It simply waited.

The ghosts in the house are not random. They are specific. They cling to moments of betrayal, silence, and abandonment. They do not seek revenge. They seek acknowledgment.

Which, unfortunately, no one is very good at offering.

The Daughters: Inheriting the Emotional Debt

Vivian’s daughters are left to clean up a legacy that looks impressive from the outside and deeply damaged from within.

They are angry. Not loudly. Not neatly. They are angry in the way adult children often are when they realize their parent’s success came at a personal cost they never agreed to pay.

The house forces them to confront who their mother really was. Not the icon. Not the legend. The woman who chose ambition over intimacy and control over connection.

None of them handle this well.

The novel does not pretend they should. Grief here is messy, passive-aggressive, and deeply inconvenient.

The Cultural Layer: Success With Conditions

Where The Manor of Dreams is strongest is in its examination of ambition within the Chinese American experience.

Vivian’s choices are not framed as evil. They are framed as calculated. She understood the rules of the world she was trying to survive in. She followed them. She won.

And she paid for it.

The book understands that success is not neutral for marginalized figures. It often requires compromise, silence, and distance from community. Vivian’s legacy is proof of that cost.

The house becomes a physical reminder of what happens when ambition is built on suppression. When identity is shaped by external approval. When survival demands self-erasure.

This part of the novel is sharp. It knows exactly what it wants to say. It says it without apology.

The Queer Thread: Soft, Sad, Slightly Neglected

There is a queer love story woven through the novel, stretching across timelines and secrecy.

It is tender. It is quiet. It is emotionally honest.

It is also underdeveloped.

The relationship serves the book’s themes well, reinforcing repression and longing, but it never fully steps into the light. It feels like something the novel wanted to honor but did not fully trust itself to explore.

This is not offensive. It is disappointing in a subtle way. Like being handed a beautifully wrapped gift box that turns out to be empty inside.

The Real Problem: Too Much House, Too Many Rooms

The biggest issue with The Manor of Dreams is not its ambition. It is its lack of restraint.

The novel wants to talk about everything. Family trauma. Cultural identity. Fame. Queerness. Generational guilt. Memory. Ghosts. Hollywood. Inheritance.

All of these themes are interesting. Not all of them are given the space they deserve.

Scenes sometimes end just as they become emotionally sharp. Revelations arrive and move on before they can settle. The pacing lingers where it should cut and rushes where it should pause.

The house has too many rooms, and the book insists on showing you all of them.

The Ending: Acceptance, Not Peace

The novel does not end with resolution. The house does not forgive anyone. The past is not healed.

Instead, the ending offers recognition. The characters understand what they have inherited. They understand that legacy is not something you can opt out of.

The Manor of Dreams remains standing. Changed, but not cleansed.

It feels right. This was never a story about fixing anything. It was about seeing it clearly.

Final Verdict: A Haunting That Knows What It Is

The Manor of Dreams is slow, heavy, and intentional. It is not comforting. It does not explain everything. It does not care if you like its characters.

It works best when it trusts its atmosphere and lets silence do the work. It stumbles when it tries to explain itself too much.

Christina Li proves she understands how houses can hold history and how families carry damage forward without ever naming it. The book is thoughtful, moody, and occasionally overstuffed.

Still, it lingers.

You do not leave this house relieved. You leave it thinking about what your own walls might remember.

Which is, frankly, the most honest kind of haunting.

Severance by Ling Ma: The Capitalist Apocalypse We Deserve

Image Fair use: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64751369

Disclaimer: The following review contains spoilers, fungal metaphors, and critiques of productivity culture. If you're the kind of person who prides themselves on “only taking 3 sick days in 12 years,” you might be the target audience.

You’re Already in the Zombie Apocalypse, You Just Call It “Work”

You know that thing where you wake up, scroll through Slack with one crusted eye open, make coffee you don’t even taste anymore, and somehow arrive at 6 p.m. without remembering a single thing you did? That’s Severance. Not the show. The novel. And yes, it came first.

In Ling Ma’s version of the end of the world, the virus doesn’t make you run wild and eat brains. It makes you… do your job. Brush your teeth. Stir the soup. Forever. Until your body gives out. It’s not a stretch. Most of us were halfway there before COVID. We call it "routine." She calls it Shen Fever. Tomato, fungal plague.

