magical realism & sad girl vignettes | recent reads

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:04]Hey guys, it's Jaylen and I'm here today with another episode of recent reads.

[00:00:09]This is the series where I chat about the last 10 books that I read. I've been doing it for so long that I don't even know what number this is. I think it's like 60some. My usual disclaimer is that these are my very personal and subjective opinions and I'm not making these videos to tell you how to feel about these books or which books you should read or shouldn't read or if you've read these books how you should feel about them. I see this very strange culture of equating not even someone's overall taste but like their feelings on specific books with morality or intelligence. Oh, this person liked a book that I didn't like or vice versa.

[00:00:49]And so that means that no, I can't trust them anymore. I just like to kind of set the tone for my perspective on reading, what my intentions are with these videos, which is really just to have sort of a reading diary. The first book that I have to talk about in this video is Ordinary Love by Marie Rowski. I started reading this, I think I read like 40 pages one night and then I got hit with so much grading. I had to grade 92 assignments. I can't tell you how nice it felt to return to this book after 2 weeks, you know, kind of not reading for pleasure. It was actually pure bliss. So, this novel follows a woman named Emily. At the beginning of the book, we see her leave her husband, Jack, and they have two young kids.

[00:01:36]There's sort of a branching timeline where we follow Emily in the present.

[00:01:40]She's dealing with the dissolution of her marriage, and then she also reconnects with her high school girlfriend, Jen. and Jen has now become star athlete. She's an Olympic track runner. Also, jump back and we see Jen and Emily's relationship when they were teenagers. Really enjoyed the writing.

[00:01:57]Beautiful, really buttery. There's an aireriness, great technical writing that made this so effortless to read. It's a pretty long book. I'd kind of seen it described as like a literary romance, and I'm not a big romance reader. I thought that this would be kind of a nice little bridge for me where it's kind of in that like middle ground between like a contemporary literary novel and still having the emotional beats of like a romance novel. It almost sounds more like a romance novel from the pitch uh than it does in the execution. Uh because so much of this book is really about this very emotionally abusive marriage that she's in. Personal questions that aren't related to her dynamic with Jen.

[00:02:36]However, her dynamic with Joe is really enjoyable to read. They have a really clear chemistry. They both feel like very interesting characters. I think where actually the book almost loses its kind of tonal grip a little is actually when it veers closer to the beats of being in a romance novel. Those brief moments there's like a sensationalism or a melodrama. Emily is a very interesting character. Jen is a very interesting character. Jack, you hate, but he feels very realistic, becomes kind of increasingly controlling and doineering, and she she starts to increasingly feel so anxious about the potential of his reaction. I thought that that was so well done. It felt so realistic. The style and just richness of the characters made this so so enjoyable and immersive to read. So I'm here with the next book review and it's Shuet by Claire Oetski.

[00:03:33]So this book has a very simple concept.

[00:03:36]It follows a woman named Tiny and she gives birth to an owl named Shuet. I adored this novel. So I had read Clarettky's second novel, Poor Dear.

[00:03:48]This is her debut. I really enjoyed it.

[00:03:50]It was really good, but I loved Shuet even more. This is actually probably one of my favorite reads of 2025. I was immediately enchanted by this. I'm going to read you the beginning, and I think you'll see why I was immediately charmed by this book. So, the book begins, I dream I'm making tender love with an owl. The next morning, I see talon marks across my chest that trace the path of my owl lover's embrace. Two weeks later, I learned that I'm pregnant. You may wonder, how could such a thing come to pass between woman and owl? I too am astounded because my owl lover was a woman. More [snorts] plot twists than I've ever seen in a first paragraph.

[00:04:33]This is such a delightful novel. I was actually really surprised by how genuinely funny this book was. I tabbed a couple p places that I wanted to share. I don't know if they'll have as much impact out of context. She is still pregnant with the owl and she goes to a doctor's appointment. The doctor says, "Little mother, we've done all of the recommended prenatal tests." She says, "Your fears are perfectly normal, and you have nothing to fear." "Your so-called recommended prenatal tests are wrong over half the time," I say. I read about it in a magazine. Also, you're testing for the wrong things. You haven't given me a single owl baby test.

