Book Review: The Maid by Nita Prose

The Maid is a heartwarming and sharply observed cosy mystery novel that feels like a gigantic warm hug and a hot mug of cocoa. The story invites you into the world of Molly Gray, a twenty-something hotel maid who has suffered many set backs in her young life but who nonetheless takes immense pride in her work.

Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Genre: Cosy mystery, feel good fiction.

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Review in one word: Perfection

The Maid is a heartwarming and sharply observed cosy mystery novel that feels like a gigantic warm hug and a hot mug of cocoa. The story invites you into the world of Molly Gray, a twenty-something hotel maid who has suffered many set backs in her young life but who nonetheless takes immense pride in her work.

Molly’s life is orderly and predictable—just the way she likes it. She thrives on cleanliness, structure, and the clear rules of her job at the prestigious Regency Grand Hotel. But Molly also sees the world a little differently from most people, although never spelt out it is clear she is neurodivergent. Social interactions are often confusing, metaphors baffle her, and she sometimes misreads the intentions of others. Yet she is deeply sincere, unfailingly polite, and guided by a strong moral compass. As a character she is deeply vulnerable and good-hearted and I felt like I wanted to protect her from the scheming duplicity of the people around her.

When Molly discovers one of the hotel’s wealthy guests dead in his suite, her life is thrown into chaos. Due to her unusual behaviour and inability to read social cues in the same way others do, she becomes an unwitting part of a police investigation. This is not only a cosy mystery but a journey of self-discovery for Molly and despite the murder at its core, there is a sense of the story being more comforting than chilling.

There are many threads running throughout this book of humanity, warmth, humour, and kindness. The novel shines in its portrayal of Molly’s inner world—her thoughts, struggles, and triumphs. While Molly may appear naive to others, her unique way of seeing the world allows her to piece together clues others miss.

Themes of loneliness, societal invisibility, and finding one’s chosen family run beneath the surface, making this an uplifting and emotional read. You are reminded of the silent, unspoken and too-often overlooked dignity and beauty of cleanliness, and what a maid does to ‘return a room to a state of perfection’ – as Molly would say.

This is a deeply moving, comforting and cosy mystery without the gore and cynicism of so much detective fiction (just how I like it). A bit like Miss Marple combined with Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. You may find yourself falling in love with the character of Molly the Maid as I did, I highly recommend this!

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Book Review: Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen

Dependency is the third and final volume of Tove Ditlevsen’s masterful Copenhagen Trilogy, a searing work of autofiction that chronicles a life marked by artistic ambition, potent writing talent, vulnerability and addiction.

Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Genre: Memoir, Autofiction, Classics, Non-fiction

Publisher: Penguin Classics

Review in one word: Heart-rending

Dependency finds Tove as a young woman in her twenties, having achieved her childhood dream of becoming a published poet. She is married to the much older and influential editor, Viggo F. Møller, a relationship that provides stability but stifles her youth and passion. The narrative follows Tove as she navigates the literary circles of Copenhagen, feeling like an outsider while yearning for connection with artists her own age.

The trajectory of the book is a harrowing descent into depression, addiction and malaise. If that sounds like a heavy book to read, well in many ways it should be, however Ditlevsen manages to captivate your heart and attention with her vulnerable, curious and raw real self, and having a glimpse into this world – it’s hard to put this book down!

The memoir is a stark and moving recollection of how she found creative and emotional dependency on one man – her first stifling marriage to Viggo, a short but fiery relationship with a university student and then a deeply disturbing marriage to a sadistic doctor with mental problems who gets her hooked on opiods as a way to control her and make her dependent upon him.

If you have ever known someone who has fallen into addiction, this book might be triggering for you. I found this memoir to be sad but fascinating, like watching a car crash in slow motion.

Ditlevsen has cultivated a raw and unrelenting narrative of her body and mind as colonised territory. This is an absorbing and deeply powerful and timeless memoir and it is little wonder that Ditlevsen’s trilogy is considered a classic in Scandinavia.

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Book Review: King Kong Theory by Virginie Despentes

Virginie Despentes’ King Kong Theory is a fierce and foundational text of modern feminism, a Molotov cocktail in book form. Part memoir, part punk manifesto, it is a raw, unapologetic, and deeply personal exploration of gender, power, and sexuality in our modern world.

Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Genre: Non-fiction, Memoir, Essays, Feminism

Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK, 2020), The Feminist Press (US, 2010)

Review in one word: Joyful

Originally published in French in 2006, this classic feminist work is now available in English. Despentes is a punk iconoclast, rebel writer and confrontational filmmaker. Arguably her most famous book is her first novel Baise-Moi, was later adapted for the screen. She is the author of more than fifteen works, including the acclaimed Vernon Subutex trilogy. Always seeing life from the outskirts, Despentes draws from her own experience as a former sex worker and rape survivor for her scathing and excoriating analysis of surviving in a world mired in misogyny and misandry.

Far from being depressing in nature, this book is irreverant, hillarious and cheeky in its analysis of our world.

There’s a whole range of taboos that are exploded in this book. As she states in the explosive opening, “from the realms of the ugly, for the ugly, the old, the bull dykes, the frigid, the unfucked, the unfuckable, the hysterics, the freaks, all those excluded from the great meat market of female flesh”.

The essays in this book are provocative, explosive and generous in their philosophical reach and insight. Despentes examines concepts of rape, prostitution, pornography and the myth of the ideal woman. She strongly rejects victimhood and refuses to apologise or explain her reasons for doing anything she has done.

The book shows its age in the discussion about the ultimate waif-like beauty of the 90’s – Kate Moss. Despentes joyfully aligns herself not with the unreachable ideal of Kate Moss but instead with the mythological monster – King Kong who is beyond male and beyond female. He is a potent symbol of polymorphic sexuality and raw power before he is captured and destroyed by society.

The overarching themes are of railing against oppressive forces of sexual and societal control in our world are refreshing and interesting. I particularly enjoyed the ethos so closely intertwined with rebelious culture, art and music which showed in her amazing Vernon Subutex series. Despentes argues for a “new punk feminism” that embraces and loves what society deems monstrous or unacceptable in women and any one else who feels marginalised.

She challenges the binary thinking that pits “good” women against “bad” ones, virgins against whores, and victims against aggressors. Her style is blistering, direct, and brutally honest, characterised by precisely phrased rage and a refusal to soften her message for the comfort of the reader.

Despentes’ tone is provocative, warm and unapologetic. King Kong Theory is an essential work that rejects polite discourse in favour of a raw truth about sex and power that is as uncomfortable, liberating and joyful. I cannot tell you how much this book means to me, it is foundational, liberating and life-changing in every way.

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Book Review: Endling by Maria Reva

Maria Reva’s debut novel, Endling is immensely ambitious and credit where credit is due this is a vast, sweeping novel that rocked me to my core in its first few chapters.

Rating: 🌟🌟

Genre: War fiction, Ukraine, Metafiction, Literary Fiction.

Publisher: Virago (Hachette UK)

Review in one word: Confounding

Goddamnit I really wanted to love this book so much…I really did.

All of the ingredients were there! A lone female protagonist who cares deeply for endangered mollusc species. Driving through Ukraine and looking to mate molluscs together to prevent them being “Endlings” in other words the final individuals of their species.

Maria Reva’s debut novel, Endling is immensely ambitious and credit where credit is due this is a vast, sweeping novel that rocked me to my core in its first few chapters.

It’s set against the harrowing backdrop of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Yeva lives in a mobile laboratory, dedicating her solitary existence to collecting and sheltering endangered snails. Her most prized possession is Lefty, the last known individual of his species—an “endling”.

To fund her strange mission, Yeva works for a Canadian firm specialising in “romance tours” to Ukraine, a euphemism for the mail-order bride business. Through this work that Yeva crosses paths with two other women entangled in the romance industry: the stunning Nastia and her brilliant sister Sol, daughters of a famous feminist activist who has mysteriously vanished. Disheartened by her inability to save the snails and desperate for a way out, Yeva is drawn into Nastia’s audacious plan to abduct a dozen of the foreign men who have come to Kyiv in search of wives.

Endling tackles profoundly difficult themes of our time – war, extinction, the trafficking and exploitation of women and does this in a confronting and emotionally raw way.

There are self-conscious moments in this that I thought were totally unnecessary and cringey. The novel shifts back and forth in time in a jarring way and in some parts Reva herself narrates in the first person. This distracts from the story itself and slows it down massively. There’s also the not inconsequential thing of having 12 grown men jammed into a tiny van being driven around Ukraine for days to weeks at a time. Apparently none of the guys were aware of there being a war happening outside the van. Nobody mentions needing to go to the loo in the novel but this seemed like too much of an obvious omission. How on earth would this situation occur in reality?