Candace Chen: Patron Saint of Late Capitalism’s Burnout Baddies

Candace isn’t out here wielding machetes or hunting down supplies in a Mad Max wasteland. She’s doing what every good millennial does when civilization collapses: finishing the project. Holding down her desk job. Sending emails to an empty inbox while the city smolders outside.

Her motivations aren’t bravery or hope. They’re habit. Obligation. That buzzing anxiety that tells you you’re failing if you’re not producing something, even if no one’s left to consume it. She is what burnout looks like in a blouse from Zara, and she will absolutely outlast us all.

A Pandemic Book Before the Pandemic Hit? Ling Ma Knew Too Much

Severance came out in 2018. That’s right. Ling Ma predicted not only the general collapse of society but also your 2020 skincare routine, emotional numbness, and doomed return-to-office mandates. And she did it with style.

But this isn’t a COVID book. It’s sharper than that. It’s about the disease that was already inside us: our inability to unplug, even when unplugging is the only path to survival. The fever just gives it a name. Everything else? You were already doing it voluntarily, every day, on autopilot, in a blazer that still smells like dry shampoo and corporate guilt.

The Fevered Are You. No, Seriously. It’s You.

The infected don’t scream. They don’t chase you through grocery stores or try to rip your face off. They just repeat. Looping mundane tasks over and over like your uncle forwarding conspiracy memes. One woman sets the table, clears it, and resets it for no one. Another folds a shirt, unfolds it, folds it again. There’s no menace. Just muscle memory and quiet decay.

It’s genius. Ma doesn’t lean on gore. She leans on truth. The horror isn’t death. It’s the living death of never breaking pattern. Of dying with a checklist half-done and a Slack status still marked "available." She’s not describing a virus. She’s describing you, in Q4.

The Office as Mausoleum. The Commute as Sacrament.

Candace works for a company that produces Bibles. Printed in bulk. Shipped around the world. It’s almost too on-the-nose, except it works. Her job is logistics. The sacredness of scripture filtered through supply chains and corporate quotas. God as deliverable.

Even after the city empties out, she’s still showing up to her glass tower of fluorescent despair, logging hours. There's no boss. No paycheck. Just that gnawing need to not let it all go. The office becomes a holy site. A place of worship for those who believed in performance reviews more than actual purpose. Bless this spreadsheet.

Bob and His Cult of Survival: Just Another CEO, Really

Bob is the kind of man who thinks his Spotify Wrapped is a personality. He leads a survivor group post-collapse with the charisma of a bad LinkedIn influencer and the ethics of a pre-cancellation WeWork founder. He calls the shots. He distributes goods. He talks about “order” like it’s a brand he’s launching.

He isn’t building community. He’s running a startup, apocalypse edition. And just like every startup, there’s a vibe shift halfway through where you realize he’s not trying to help anyone. He’s trying to stay in charge. Bob isn’t the villain because he’s evil. He’s the villain because he’s normal. The world ended, and he’s still trying to be manager of the month.

Nostalgia, But Make It Corporate

Candace isn’t nostalgic for people. She doesn’t weep over lost relationships or social connection. Her flashbacks are soaked in the comfort of structure. Of brunch routines, subway rides, sterile apartments that look like an IKEA exploded. She misses function, not feeling.

And that’s what stings. Because we get it. How many of us cried when the Starbucks near our condo closed? Not because we loved the coffee. But because it meant we were really, actually alone. Severance doesn’t mock that loss. It exposes it. What we mourn in collapse isn’t each other. It’s the rhythm that kept us from noticing we were already gone.

Identity Is a Spreadsheet You Never Get to Edit

As the daughter of Chinese immigrants, Candace’s inner life is shaped by inherited expectations. Be dutiful. Be successful. Be quiet. Be grateful. She doesn’t rebel. She absorbs. She fits herself into roles so seamlessly it hurts to watch. Especially when there’s no reward. Just more work.

Ma unpacks that identity with a scalpel. Candace isn’t lost because the world ended. She was lost long before that, wearing the perfect outfit and saying the right things. Her grief isn’t loud. It’s ambient. And that’s what makes it real. Her trauma doesn’t explode. It spreadsheets itself across her life in neatly formatted, emotionally vacant cells.

Aesthetic Minimalism Meets Maximalist Commentary

Ling Ma writes like she’s running a quiet revolution in lowercase. Her prose doesn’t scream. It insinuates. Cool, clean, almost antiseptic. And yet every sentence cuts just deep enough to leave a scar. This is what weaponized minimalism looks like.