[00:05:12]I think I've eviscerated her argument, but she drowns on as as if I've said nothing at all. This book is really interesting tonally. It's obviously a very off-kilter concept and the other characters, the way they speak, the way they act is not very realistic. The world ends up being a little murky in a sense. Tiny and her husband have very different ideas of who Shuet is and what the best thing for Shuet is. I'm very inclined to to trust her as a narrator.

[00:05:40]And so, I think I I did want to believe that her baby was an owl, but no one else ever acknowledges the baby is an owl. And it's it's really carefully done. We don't really know what everyone's reality is. You could read this book in a ton of different ways.

[00:05:56]You could read it as being literal, as being about a woman who gives birth to an owl. You could read this as, you know, a work of magical realism. You could also read it as a story about an unreliable narrator. There are a lot of ways you could read this, and the book never really tells you or confirms what the right way to read it is. The core themes and metaphors of the story, I think, hold up regardless. That trust to let the reader read the story so many different potential ways and not hold the reader's hand and not guide them towards a right or wrong reading. It actually kind of supports the core themes and and metaphors. This has definitely become one of my favorite novels of 2025.

[00:06:36]It's funny, but also poignant without being sentimental. It's also kind of simple and complex at the same time. I think this has kind of made Claretsky into one of my favorite authors. All right, so for the next book review, I'm going to be talking about Sister Snake by Amanda Kohi. So, this book follows two sisters, Sue and Emerald. Sue lives in Singapore and she's the wife of a politician, whereas Emerald is living in New York City and working as a sugar baby. However, a thousand years ago, they were snakes in a lake under a bridge. Sue wanted to become human to experience human life.

[00:07:18]This was just so much fun. It's very bold, very kind of like contemporary.

[00:07:23]And this is kind of in contrast in friction with these episodes that are very folkloric and, you know, take place hundreds of years ago when they were living as snakes. It's funny and edgy and weird, very fast-paced, uh, but also doesn't lack depth. The contemporary elements are almost pushed a little too far that it feels like maybe I'm like watching a Tik Tok. And sometimes it's so on the nose with its social and political commentary in a way that almost takes away from what's really working in terms of social and political commentary on a story level. But at the same time, the book is so bold and funky stylistically. It kind of does work.

[00:08:06]While I found the characters interesting, especially Emerald, I did kind of not buy their immortality. I mean, I love the sections that were set in the past. I wish we had more of that to be honest. In the present moment, they don't really feel immortal. Maybe that was just my reading. Maybe other people really felt convinced by that, but I felt like there were some potential thematic nuances that I felt were calling to be explored, but weren't in relation to why Sue in particular has such a deep desire to be human. There's a very very violent scene that happens to her early on um that takes place when she's a snake. I felt like there was some potential like theme or subtext to be drawn from this idea. Can you actually escape violence and brutality by becoming human or does it just look different? There's a touch of that subtext just by the fact that these ideas are introduced. I felt like there were potential layers to the motivations that could have been dug into even further. So, this is written in an omnisient perspective. Almost in every scene were switching perspective two or three times. When omnisient perspective is done well, it's so seamless that you don't even really notice. Basically, what we were doing is two to three times per scene, we were just jumping limited perspective almost into new characters.

[00:09:24]It was like, "Oh, we're at the bar, so we're going to start with Emerald. We're in her perspective, and then we're going to introduce the bartender, and now the rest of the scene is in the bartender's perspective." It's one of those cases where there's this stylistic choice that I felt was pretty awkwardly handled, and I don't see what we're gaining from it in terms of theme or access to the story, really. All that said, I had so much fun with this. one of those books that it's fun, it's fast-paced, it's exciting, but it's also complicated, and it's also rich, and there's a lot to sink your teeth into. Despite my like little quibbles, I had a great time and also felt like I took a lot away from it. So, I'm here with the next book review, and it's for A Language of Limbs by Dylan Hard Castle. This book is set in Australia in the ' 70s. It begins with two queer teenage girls. They're hooking up in a shed. They're caught together. Like, this is literally paragraph one of the book. The story spans a couple decades. The chapters are just labeled as limb one and limb 2. The characters go unnamed. So, we follow this first character, Lim one, who's kicked out by her family. And so, she ends up finding her way to this like queer house called Uranium House, living openly as a lesbian in queer community throughout the 70s and 80s. So, throughout the AIDS crisis, we follow her relationships with the other queer people in this community. and uh you know a very pivotal relationship she has with this other woman. The other character Limu who just flees the scene.