I wanted so badly to love this novel but it seems to get bogged down in its own meta-narrative style. Hugely ambitious and filled with glorious moments of genius writing, I just wish Reva had made it simpler to follow and it would have been far more enjoyable.

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Book Review: How to Be Resilient by Gail Gazelle

In an increasingly scary, unpredictable and challenging world, Dr Gail Gazelle’s How to Be Resilient is a practical and compassionate guide that will empower you to find inner strength and inner calm needed to navigate life’s tough times.

Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Genre: Self-Help, Personal Growth, Psychology, Mental Health

Publisher: Callisto

Review in one word: Empowering

Self-help books and books about resilience in particular are a dime a dozen nowadays. And so I almost rolled my eyes when I came across this book. But I was naturally drawn to it anyway and wanted to give it a go.

I was absolutely delighted to find that this book is not cliched or filled with overwrought and trite advice. Instead this is an indepth and extensive collection of theories all masterfully brought into the real world of actionable insights. collection of abstract theories but a roadmap filled with supportive advice and actionable exercises designed to help readers weather difficult times with courage and wisdom.

A physician at Harvard Medical School and a certified life coach, Dr Gazelle brings both medical expertise and a deep understanding of the human spirit to this accessible book.

This is a collection of wisdom from many difference evidence-based approaches that are packaged together in an accessible and helpful way. ‘How to be Resilient’ is structured to empower you step-by-step and begins by demystifying the concept of resilience, explaining the psychology behind it and the science of neuroplasticity, the brain’s remarkable ability to rewire itself in response to new habits and experiences.

From this foundation, Dr Gazelle guides the reader through a series of practices rooted in evidence-based fields such as positive psychology, mindfulness, and gratitude research. The book is organised very well and is not overly long-winded either, each chapter has clear takeaways that reinforce the main points.

The overarching theme is that resilience is not an innate trait possessed by a lucky few, but a flexible pool of strength that anyone can consciously cultivate and fortified with continued and dedicated practice.

Dr Gazelle focuses on several core pillars for building this strength: learning to be more adaptable in the face of change, cultivating meaningful connections with others, staying mindful of one’s thoughts and feelings without being overwhelmed by them, and prioritising self-care.

Her style is clear, encouraging, and direct, making complex psychological concepts easy to understand and apply. The tone is deeply supportive, caring and non-judgemental, acting as a trusted guide on the journey toward greater well-being.

How to Be Resilient provides readers with the techniques—from meditation and journalling to strategies for deepening relationships—to not just survive challenges, but to heal, move forward, and continue to enjoy life to the fullest.

I found this book to be one of the best I’ve ever read (and I have consumed 100’s of self-help books over the years), I cannot recommend this book more strongly to you!

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#BookTag: Great British Bake Off Challenge

I absolutely love the Great British Bake Off so, when I saw this book challenge I though 'yeah, sign me up for that one.' ON YOUR MARKS – A Book You Can’t Wait To Read I can't wait to read The Last Mandarin, a fast-paced, all-too-real thriller co-written by #1 New York Times bestselling author Louise Penny and award-winning journalist Mellissa Fung, global politics become personal for two unlikely heroines.

https://alexwolfe.ca/booktag-great-british-bake-off-challenge/

Book Review: Sexographies by Gabriela Wiener

Sexographies is by famous Peruvian “gonzo” journalist Gabriela Wiener who dares to go where nobody has gone before – into the decadent, gritty and amusing sexual underworld of South America in a series of mind-blowing essays, published in English for the first time.

Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Genre: Non-fiction, Essays, Memoir, Sex, Gonzo Journalism.

Publisher: Restless Books

Review in one word: Adventurous

Peruvian journalist Gabriela Wiener has carved out a solid name for herself as a Gonzo journalist and lifelong adventurer in Latin America. She is bold and unafraid of pulling back the curtains on underground worlds most people don’t know exist.

Sexographies is a collection of short, evocative and darkly funny essays published for the first time in English and what an absolute treat it is to read!

