Category: Books

The whole world is astroturfed, we know this much. It’s how I Think We’ve Been Here Before ended up in my lap, probably – it’s published by Lake Union Press, which is owned by Amazon, and it was promoted as one of the Goodreads books of the year despite being published in December 2024. Without the need to feed the gamification ending that is modern Goodreads, many readers likely would not have even thought to try I Think We’ve Been Here Before. It’s very low key, but it’s also entirely divorced from human nature in a way that never rings true, despite the elevated concept.

In October, news reports announce that an astronomical event will see the world destroyed by Christmas time. A family in a small Canadian town are in peril: the patriarch is inured to the concept because he has a terminal illness anyway; the matriarch can’t reach her daughter in Berlin; the daughter, unable to book a flight home, refuses to answer her phone. All the while, they have an intense feeling of deja vu, but surely the world hasn’t ended before.

Krause has two huge deal breakers that make the book near impossible to take: Nora’s inability to answer her mother’s calls for two weeks discounts most sympathies the reader is able to have; a twelve year old disappears without trace for three weeks and his parents only marginally freak out. If this was a non-apocalyptic book they’d be apoplectic; that global doom is imminent means you think they would be more desperate for the reunion.

Nobody says that people need to face the end of the world in panic; there’s a lot to recommend taking it in your stride, but who’s to says how any of us would tackle the inevitable? But Krause has preserved her characters in a sort of amber sludge where they don’t care about anything, particularly. It’s not nihilism, but an indifference that is neither credible nor distressing. Krause’s touch is so gentle that for the most part you can only feel either contempt or disdain towards.

It’s one thing for the people of a small Canadian town where nothing ever happens to be this way (if anything, they should care more), and another for the streets of Berlin that are portrayed as if they have almost no one in them, without ever explaining where anyone has gone.

This said, I can be a sucker for ends of the world when an author is brave enough to commit to them. I Think We’ve Been Here Before does, in fact, have an ending that is both stronger than anything that came before it while still feeling like it was informed by what came before it. It’s not enough, but it’s a valiant effort on Krause’s part.

I Think We’ve Been Here Before has the kernel of an interesting idea hiding in it, but Krause never really allows it to germinate, and it has an artificial air that is so intoxicating to people who enjoy reading books where the characters aren’t easily mistaken for humans. The word “cozy” has been bandied about to describe this sort of fuzzy hug of a book divorced from reality, but readers would do well remember that coziness can be suffocating. There’s no breathing room in this novel, but at the very least it thematically hits the mark for an end of year read.

Free yourself from the chains of Goodreads challenges.

The best man at a wedding tells Elizabeth that someone is out to kill him. Emerging from the rut of her grief, Elizabeth’s interest is piqued, and piques further when, the day afterwards, the best man disappears. The Thursday Murder Club bands together to figure out, with the help of their increasingly wide network of criminal accomplices, precisely what the best man knew, while also taking turns babysitting Ron’s grandson, Kendrick.

It’s all perfectly serviceable, not infrequently affecting, and often funny. But The Impossible Fortune isn’t particularly well structured: Joanna becomes a major character, which is fine, while the police are largely sidelined. Osman has become almost more enamoured with his various crims — even the freshly introduced ones — than with his established oldies. 

The character work doesn’t make up for the story, which Osman doesn’t weave together or really get off the ground. There’s dynamism to the Ron B plot (which is really the A plot) but, rather like the smug utility of AI in 2024’s We Solve Murders, the titular impossible fortune is a lame duck that is too trendy for its own good. By the end it’s not even clear if it’s really strong enough to be considered a MacGuffin.

And the character work isn’t always Everyone seems particularly bumbly, and not in a way that seems to be a cunning ruse. It often beggars belief; towards the end Joyce is unable to locate the pause button on her remote control, which Joanna informs her is the “button with two parallel lines on it.” Joyce is an eighty year old woman in 2025 with no evidence of cognitive decline (we’ve already done four books of that), the pause button was invented in Sweden in the 1960s, and there is no way, in between tapes, cassettes, videos, CDs, DVDs, and all of human history, that Joyce has not encountered it for a full three quarters of her life. If you’re going to pick a “old people don’t understand remotes” joke, don’t use a universal symbol, Osman. You are smarter than this and so are your readers.

