About Me
Right, here goes.
I’m Minnie. I read too much, I sleep too little, and I have never once in my life managed to stop at “just one more chapter.” I’ve got books on the bedside table, books on the floor next to the bedside table, books on the landing that never made it to the bedroom.
I started this site because I kept finishing books and having no one to shout about them at. My partner has heard “you HAVE to read this” so many times that I think it’s lost all meaning, like when you say a word over and over until it stops sounding like a word. So now I shout into the internet instead, and somehow people started listening, which is either lovely or slightly concerning depending on how you look at it.
What you’ll find here
Book reviews, mostly. I read across pretty much everything, literary fiction, thrillers, horror, crime, the odd curveball that doesn’t fit neatly into any box. I don’t really have a type. I just read whatever grabs me. If a book has a pulse and someone whose opinion I trust has told me it’s worth my time, I’ll probably pick it up. I’ve given five stars to a horror novel about feral vampires and four stars to a Booker longlisted novel about Irish colonialism in the same month, and I don’t see any contradiction in that.
I’m not interested in only reading “serious” books, whatever that means. I wrote a whole rant about literary snobbery that I still stand behind completely. Life is too short and books are too good to spend your time feeling guilty about what you enjoy. Read the prize winners. Read the beach reads. Read both in the same week. Nobody is grading you.
How I review
Honestly. That’s it, really.
I try to tell you what worked, what didn’t, and who I think would enjoy it, because not every book is for every reader, and a book I found slow might be exactly the kind of quiet, careful novel you’ve been craving. I use a star rating system but the words matter more than the number. Three stars from me isn’t a bad review. It means I liked it, I had a good time, but something stopped it from being a book I’ll still be thinking about in six months.
I don’t get paid for reviews. I buy or borrow almost everything I read, and on the rare occasion a publisher sends me a copy, I’ll say so, and it won’t make a blind bit of difference to what I think. You’re here because you want to know whether a book is worth your time and money, and I’m not going to waste either by being anything less than straight with you.
I also won’t tear a book apart for clicks. Real people write these things, often over years, and I think about that every time I sit down to review. But I won’t pretend I loved something I didn’t. You’d see through it anyway.
Come find me
I’m on Instagram, Threads, and TikTok if you want more bookish nonsense between reviews. I love hearing from people, especially if you want to recommend something or tell me I’m wrong about a book. Some of my best reads have come from someone saying “I know you gave that three stars, but try THIS one.”
The boring but necessary bit
Some links on this site go to Amazon and Bookshop.org and they’re affiliate links, which means if you buy through them I get a tiny commission at no extra cost to you. It helps keep the site going and, if I’m honest, mostly gets funnelled straight back into buying more books. The cycle continues.