[00:10:50]She stays closeted and we follow her going through university and uh getting married. It's a really beautiful novel.

[00:10:57]It's really really poetic. The writing is a little loose in form. Occasionally it kind of breaks apart and gets very playful. Something about the pros is just so like visceral. It's a very fast-paced book, even though ultimately it is very slice of life. Covers a long period of time. There are like large time skips usually between a lot of the sections. It's very, very impactful.

[00:11:22]It's very heartbreaking, very emotional.

[00:11:25]It's a very sentimental novel and at times I think it's very beautiful that it's so sentimental. It's not hiding under like irony or edgginess, which I think a lot of contemporary does. Here I think it's very generous that the author has leaned fully into sentimentality, beauty and life and love. But I do think at times it becomes overly sentimental and quite melodramatic. Things are so so sentimental that they start to feel a little manufactured. We lose the sort of grit of real life. And I think it was towards the end of the book as things are getting like so sensational that I go what do I really know about these characters? I know that the main character is a lesbian and I know that she writes poetry and she lives in a in a house with other queer people. Like what do I really know about this character emotionally? A lot tangibly nothing really. What do I know about this other character? I know that she's wants to be a publisher and you know she loves literature. I know that she's a closeted queer woman and she's married to a writer and he's Welsh. There are definitely a few moments in here that feel like teaching moments that the author is very inorganically inserting into the narrative in order to hit certain talking points. It's not really an integrated part of the narrative.

[00:12:54]Like I specifically think about this one scene where one of the characters is at a restaurant with some friends just learns that racism exists doesn't feel like a real life conversation. This feels like maybe an Instagram infographic conversation example of a conversation that has been inserted into this book. It makes the moment feel very manufactured. There's another scene that is kind of exactly the same where the main charact one of the other main characters learns about bifphobia. It doesn't feel like how situations actually play out in real life. So, it doesn't actually capture how these things affect real people. To me, it actually dulls the message because instead of showing like these are real issues that happen in real life and sometimes they can be so insidious that we don't even notice them. Anyways, that's a small thing, but I guess it just took a long time to explain my thoughts on that element of the book.

[00:13:44]It's also an incredibly beautiful novel.

[00:13:46]It's incredibly impactful. It's visceral and poetic and lush, really gorgeous.

[00:13:51]And I was fully enthralled and very impacted by it. Maybe it's easy to uphold restraint and subtlety as the pinnacle of good literature and so it can actually be really refreshing to read a book that is so emotionally generous. Maybe I feel a need to critique it for its profound sentimentality. But maybe that's actually something that I should celebrate about the book. I think this would appeal to similar readers as say like On Earth Were Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vangu. If you like a queer narrative that is sort of unabashedly poetic and emotional, it's really got like a sort of vital heartbeat to it.

[00:14:29]While I do think there are points where I wish there had been a touch more restraint, it was ultimately very refreshing and emotional for me to read a novel that was so generous in its emotionality and so generous in its sentimentality and so generous in its poeticism. I don't think it'll be for everyone, but I do think that for the right person, you'll ball your eyes out, you know. So, I just got back from a week in Mexico, and I did a lot of reading while I was there. So, today I'm going to be catching up on a few book reviews. So, the first book that I read was 100 Years of Solitude by Gabrielle Garcia Marquez. You know, considered one of the greatest novels of all time. This book essentially follows the history of a town in Colombia through the stories of this one family, the Bundia family.

[00:15:16]And I think we follow this family for God, it's like five generations. You know, when you start reading a book and there is such skill and such confidence in every sentence that you really feel like you are in the hands of a great writer. And that's how I felt as soon as I started this book. Quite a long novel and it's quite a dense novel. Not in the sense that it's hard to read, but in the sense that every single sentence in this book is utterly critical. Every sentence is a critical event. This book is told almost entirely in the sumitive form.

[00:15:51]There's very little scene. There's very, very little dialogue. It's a whole book that's like 95% narrative summary. So, you're always reading in this very condensed mode.

[00:16:01]Every single sentence is a very critical event that in another book could be a scene. And there's something very interesting about the pros rhythm. His sentences are all very sophisticated.