There are also parts in here about the characters growing more frail as they age, but it still feels that Osman isn’t yet strong enough to face the concept. The groundwork is laid, but only barely. It feels like Osman is trying hard not to advance his characters too far (he is going to live longer than they can, realistically), so this is far more timid than his usual work — and one of the solutions is risible.

The Impossible Fortune is going to make a lot of people happy, and that’s fine. But we know that Richard Osman can do more than fine, even if the tone is more often than not “aw shucks” amused and the characters’ moral codes are divorced from the petty morality of the real world. This one doesn’t amount to much and, due to his publishing schedule, it will be 2027 before you see these old folks again. If it tides people over, that’s good, but readers deserve more than a faint smile. There’s no blood in this water.

And let’s face it: the movie was wrong.

At long last, the final piece of The Long Halloween puzzle – until The Last Halloween debuted towards the end of last year. But that’s still ongoing, so we’ll put it aside. Initially intended to be published shortly after Dark Victory, Catwoman: When in Rome was delayed for four years; Hush, a very different flavour of Jeph Loeb,was published in the interim.  

This six issue rundetails what Selina Kyle was up to while Batman was investigating the Hangman in Dark Victory, a story which Selina only features at the start and end of. Realistically it’s an excuse for Tim Sale to illustrate Selina in a series of high fashion pieces – for the covers, at least. She spends a lot of the inner contents either naked or close enough to it. Combine this with an overtly lecherous Leprechaun-like Edward Nigma, and you’ve got a DC title custom-built for perverts. Sale’s art is excellent as always — and different to his previous titles, as always — but after a while the attention to detail is notable.

Frustrated with Bruce Wayne’s distant nature, Selina Kyle takes herself to Rome to investigate the Falcone crime family, which she suspects she has deeper links to than simply an easy target for funding her lifestyle. Plagued by vivid nightmares, thwarted by overly familiar enemies, and abetted by Edward Nigma in heat, Selina has to hope that she not only solves her mystery, but survives her European sojourn.

Loeb doesn’t have access to the full Bat rogue’s gallery that he loves so dearly, because he was using most of them extensively in Gotham at the time this is set. Still, he makes an effort: he borrows Cheetah from Wonder Woman, and various weaponry crosses Selina’s path in ways that she’d rather it didn’t. Thanks to the miracles of modern villain science, Sale’s gloriously tetanoid Joker gets to make a guest appearance.

Due to the holiday nature of When in Rome, Loeb doesn’t tangle it near so much as he did the other Long Halloweens or the famously twisted Hush (for which Loeb has admitted that one key element came out of nowhere). The solution to this one, such as it is, is less surprising than it is inevitable. It’s a pleasant diversion from the dramas in Gotham, a sun drenched adventure for Selina and all that entails.

Loeb and Sale were a formidable team, rarely using the same aesthetic twice – while Long Halloween and Dark Victory were of a kind, they look quite different to Haunted Knight, which is the platonic ideal of Batman art (to this reader, at least), and the luscious Italian vistas offered by When In Rome. The Riddler is some sort of grotesque, but everything else is beautiful. Selina has a lot of skin, and a lot of butt, but it’s gratuitous in a completely different way to Jim Lee’s take on the character in Hush.

That’s why it’s so weird to end When in Rome with an epilogue taken directly from Dark Victory, with no changes to the art – Sale was in a different mode.

The more comics you read – pretending to an unearned expertise here – the more you realise that they’re not all momentous events. Catwoman: When In Rome has no sense of immediacy to it because it really does play like its title: it’s a holiday from more serious stories, despite a relatively high body count. Loeb has written Selina as a credible protagonist, and Sale has lavished her with an intense amount of attention to detail. It all adds up to complete the character arc that was alluded to throughout the Long Halloween series and, while not a towering achievement, it’s certainly a satisfying one.

I enjoyed Beach Read, and Emily Henry is one of the big publishing sensations of the last five years. I’d put off You and Me on Vacation (known outside Australia and the US as “People We Meet on Vacation“) because I found that I’d bought it in an Audible sale years ago, and the time allocated to an audiobook lives in a different compartment to that of a print or Kindle book, mentally. 