There’s a reason the novel feels slow. It mirrors the soul-deep drag of real-life monotony. You don’t get a chase scene. You get a meeting invite. You get a memory of your mother cooking congee. You get pages where nothing happens, except the realization that “nothing” is how most of us lived even before the world ended. Ling Ma doesn’t offer catharsis. She offers a mirror you want to throw across the room.

If You Liked “The Office” But Wanted Everyone to Die

Severance is not a zombie novel for people who like fast-paced survival horror. It’s for people who have ever stayed too long in a toxic job. It’s for those who checked their work email during a funeral. Who felt guilty taking a real lunch. Who miss the smell of office printer ink like it’s Chanel No. 5.

It’s not escapism. It’s entrapment. It dares you to confront the sick satisfaction of being a cog in a machine. And it doesn’t let you off the hook just because you read it ironically. If The Office is a satire of work culture, Severance is the post-mortem.

TL;DR – But Make It Judgmental

• Candace is your inner overachiever with no exit strategy.

• The infected are just peak productivity with a dash of death.

• Ling Ma saw your 9-to-5 lifestyle and raised you a slow-burn existential crisis.

• Bob is what happens when you give middle managers too much rope.

• The scariest part of this novel is how familiar it feels.

Final Word: Are You Working or Are You Fevered?

At its core, Severance isn’t a book about zombies or pandemics. It’s about the quiet horror of forgetting who you are in the pursuit of stability. About how easy it is to disappear while still technically functioning. About how survival isn’t always the same as living.

And honestly? Ling Ma didn’t need to write a sequel. We all became it.

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang: A Deliciously Uncomfortable Mirror of Our Literary Obsessions

Welcome to the Book That Dragged Everyone—And Still Hit #1

Some novels build a world. This one dismantles ours.

Written by R.F. Kuang, bestselling author of Babel and literary grenade-thrower in her own right, Yellowface is the kind of novel that doesn’t just provoke—it detonates. It’s messy, brutal, wildly entertaining, and deeply uncomfortable in all the ways that matter.

This book doesn’t whisper or politely tug at your sleeve. It walks up to you at a literary festival, knocks your iced oat latte out of your hand, and says, “So... you think you deserve that book deal?”

It’s a satire. It’s a horror story. It’s a cry of rage. And if you work in publishing—or have ever tried to write, pitch, sell, or market anything—you’re already implicated.

The Setup: Death by Pancake, Theft by Insecurity

June Hayward is a failed author who’s angry the universe didn’t give her more than a lukewarm debut, a quiet book tour, and the slow rot of literary obscurity. Her friend, Athena Liu, is a star: young, Chinese-American, brilliant, bold, and bestselling. When Athena dies in a freak accident (choking on pancakes, because even death has a sense of irony here), June sees her opportunity.

She steals Athena’s unpublished manuscript—a sweeping historical novel about Chinese laborers during WWI—and publishes it under the ambiguous name “Juniper Song.” The lie grows. The fame swells. And the rot sets in.

This isn’t just a plot. It’s a dare: How far can a white woman go before anyone stops her?

June Isn’t a Villain. She’s an Algorithm.

Kuang doesn’t give us a clean-cut antagonist. She gives us the exact kind of person who wins in real life.

June isn’t evil. She’s entitled, which is worse because it’s so ordinary. Her internal monologue reads like a Reddit thread where someone “just wants to have a conversation” about race but ends up defending colonialism by paragraph three. She tells herself she deserves Athena’s success. That she’s honoring Athena’s legacy. That this is what Athena would have wanted.

Every bad faith argument you’ve ever read online? June makes it. Out loud. To herself. And to us.

Kuang’s Genius: Making Us Hate June While Realizing We Know Her

June isn’t some literary Bond villain. She’s your co-worker. Your former roommate. Your old writing partner who never quite got over your book deal.

And Kuang makes sure we recognize her. Because to hate June is to admit that mediocrity packaged as ambition is disturbingly common—and often rewarded.

Publishing Is the Real Horror Show

Let’s get one thing straight: Yellowface isn’t just about one woman stealing a book. It’s about how the entire publishing machine enables her. Rewards her. Protects her.

Kuang dismantles the industry layer by layer:

• Editors who nod at diversity while asking for “more universal themes.”

• Marketers who love a brown cover photo if it means hitting the DEI quota.