[00:16:14]They all kind of have a very similar rhythm, a very similar sound. We talk about in writing that you should vary your sentence structure, right? Well, he kind of has done the opposite. He has used a very consistent sentence structure, but that structure itself is very melodious. Every sentence has this sort of important crescendo. It's so hypnotic that like you actually have to force yourself to slow down when you're reading. At least I did. I'm a pretty fast reader and I felt like I had to force myself to read this one slowly and I actually do feel like I read it a little too fast still. matterof fact but sophisticated style and tone that the book has lends this very entrancing combination the fabulous and the magical alongside the boredom the grit the oddities of daily life but because everything is conveyed in the summitive format it's not a book where you ever really feel close to a character but that's fine so like I've talked in some of my writing craft videos about how you know structure is about how the way that events are ordered and connected creates meaning. And there are different ways that events can be connected. And this book, I think, is most fascinating because of how events are connected.

[00:17:26]Like you start each chapter, the chapters, similar to the sentences are all like a very particular rhythm. And each time you start a chapter, as it begins to unfold, the events as they are like linked together morph and build meaning in like a magical realist way. I thought I had read a lot of magical realism before, but I think I actually hadn't because this book is magical realism structurally. This is definitely a book that you do have to work for a little bit. We're following this family, the Buendia family, and every character in this family are all named like the same thing. I was reading this as an ebook, and I would not recommend doing that. Do do not read this book as an ebook. It makes it very hard to flip back to the family tree at the start.

[00:18:14]Sometimes you're like, who is this scene about? Cuz each chapter, you know, you'll like introduce to a character. as you follow them, this sort of omnisient narrator will just like very gently morph through different characters. And it's probably the most skillful omnisient narrative that I've ever read.

[00:18:33]These transitions between characters you almost don't even notice. This is the butteriest, smoothest omnisient narrative I have ever read in my life. I totally see, having now read it, why this is considered one of the greatest novels ever. I don't think it's one of my personal favorite novels ever, but I do see why it's one of the greatest novels ever. After reading 100 Years of Solitude, which was quite long, I decided to read a very, very short book.

[00:19:01]So, I read Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Vo Lobos. This is a Mexican novel.

[00:19:06]And when I travel, I often like to use that to read novels, the country that I'm traveling to, just explore some work that otherwise I maybe wouldn't encounter. So, this book down the down the rabbit hole is actually described in the introduction as a micro novel, which I had never heard the term before, and I don't really know what distinguishes a micro novel from a novella. Just really like that term micro novel. It's very, very short. I think I read the whole thing in half an hour. So, this book follows. He's a little boy and his father is a drug lord, but Tley doesn't really understand that. He knows that his dad kills people and he knows that they lived in a mansion with guards and he knows that the pet lion and tiger they have they have so that they can feed the bodies to the lion and the tiger and he doesn't really understand why so many of the servants in the house are mute. Really really fascinating.

[00:20:02]Like this I think is one of my favorite books that I've read this year. The child's perspective here is just so fascinating. He says so many like really offensive things and he evidently has no idea what they mean. You understand the world that his father has created for him and you understand his relationship with his father through how he talks about the world and how he talks about other people and how he describes other people and how he relates to himself.

[00:20:29]He's not completely in the dark. He has a level of understanding, but he doesn't have a full level of understanding. has an obsession with Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses and he wants a Liberian pygmy hippopotamus and he lives in a world where if he wants something his dad will get it for him that kind of forms the basis of the plot very darkly funny at a lot of points I think this is one of the most interesting child narr narrators that I've ever read the wisdom of the book comes through maybe the wisdom that he doesn't have really really loved this book I thought you know funny and illuminating and quite weird So, I'm going to just do one more book review right now, and it's the other uh Mexican novel that I read, and it was Pedro Parmmo by Juan Rufo. I had kind of seen it talked about as like Mexico's most influential novel. Also, because I had seen it talked about as kind of a precursor to 100 Years of Solitude, even in the introduction, the introduction is by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He talks about how this book did influence him in writing 100 Years of Solitude and this is like his favorite novel of all time. So this book follows a man looking for his parents in a rural town in Mexico full of ghosts and hallucinations and hauntings. It's very very fragmented. 100 Years of Solitude was very measured. The voice had a sort of like competence, a commandingness, very collected. The narrative is scattered. It's fragmented.

[00:21:59]Formatting shifts. The punctuation style shift. Dips in and out of different fragments and memories, times, and places and narrators. That makes it, yes, a little confusing, but also very hypnotic. When you read it, you feel like it's put you in a sort of fever dream. Nothing is quite real, and time is kind of uh fragmented.