Weiner puts her mind, body and soul on the page for all readers to bare witness to and the result is a deeply compelling, vulnerable and yet totally funny depiction of a variety of crazy sexual underworlds that exist in Latin America in parallel to the vanilla existence of the mainstream.

The book features a series sumptuous, decadent, gritty and colourful worlds that exist on the far margins of society. Wiener chronicles her experiences infiltrating a dangerous Peruvian prison to understand its tattoo culture with hardcore criminals, participating in weird and amusing orgies in swingers’ clubs, and walking the dark paths of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris alongside trans sex workers.

She undergoes a complicated egg donation process and takes part in an ayahuasca ritual in the Amazon jungle and is coaxed for a while into joining a sex cult. What makes these essays so much more vivid is how each adventure is profoundly personal and all about her own inward journey.

“Mercedes teaches me to look at myself in the mirror, to confront my sensuality, to seduce with my gaze, to reveal my belly as I swing my hips to the rhythm of “The Girls of Alexandria.”

Badani enters and, without asking, takes a picture of me in the middle of a hip-swinging trance. La Gatita has graciously pronounced me a natural. I lap it all up.

By the end of the night, I want to be like these women. I want to be lavished with heart-shaped sweets and chocolate roses. I want my work to be a hobby. I want to live with all of my best friends and play amorous games together.

I want to embroider panties and bras. I want to cook for my man. I want to wear Arabian fantasy clothes. I want to love the present. I want a god.

“For this she handed me the flogger, a whip with a leather handle and several strips. “I want to see your grip. Test it on your hand.” I took the flogger, combed it with my fingers and brought it down on my hand putting on a “bad girl” facial expression. Monique told me to flog the wardrobe.

I hit so hard I thought I nearly dismantled it. Monique laughed at me. “If that was a slave you would’ve destroyed his kidneys. What matters is not to hit hard, it’s to hit intoxicatingly.”

They say cruelty is a purely feminine virtue. I looked at Monique and asked her what was the most essential thing for me to know.

“Believe in yourself, love yourself, and know that you’re the best. You need to be self-aware, honorable, know your limits, and know the human body. Otherwise, it’s like handing a revolver to a monkey.”

“Some people think you’re a woman but when they find out you’re not they don’t care. They’re often really into it. They tell me it’s their first time and ask me if they can touch me. Before you know it, they’re down on their knees acting out their repressed fantasies. Everyone’s got their own drama.”

Vanesa can be vulgar but dreams of being treated like a sensitive girl. Everyone’s got their own drama.”

She is not taking in the mayhem from an anthropological distance, instead she is forever changed by intense experiences that challenge her ideas of monogamy and polyamory, immigration, motherhood, her fear of death and loads more.

The biggest theme is arguably the identity, gender and the human body and likewise how she feels about her own body. Her journeys into the far edges of human experience are thrilling and enjoyable and her writing style is deep, unflinching and totally addictive. I would highly recommend this book!

About the Author

Gabriela Wiener is a Peruvian writer and journalist, living in Madrid, Spain. She is considered a leading voice in “gonzo” journalism in the Spanish-speaking world. Her work explores themes of sexuality, identity, and migration with a unique, first-person, immersive style.

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Book Review: Plant Magick: The Library of Esoterica by Taschen

Plant Magick is a collectors item of sublime and exquisite beauty. This is a treasury of art and plant history for lovers of nature, art history, folklore, witchcraft and magic. Psychonauts, spiritual seekers and shamanic explorers will find a lyrical home here as well.

Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Genre: Non-Fiction, Philosophy, Spirituality, Esoterica

Publisher: Taschen

Review in one word: Esoteric

Divided into thoughtful sections and chapters, Plant Magick features visionary and universal wisdom from a broad range of scholars, witches, sorcerers and mystics about different aspects of plant magick, lore and practice.

There’s a diverse and broad exploration of magical practices using plants and fungi and how this is reflected in art across all ages and cultures. This is an ambitious ask and Taschen have delivered 100% with this stunning book.

If you or someone you know is a gardener, plant enthusiast, hedge witch or practising pagan or you simply revere and respect nature and plants – then this book will embolden and deepen your love and respect for these other-than-human beings.

The importance of plants as a part of religious and pagan rites, ritual, medicinal and transcendental spiritual purposes is explored through eye-popping and mind-bending art.

