2025 Book Reviews

Reading Wrap Up, Books I Read and People Who Hate Readers

Welcome to my very first book review of 2026!

A book review that consists of 4 whole novels. And not from one month, either.

For those of you who have been following along for a while, you may be wondering what took me so long to come back around with another book review.

I don’t even know how long it’s been since I’ve done one, maybe the summer? I don’t think I did one in the fall, and I know I started the horror novel sometime around then, too.

But that’s because, honestly, for a big chunk of the end of 2025, I lost my love and patience and desire to sit and read. Or, for any of my hobbies, for that matter.

Which is crazy for me to say out loud because I am an avid reader, and I very rarely go through reading slumps. I also really love to craft and make things, wherever my creative spark leads.

A few times in my life, though, I have gone through these depressive or exhausting or busy times in my life, and so much ends up taking a more important front seat that a lot of my hobbies and passions take a back burner.

That’s the sort of place I found myself in last year. So hyper focused on healing, not slipping into a depression, taking accountability for the mess of my life and rebuilding it, that I literally made zero time for the little things that I love that brought me joy. And that just adds to the negative, may I add.

That’s not to say I never did, it just came in smaller waves, little projects, or projects taking waaay longer than they should, or starting them but never finishing, starting them and never looking at them again. I threw a whole wooden booknook away. (To be fair, it was horrible quality)

I was in a bit of a rut overall all I guess.

This winter, I started to make time again. Painting first, then crafting, and then finally reading again. I painted crazy designs all over a shelf I repurposed for my tiny trinkets and treasures, my oldest got me a new booknook, one of superb quality, and I’ve been reading back to my usual self now in January. It feels so good.

So, that’s to sum up why I only have 4 books for you today, and I read these over August till December.

And I read 2 of them in December… ha.

But they were all really good reads, and without further delay, here’s what I thought of them.

Horror Movie – Paul Tremblay

I was really thrown by this book. It was… decent. Better than Cabin At The End Of The World, which I seem to get slack for about not liking, but I didn’t. This one was a slow read, and the ending didn’t go the way I thought it would as I first read it; however, it wasn’t as climactic as I thought it could have been. That being said, the concept and storyline, and how it’s written, are well done.

It follows an actor who was, cult film style, famous for an 80s horror film that never quite came to be. Then, in the 2000s, the film gets a reboot, if you will, and that one actor is the only remaining cast member of the original film able to help… if you can call it helping.

It was good overall. Not a top 5 read, but I did like it and would recommend it if you’re a reader and also like horror slasher 90s cult movies.

Stolen – Elizabeth Gilpin

This was a hard read. As a child of the 80s and 90s, who grew up in a little nowhere country forest town where I know places like this happened, and now in the 2020s with the knowledge that I have as a grown adult, this book shook me.

It follows the true story of a woman who, in her early teens in the early 90s, was sent away from her family to live in a camp where she would learn to control her “bad teenage behaviour.”

And I am just going to leave it there.

I feel for her, her story, the people she met, the people I have met in my life, anyone who was so easily swept away in a broken, hurtful system.

I highly recommend if you’re a deep reader and enjoy documentaries and real life.

Oh boy, then we have Pucking Around by Emily Rath

Guys I was late to the party with this. I thought it was like, why choose romance? Albeit smutty dark romance. But.

Yall. I thought, why choose was like, have both somehow, or someone chooses to leave, or I don’t know, the choice seems more… less… man the whole hockey team is together in this. We got a 4-way, 5-way, some kinda way love fest going on. All love. All r rated. All the time. No sadness. No heartbreak. No real miscommunication trope, I mean, a little of all of those, enough to keep the book storyline going,, but really, no.

This is just one good ol wholesome everybody in love and everybody…. Doing it. Together. Mostly.

Everyone.

Anyway I picked it up at a good time because even though I assumed it was smut, what I really needed was a feel-good read. This was it for me. As wild as that sounds, with it being a smutty sex book. There is No fighting. NO anger. No meanness. No confusion. Within a page or two, everything is solved, and everyone is back to… doing that.

Wholesome. “Group style” wholesome.

I highly recommend this read if that’s your thing.

And last but certainly not least, we have The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

SO many people shared this the other year and said it was amazing.

When I started reading it around Christmas, I shared it on my social media and mentioned I hoped it was as good as others said it was.

Everyone swore it was.

They were not wrong.

This was an incredible read. It was a really blunt and raw look at the idea of growing old with regrets, and what it would look like if we could go back and redo those regrets.

If we could go back to each and every pivotal moment in our lives, make drastic, or sometimes minuscule, different choices, and live to see each outcome.

Would we mourn for the life we really did live?

Or is there really another life out there that would have been better?

It definitely got me in the feels a bit, made me look at certain things in a new light. It’s a book that will stay with me for a while.

So that’s it, my friends. That’s the end of my 2025 reading.

I’m really happy to say, I am on my 3rd and fourth books of 2026 already, and it’s the 5th as of the time I am putting this together, so I know that by the first week of February, you can expect another pile of books to be reviewed.

And not just any.

The second book I read so far this year was the most emotional soul soul-shaking 5-star read I have read in a very long time. It was exceptional. I can’t wait to share it with you. But no spoilers yet. You will just have to stay tuned.

Also, I am going to go on a whole rant here, but man, I had no idea that collecting books and being a fast, avid reader, and reading being your hobby, was going to be such a hot topic for so many people.

I went way more in depth about this on my YouTube video on book reviews, but as the new year started, I went through my shelves to clean them up and purge them a bit and make them look nicer.

Every few years, I try to count them.

I thought it would make funny content to post some photos of them on my Facebook and be like, any guesses how many books I have?

And people got mad.

And I know what you’re thinking, Carissa, you post something on the internet, people can have an opinion. Yes, of course. But, mad that I have a huge collection of books? Books. Guys, it’s not meth.

Which leads me to the controversial TikTok and New York Times article and videos about the woman who read 100 books last year, and people being mad about it.

Mad about it.

Mad how much time that would take every day, and mad that they spend all their time reading. When, in reality, if you took away all the time you spend doom-scrolling, binging Netflix, and staring at your screen, you absolutely could read that much without adding any more time into your schedule. People who read 100 books a year don’t "do nothing" with their lives. They read on the shitter and read the same amount of time you watched 8 episodes of Stranger Things over the Christmas holidays. It’s not that hard to wrap your head around.

Anyway. I am going to come back to that another time. In more detail.

For now..

What have you been reading lately?

I want to know.

Have you read any of these? What did you think of them?

And most importantly…

Have you read my newest book? That tentacle one? I have news and updates on that coming later this week.

As always, thank you so much for being here, my friends. Thank you for reading. It means the world to me.

Much love,

Author Carissa McIntyre

Lady Mack Xo

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