[00:22:23]You almost can't even explain where your understanding of narrative and building story is coming from, but it is there.

[00:22:31]translator's note at the end really gave me a deeper appreciation for this book.

[00:22:36]Talking about the techniques that Ril was using linguistically, the choices he made and the work he put into maintaining those choices in a translation when previous translations had assued them in order to make the book more comprehensible for an English reader removed key parts of the book's experimentations. and seeing the translator kind of break down these these techniques that Rufo was using in the language. I mean, some of it's very obvious, like you see the punctuation styles shifting throughout, but other things that were more subtle. This is a book where as I was reading it, I was definitely thinking, "Wow, I would never be able to write this." This is definitely a book that I would like to read again. I'm going to film the last book review of books that I read on my trip. This is what I read on the flight home. Agatha of Little Neon by Claire Lucett. This book follows the titular character Agatha and she's a Catholic nun. Her and her sisters are moved to a halfway house. It's written in a very like brisk vignette style where each chapter was only on my coobo only like three pages. I really enjoyed the writing. The writing is well composed.

[00:23:48]There's a great like sense of voice and specificity and melody, but it doesn't feel ever overroought or distracting.

[00:23:55]Like it's just like that real nice perfect blend of being rich and eloquent, but also having like a minimalisticness to it. You know, it's like minimalist without being plain. It was a beautiful example of Vignette style writing. So, stylistically, I thought this was like very very well conceptualized and very well executed. I felt like there were a lot of really interesting angles that could have been explored and were not. And towards the end, you know, wraps up with the death of a character who you just never particularly cared about or knew anything about. And so it feels like a very random ending. It leads her to have a revelation that, you know, just doesn't really feel like it was built up to in a meaningful way. So, I really enjoyed reading this book. I thought it was very well written and beautifully constructed. I really enjoyed the writing and the style and I really enjoyed like the first third of the book in particular. Like a good novel, not a bad novel, a good novel. There's lots I really enjoyed about it. I just think it could have been more, you know. So, I have a really quick little book review today uh for a poetry book. And Georgie is here. This is our new kitten, eight months old. She's literally so precious and she's just like such a sweetie pie.

[00:25:08]Like she's literally the sweetest kitty cat that I've ever had. Like starts purring as soon as you walk into the room. It's literally just so precious.

[00:25:17]The book that I have to review today is I do know some things by Richard Syen.

[00:25:22]Richard is one of my favorite poets. So this is a book of pros poems. They're autobiographical. In the most like recent thread, we're following him in the aftermath of his 2018 or maybe his 2019 stroke. And then we also follow his childhood, his upbringing. And then we also follow him around the same time period as his debut collection, Crush, which follows the relationship with and aftermath of the death of his boyfriend in the '9s. This was so good. He just has such a distinctive voice, blunt statements that kind of contradict each other back to back. So I thought I would just read the first poem that I had tabbed in the book, which is her on page 11. They say that I was born in February in a hospital in Midtown while it snowed. It is legend. There are photographs. They say the blue bathing suit with the little green frogs was my favorite. They say that those are my mother's sunglasses pointed at a naked boy wearing nothing else in a polaroid laughing. My first birthday and the big stuffed dog. I remember that dog, but I don't remember getting that dog. It seems like I always had that dog. She would sleep in bed with me, endlessly vigilant, black plastic eyes, flashing hallway light if anyone opened the bedroom door along with a real cat named good for nothing layout cat. That's you, they say, pointing at a photograph. A little boy at his first radio in a baby blue cowboy outfit with suede fringe, standing awkwardly and squinting into the sun. But they aren't pointing out a photograph. They are pointing out a story. How this and that and something something. What does it take to own the myth? Why build a self from this? It makes me uncomfortable. My story, part insight, part anecdote, started by unreliable people at cross purposes, in which photographs didn't get saved, and which photographs didn't get taken. I never figured out who named the cat, but everyone took credit for it. I just find something about his style, his use of sort of directness. You know that line, I remember the dog, but I don't remember getting the dog, but it seems I always had the dog. You kind of see this sort of human thought process working itself out on the page. His work is always just so direct. There's often a sort of brutality to it. The directness is actually where the ambiguity is. I think what's always drawn me to Psychon's work is the intensity and the the gravity of his words. I think his sentences hold a real and true gravity that is very very arresting. It's also the intensity in unexpected places as well. Sometimes sentences that feel so direct and so simple carry this weight, this real urgency. Okay, so I have the next book review and it's All Men Want to Know by Nina Bare, translated from French by Ana Boss Higgins. So this book follows a French Algerian lesbian who lives in Paris. It's a vigning style novel that is told in three different modes which are labeled becoming, remembering, and knowing. In the becoming sections, the unnamed protagonist is 18 years old living in Paris and exploring the lesbian club scene in Paris in the8s.