• Readers who demand authenticity, then buy books that flatten trauma into hashtags.

• Book influencers who virtue-signal one minute and cancel the next, all while chasing algorithmic clout.

This isn’t satire. This is a documentary with a better wardrobe.

That Voice: First-Person Delusion with a Side of Self-Pity

One of the most compelling (and disturbing) aspects of the novel is June’s voice.

It’s confessional. Coiled. Defensive. At times, she sounds like she’s convincing herself more than the reader. But that’s the trick. June’s voice is a spiral. You follow her logic down until you realize there’s no logic at all—just ego in a trench coat.

You don’t read Yellowface for comfort. You read it to sit in the bathwater of delusion and let it scald.

Twitter Fingers Turn to Trigger Warnings

Social media plays a massive role in the novel’s chaos. June’s ascent and descent are both manufactured online. One viral post turns her into a darling. Another threatens to unravel everything.

Kuang weaponizes cancel culture here—not to dismiss it, but to interrogate the shallowness of public accountability in a system built on performance. The outrage is real, but fleeting. The damage is personal, but impersonalized. And in the end, everyone moves on. Except the people who got burned.

It’s Not Cancel Culture. It’s Consequence Theatre.

June isn’t “cancelled.” She’s exposed. Then rebranded. Because that’s the real currency in this world: the ability to repackage guilt as growth. The only thing people love more than tearing someone down is giving them a comeback arc. Especially if they’re white, tearful, and use words like “learned” and “grateful.”

Who Gets to Tell the Story?

This is the question at the heart of Yellowface. Not just who can, but who should. And when do good intentions stop mattering?

June never asks for permission. She justifies her theft with vague platitudes about craft and art and being inspired. And yet, her actions echo countless real-world moments where stories were taken, voices were mimicked, and credit was misplaced.

Kuang is not subtle here. Nor should she be. The line between inspiration and appropriation isn’t thin. It’s clear. And June sprints across it in stilettos.

How R.F. Kuang Weaponizes Satire with Precision

What makes Yellowface so effective isn’t just its anger—it’s how smart that anger is. Kuang is in control every step of the way. Every petty industry dig. Every performative tweet. Every smug email from a white editor pretending to understand Asian trauma. All of it lands because it’s earned.

She isn’t lashing out. She’s dissecting. And the cuts are surgical.

You’ll Laugh. Then You’ll Gasp. Then You’ll Want to Send Her Flowers.

This book is funny in the way that real-life tragedies sometimes are: dark, absurd, and laced with the kind of awkward truth that makes you stare at the ceiling afterwards.

The Ending: No Redemption Arc. Just Consequences (Sort Of)

Without spoiling, the novel ends exactly how it should: messily. Uneasily. With a taste of justice that feels like it might rot your teeth. June doesn’t get what she wants—but she doesn’t really not get it either. And isn’t that the most honest portrayal of white mediocrity ever written?

This book doesn’t tie things up with a bow. It frays the bow. It cuts the ribbon. It burns the whole box.

Who Should Read This?

• Anyone who’s ever worked in publishing and needs therapy.

• Writers who think “just changing the names” makes it their story.

• Readers who want to be entertained and called out.

• Fans of literary satire who like their metaphors wielded like knives.

And yes, even the people who will hate this book. Especially them.

Final Take: Yellowface Is the Literary Equinox—Equal Parts Entertaining and Excruciating

You will turn pages so fast your thumbs will hurt. You will question your own taste. You will pause midway to look at your Goodreads reviews and wonder if you’re part of the problem.

And that’s the point.

Kuang doesn’t want to be liked. She wants to be understood. And in Yellowface, she proves you don’t need likability to write a damn masterpiece.

The Midnight Library Is a Multiverse You’ll Regret Loving

By Sara Alba

Rating: 4.8/5 🍷 For the girls who say “no regrets” and lie through their teeth.

The Midnight Library Is a Multiverse You’ll Regret Loving — And Love Regretting

There are books that entertain. There are books that hurt. And then there’s The Midnight Library by Matt Haig — a novel that gently rips your emotional wiring out, alphabetizes it, then asks you to examine each regret like it’s a library card you forgot to return.

This isn’t a book that lets you escape. It’s a book that quietly pulls you back into yourself — and asks what you’ve done with all the lives you didn’t live.