Unfortunately, it seems that You and Me on Vacation could have been put off forever, because I did not enjoy it at all. The epigraph reads “I wrote the last one mostly for me. This one’s for you.” As a result, Henry has written a book she doesn’t want and I don’t either.

For twelve years, Poppy Wright and Alex Nilsen have been the best of friends. Every year, they would go somewhere for a summer vacation, until two years ago, in Croatia, something happened that saw them cut off almost all contact. Now at a loose end writing for her travel magazine, Poppy wants to rediscover her joie de vivre, and reconnects with Alex to invite him away for a week in Palm Springs, culminating in his brother’s wedding. The only problem is she’s pretending that it’s a work assignment, and she’s bankrolling the whole thing herself.

Told in the present day, but interspersed with historical accounts of Poppy and Alex’s trips (related as if they were just happening, rather than Poppy being retrospective), You and Me on Vacation tracks their relationship from its inauspicious beginnings to its catastrophic collapse, into its inevitable future.

Love does not bloom between the pages (or the ears) of You and Me on Vacation: it is always there. There is no slow build up to Poppy developing feelings for Alex, despite what her narration tells you. This isn’t love at first sight, but it’s so close to it that you know you’re reading about twelve wasted years. It does not take her long at all to want to spend her life with him even if she’ll never admit it until the reader’s patience has worn gossamer thin.

Henry here subscribes to the romance novel theory that if there’s any problems in a relationship, it’s the fault of one person alone, and the other is a perfect angel. Poppy blames herself for everything that goes wrong, despite the fact that Alex Nilsen is a stuck up prig. He is presumptuous, he always assumes the worst and, despite having Poppy as a confidante, he never tells her the actual important things. This failure to communicate on both of their parts is a genre hallmark, but it is always treated as if it is Poppy failing to pick up on cues. No. Alex is rude. Alex has no social skills. Poppy claims that there’s a “Naked Alex” that only she sees and understands. And he’s a jerk.

Don’t get it wrong: Poppy sucks too. Big time. You and Me on Vacation is performed by legendary audiobook reader Julia Whelan, who has done many, many books, but one in particular for the purposes of this review: Gone Girl. Poppy comes across like the Cool Girl that Amy talks about in that novel, and she sounds exactly like the most disingenuous person you’re ever likely to come across. This is a charmless woman who acts ridiculously entitled without realising that her playful teasing is actually more akin to bullying. She’s not nice to be around. 

There’s also a secret thread that makes you hope that Emily Henry doesn’t identify too much with her protagonist: Alex is fastidious about cleanliness, but Poppy doesn’t “enjoy showering … I’m a three-shower-a-week person to Alex’s one to two showers a day.” It’s an incredibly weird statement to put three quarters into your romance novel, and there’s no suggestion that Poppy, with her active lifestyle, is bathing on her off-shower days. You have to sit with this knowledge for the end-run of the book, and suddenly you don’t trust Poppy on anything any more. There is a theory that is not allowed to be spoken aloud – and if it had any ballast, it would have made for a far more interesting book. Possibly written by Helen Hoang.

In her afterword, Henry talks about When Harry Met Sally, and its influence on this book. Maybe if You and Me on Vacation had a deli scene, it would be good. Henry says “[Nora] Ephron … left this indelible mark on me, planted a seed of ardent appreciation for characters who grate and irritate and infuriate, until the moment they suddenly don’t.” Alex and Poppy never don’t grate.

Sometimes a book’s title is tweaked internationally for very basic reasons and it either makes logical sense or it’s a huge impact to the interpretation of a book. People We Meet On Vacation is a title that only makes sense when Phoebe makes her giant speech towards the end, the traditional grand gesture, and there is absolutely nothing in the book to back up her grand thesis that boils down to three people from two separate vacations. It’s a terrible mission statement that doesn’t hold up in the text at all.

You and Me on Vacation is a far cry from Beach Read, which featured characters who were more grounded, and a late-stage drama that kind of made sense — and at the very least was squarely on the shoulders of the love interest, rather than the narrator.