[00:28:40]She knows she's a lesbian. She has known this for a long time, but she's never acted on her desires. She's never been with a woman before. And despite the fact that she is very kind of deeply involved in this sort of lesbian bar scene in Paris, she is closeted and feels pretty ashamed of herself. In the remembering sections, we follow her childhood. She was growing up in Algeria. And then in the knowing section, she talks about her family history. I will always be a sucker for a Vignette style novel about a lesbian. I don't know. There's something about a Vietnam novel that feels so like synthesized because every single section is so compressed and the main character is very introspective. Maybe even Virgin on Naval Gazy, but I think Naval Naval Gazy literature is my guilty pleasure.

[00:29:27]So, you know, I'm the target audience for this. She's very like restrained and also very messy at the same time, which makes her very captivating to read about because you never know what she's going to do or if she's going to finally do something. Even her inactions feel messy and feel complicated. The thing about a vignette style novel, which is really interesting and slightly paradoxical, is because all the scenes are so short, even when nothing is really happening, like this is not a book where things happen, the pace actually ends up feeling super super quick. you're flashing between moments so quickly, you know, it's almost like you're flipping between photographs, but then every single little section is so like specific and vivid. There's also something kind of languid about this because it's so introspective. It's so heady. It's so emotional. The main character is a writer and this almost feels like it could be her diary entries. There are some barriers to the intimacy, but at the same time, those barriers feel purposefully constructed by the narrator and by the narrative and the things that she's just not ready or able to talk about with us. So, I have a couple book reviews to film today. Uh, but the first one is going to wrap up this video and it's going to be For All Girls Be Mine Alone by Sophie Strymer.

[00:30:41]This is, I think, Joyland Edition's first novella project that they're publishing. Maybe it's their second. So, this book is set in Vienna and we follow an unnamed lesbian narrator. So, in the first half, she's talking about the dissolution with her best friend because she is obsessed with and in love with his girlfriend and they have this kind of rivalry over his girlfriend. And then in the second half, she is recalling a story that someone else had told her years earlier about this other character's time at a music school. All the characters are in music school.

[00:31:16]about how a group of students had [clears throat] summoned the spirit of a dead monk and it had possessed one of the girls. So, the book is very concerned with messy teenage social, romantic and sexual dynamics, particularly lesbian dynamics. There are male characters in these friend groups. Even when say like there is a rivalry with a main character, it's like underpinned by the narrator's lesbianism. Do you know what I mean? So there are dynamics that are not lesbian, but they're like underpinned by a lesbian motivation. And that really fascinated me. I was really intrigued by a story that is exploring lesbian obsession as it extends to characters outside say like a one-on-one lesbian dynamic. That was really uh interesting to me. And the book is quite atmospheric. It feels quite kind of sophisticated. There's quite a simplicity to this in part because it is so short, so honed in, but it feels fairly rich for such a a short book.

[00:32:19]Actually, I feel like it took me quite a long time to read because even though it's very short, it it's like quite slow in its pace. And I don't mean that in a bad way. If anything, it kind of aids to the feeling of getting so much more out of the book than the sum of its parts.

[00:32:35]I've never been to Vienna. I did feel this very like atmospheric rendering of the setting and overall I found the messy dynamics between the characters to be really really interesting. Two narratives have a very interesting relationship. Personally, I found more interest in the first story. I did enjoy the ultimate friction of the two narratives together and I don't think this book would have been the same without that second part. This was my first read of 2026 and it was a really nice way to start out the year. This book feels very like cozy, but also the dynamics are so messy that there's just so much to sink your teeth into. So, that's all for this episode of recent reads, wrapping up uh all the books that I had read in 2025. Thank you guys so much for watching and I will see you in another video. Bye.

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