Nora Seed Isn’t Dead — But She’s Done Living

Nora Seed is thirty-five and unremarkable. She’s depressed, directionless, and drowning in regrets. She’s estranged from her brother, isolated from her friends, unemployed, and still grieving the death of her cat. One night, convinced that the world would be better without her, she swallows enough pills to end her life.

But instead of death, she wakes up in the Midnight Library — a cosmic purgatory filled with books. Each book is a portal to a life she could have lived if she’d made a different choice: if she hadn’t quit swimming, if she hadn’t left the band, if she had said yes, or said no, or stayed.

And so begins the most passive-aggressive multiverse exploration you’ve ever read — where the past is editable, the future is fragile, and every version of Nora is a question she can’t stop asking.

This Isn’t a Plot Twist Story — It’s a Pattern Recognition One

Each new book in the Midnight Library opens to a different version of Nora's life. One where she’s married. One where she’s famous. One where she’s living in the Arctic as a glaciologist. These lives aren't presented with flashy drama — they arrive with quiet emotional friction. The discomfort of unfamiliar routines. The ache of realizing that even your dreams come with paperwork, fatigue, and unanswered texts.

This isn’t time travel. This is trauma recovery — formatted as fiction.

Matt Haig Doesn’t Beautify Depression — He Decodes It

Haig’s style is spare. Short chapters. Clean sentences. There are no ornate metaphors or sweeping descriptions. Instead, there’s precision. Honesty. Pain, plainly delivered.

This book feels like reading a Google Doc written by your inner critic and lightly edited by your therapist. It’s not indulgent. It’s surgical.

The biggest question The Midnight Library asks is simple: If you had the chance to redo your life — would you actually be happier, or just different?

The Library Isn’t Heaven. It’s an Archive of Your Worst What-Ifs

The library metaphor might seem whimsical at first, but it’s brutal in execution. Each book represents a regret. Every choice becomes a forked road Nora didn’t take. And while some lives sparkle at first, all of them reveal new kinds of loss. New disappointments. New gaps.

It’s not that no version of Nora is happy. It’s that happiness doesn’t erase grief — it coexists with it.

That’s the ache of this book. It doesn’t just show you better lives. It shows you that perfection is a myth. Even the dreamiest alt-Nora still misses someone. Still wonders if it was enough.

For the Girls Who Can’t Stop Rewriting Their Own Timeline

This book is for you if you’ve ever:

• Wondered if your best self already passed you by

• Replayed a conversation from five years ago and still changed the ending

• Felt haunted by a version of yourself that no longer exists but still feels close

It’s not about time travel. It’s about emotional resurrection.

You’ll Remember This Book — And It’ll Remember You

You’ll remember it because it taps into the exact brain that thinks about the ex at 4:44 a.m.

You’ll remember it because you’ll wonder if the version of you that didn’t quit, didn’t leave, didn’t give up — would even recognize you now.

You’ll remember it because it dares to whisper the thing most fiction avoids:

Even your dream life might leave you lonely.

Best Read With:

• A lukewarm cup of tea and a very specific ache

• The playlist you made after the last time you fell apart

• A hoodie that still smells like someone who disappointed you

• A fresh Google search for “what is the opposite of regret but still a little sad?”

Final Word: The Book That Makes You Mourn Versions of Yourself You Never Even Met

The Midnight Library doesn’t offer clean resolution. It offers a messy truth: there is no perfect life. Just different shapes of pain. And maybe, if you’re lucky, different forms of peace.

It’s not a call to gratitude. It’s not a manifesto about “choosing joy.” It’s something harder and braver — a confrontation with regret that doesn’t try to solve it, just soften it.

So no, this isn’t escapism.

It’s exorcism.

Julie Chan Is Dead, and So Is the Girl You Used to Be

Cover of Julie Chan Is Dead by Liann Zhang. Image courtesy of Liann Zhang

Brewtiful Reading Section | June 7, 2025
By Sara Alba

Rating: 5/5 🍷 For the girls who spiral in lowercase and mean it.

There are books you read for fun, and there are books that make you question your own reflection. Julie Chan Is Dead by Liann Zhang is the latter. This is not a quirky tale about mistaken identity. It’s a razor-sharp, psychologically unflinching dive into the messy tangle of grief, envy, and internet performance. It doesn’t want to be your favorite book. It wants to get under your skin and stay there.

Let’s be clear: this is not beach reading. It’s the kind of book you read in bed, at 2 a.m., half-dreading what the next chapter will reveal — about the characters, about influencer culture, and about yourself.