When you put it all together, maybe You and Me on Vacation does make sense: Alex and Poppy are perfect for each other because that way they’re not ruining the lives of anyone else. Despite all of its tropes, You and Me on Vacation is not a boilerplate romance novel, because it fails at every single element that constitutes a satisfactory one. Not enough yet to give up on Emily Henry, but if this was the first I’d read, I wouldn’t read any more.

I don’t think we’re allowed to call Molly the Maid “autistic”, or “neurodivergent” or even “autistic coded” – she’s just another in a long line of protagonists with undiagnosed brain chemistry, something that became excessively popular when a certain sitcom that shall remain nameless inexplicably took over the world.

But I can call The Mistletoe Mystery cruel. Which it is. After the strong showing of The Maid, Nita Prose has treated her heroine as a plaything to be batted around, written as if by a child. Nobody dies, so the mystery is in Molly’s head, and every reader can see what the solution is before she even begins to get suspicious.

In the lead up to Christmas, the dearly departed Gran’s favourite time of year, Molly becomes increasingly suspicious of Juan, who is uncharacteristically keeping a secret from her, is running around at all hours, and asks her questions about her stance on diamond rings.

Of course Molly takes all this the wrong way, and her coworkers try to convince her to ignore the evidence of her own eyes. It doesn’t take much for the not-particularly-eagle-eyed reader to piece it together, but the onus is not on Molly for her misunderstanding; but on everyone in her life who knows her intimately, who knows how her brain works and how she takes everything literally and doesn’t cope well with subterfuge, for putting her through this.

There are some unexamined factors in play here, like the fact that Molly and Juan are apparently not really paid a living wage by the Regency Grand, and that they live in penury. Prose’s prose pays special attention to the squalor and tatters that her protagonists find themselves living in, shakes it out of its head, and carries on to studiously ignore it.

The one legitimately hilarious element of this is Molly’s run-ins with her nemesis who she chose not to have fired in The Mystery Guest. A regret that she was entirely within her power to prevent, and no reader would have protested. Sometimes you don’t have to be nice for niceness’ sake.

In all honesty, this review already feels longer than The Mistletoe Mystery itself did. It is understandable what Prose wanted to achieve, but there was almost certainly a way to reach the final result while having Molly investigate a different non-mystery that it is not so distressing to her and offensive to all that she stands for.

The Mistletoe Mystery is for die-hards and completists. There is no real way to justify its Australian price tag, and it puts the “stuffed” in stocking stuffer. If The Mystery Guest already put a sour taste in your mouth, this will not help in the slightest.

Personal story time, and it’s not about when I spent the summer hanging out in a nature reserve in the deluded hope it would endear myself to my absentee father. All I saw was sky for forever … 

No. The story is about how, several years ago, I decided to almost completely cut YA fiction out of my diet. I wouldn’t say my life improved immeasurably, but my general well-being did. I still read all sorts of things, but not that many of them are about the minutia of teenagers’ lives. 

Dear Evan Hansen, a hit Broadway show and a failed movie starring Kyle Derin from Marge vs the Monorail, was also a New York Times bestselling novel. And it embodies all of the worst excesses of the genre: Evan Hansen is a solipsistic goober and the depiction of his various mental illnesses is not exactly empathetic. 

It’s hard to say if writers still have origin stories. TJ Newman wrote Falling, the jingoistic thriller about getting blackmailed into terrorism that almost displayed cognisance of the USA’s complicity in the shambolic state of the modern political atmosphere, in the downtime on long haul flights as a flight attendant. A variation of this was cribbed for the insulting fictional story for “Elly Conway”, who “wrote” Argylle between waiting tables. (I will fully admit that I spend a lot more time thinking about Argylle than most people, especially Matthew Vaughan)

Falling was a success in a time when no one was flying anywhere, let alone attempting to crash their plane into America’s beating heart. Two years later, Newman returned with Drowning: The Rescue of Flight 1421, a different aviation disaster: a plane sinking into the ocean and the people racing against time to save the few passengers who remained aboard. Frankly, it’s a budget version of The Poseidon Adventure for people who either haven’t seen or can’t remember anything about it (there was a song; Shelley Winters was there). It’s the sort of book that you maybe don’t regret reading, but you also can’t bring yourself to think that it was very good. And it’s awfully convenient.