One Dead Influencer. One Living Twin. And a Lie That Grows Louder Every Day.

The novel opens with Julie Chan — not an influencer, not a star, just a supermarket cashier and invisible girl — finding the dead body of her estranged identical twin sister, Chloe Van Huusen. Chloe was everything Julie wasn’t: rich, beautiful, sponsored, seen. She was a fashion-forward internet personality with brand deals and curated brunches. Julie, by contrast, exists in the margins. She doesn’t just feel like a nobody — she is one, and not in the romantic, main-character-energy kind of way. In the forgettable, ignored kind of way.

So, when she finds Chloe lifeless in her apartment, what does Julie do?

She logs into Chloe’s phone. She answers her messages. She uploads a post.

She becomes her.

This Book Isn’t About Switching Lives. It’s About Deleting Your Own.

What follows is not a classic switcheroo or a glamorous impersonation story. It’s slow-burn psychological horror disguised as a coming-of-age narrative. Julie isn’t playing dress-up. She’s committing identity fraud with emotional stakes so high you’ll find yourself sweating through benign sentences.

As she steps into Chloe’s designer shoes — literally — Julie doesn’t just mimic her sister’s routines. She starts inhabiting her. Or at least, the version of her that the internet wanted to believe was real. Influencer Chloe is alive, at least on social media. And that, in this world, is enough.

Julie doesn’t become powerful. She becomes haunted.

The Writing Style: Sharp Enough to Leave Paper Cuts

Liann Zhang’s prose is quiet, clipped, and devastating. You won’t find purple flourishes or indulgent metaphors. You’ll find restraint that feels almost surgical. Every sentence is intentional. Every pause is loaded. There’s no wasted space in this novel, which makes every word feel like a clue.

Reading Zhang feels like reading someone’s carefully crafted apology — one they’ll never send. The tension simmers in the silence between what Julie feels and what she says, between what she reveals and what she edits. The result is a novel that reads like a curated Instagram feed: perfectly filtered and deeply unsettling.

A Critique of Influence That Cuts Deeper Than Likes and Follows

This isn’t just a thriller. It’s an autopsy of influencer culture. It’s about how easily we collapse a person into a brand. How someone’s pain becomes part of their “story arc.” How tragedy, when well-lit, becomes engagement.

Julie doesn’t know how to be an influencer. She just knows how to copy one. And as she fakes her way through brand meetings, beauty launches, and Instagram captions, we’re forced to ask the question no one likes to say out loud: Is there a real person under all this content?

And: Was there ever?

Zhang doesn’t answer that question. She just keeps asking it in different ways until you feel sick.

You’ll Find Yourself Rooting for Her. And Then You’ll Feel Dirty About It.

Julie isn’t a hero. She’s not even an anti-hero. She’s desperate, angry, and quietly terrifying in her own way. But here’s the thing: you’ll relate to her. Not to the fraud or the deception, necessarily, but to the craving. The craving to be seen. To be loved. To be envied. To matter.

And that’s the book’s real horror: you’ll understand exactly why she does it.

You’ll understand the hunger to be looked at — even if it means disappearing in the process.

This Isn’t a Mystery. It’s a Disintegration.

Don’t expect a tight plot wrapped in red string and police tape. There’s no detective chasing Julie. No cliffhangers every chapter. The real suspense comes from watching her lose herself — slowly, expertly, and with chilling precision.

Each chapter peels away a piece of Julie’s identity, until you’re left wondering who she even is anymore — and whether that was the point all along. Is she trying to become Chloe? Or is she trying to erase herself?

There’s no clear answer. Just silence. And that silence is deafening.

Best Read With:

• Leftover takeout and a vague sense of dread

• Your phone turned face-down, because this book makes you hate your own feed

• A playlist of songs that remind you of your worst decisions

• The text you almost sent at 1:52 a.m. last week

Final Word: This Isn’t Fiction. It’s a Mirror.

Julie Chan Is Dead isn’t about death. It’s about erasure. It’s about the ways women disappear — behind usernames, behind aesthetics, behind more successful sisters. It’s about the version of yourself you killed off quietly, hoping someone might mourn her.

This book won’t give you closure. It won’t make you feel better. It will make you think. It will make you uncomfortable. And then, when you’re alone, scrolling mindlessly and comparing your life to someone’s carefully cropped grid, it will whisper: Remember me?

Read it. Just don’t expect to be the same afterward.