Each artwork is tactfully placed to add colour and depth to the informative essays that make up each chapter. The essays rather than being filler or less important than the artworks are a complement to them. The words are not wasted or superfluous but are instead brimming with lush and vivid detail about artists, movements and cultural phenomena throughout the ages. These allow you to understand the artworks in a much more profound way.

The sheer range of historical context explored in this book is exciting. Even if you casually flip through it, I guarantee that the hours will melt away and you will still be sitting on your sofa eyes glued to the pages, carefully turning them savouring every detail.

Bound in high quality hardcover and featuring gold inlay, Plant Magick is a part of a larger four part series by Taschen called the Library of Esoterica. Other books that might tickle your fancy in the series include Tarot, Astrology and Witchcraft. Personally, the only other one I simply had to own was Witchcraft and the review for this one is coming up on Content Catnip very soon.

Would I recommend this book to you? If you love nature, art history, folklore, paganism…then this book is a must for your collection – 5 stars!

Do you have this book or do you plan on getting it? let me know below!

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Book Review: A Hymn to Life: Shame has to change sides by Gisèle Pelicot

An immensely powerful biography from one of the bravest women in history Gisèle Pelicot, who dares to unmask rapists and a misogynistic legal system in France and do so with her own softly spoken steely courage. One not to miss!

Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Genre: Biography, True Crime

Publisher: Penguin 

Review in one word: Powerful

You no doubt would have heard of the case of Gisele Pelicot in recent years, an elderly Frenchwoman and a grand-mère whose monstrous husband was, for decades, drugging her and filming her being raped by dozens of men.

The story that shocked the world and led to all manner of salacious, sexist and rumour-filled tabloid news stories. In amongst it all Gisele refused to be reduced to a rubble of fear and horror.

Most women with lesser strength would have been broken to learn that their husbands were doing that. Instead Gisele, a softly spoken, gentle, traditional (as are many women of her generation) reveals her fierce emotional strength as she explains in her own words her own story.

The media throughout the case cast doubt upon her, as did the judiciary, which wanted to seed suspicion that she must have known what was happening to her. That she somehow consented.

Her husband Dominic or as she affectionately called him Doume was drugging her and meanwhile gaslighting her and their children that their mother was having memory lapses, possibly signs of early dementia.

In the meantime this monster was orchestrating men of all ages and backgrounds via the dark web to rape his own wife, hundreds of men, over decades.

It all sounds like a really confronting read! But honestly this book was profound in its ordinariness, the first chapter opens showing Gisele going through her daily cleaning and cooking routine, laying the dining table.

The power of this book lays in the fact that these were people who have the same values and ideas about life as most other people in western nations. These are likely your neighbours, friends, people you may know.

A lot of the book dissects Dominic and Gisele’s marriage and goes deep into their respective childhoods. Both came from working class backgrounds but where Gisele had loving parents and a mother who died tragically when she was only eight years old; Dominic had a deeply sadistic father who sexually abused Dominic’s disabled foster sister, later marrying her once his wife died (under highly suspicious circumstances).

Throughout the whole ordeal, many other people – her self-motivated first lawyer, the media, her neighbours, her children and their partners and the court-appointed psychologist – all wanted to impose upon her their own perception of who she was. A victim of domestic abuse, a subjugated woman and a slave, an emotionless enigma. Yet here in the book, we learn how Gisele feels about Dominic, her life and what happened to her – the only answer to the media circus that ever mattered!

After several years of hiding away in a remote village following the revelations, she is introduced to another man by mutual friends, who has also endured heartbreak as well (losing his wife to cancer), and miraculously, despite the huge betrayal she endured, Gisele is able to find love again with a new man Jean-Loup. She goes towards love, connection and light despite all that has befallen her, a sign of her inner strength.

“I know my story has fuelled disgust for men, but it has not done that for me. I know that the image the world had of me at that point was nothing more than of a woman who had been horrifically abused; if I had any memories of the ordeal, I’m sure that is what I would have been reduced to, and it probably would have killed me. But I was forged in a different time and place. The way I think about life was wrought at the moment of my mother’s final breath, when Papa leaned over her and whispered her name, and I squeezed her shoulder and begged her to wake up. In that instant I felt a wave of infinite love wash over me, far stronger than death. That sensation saved me, carried me through, and no doubt also blinded me and warped my judgement, considering everything I endured with Dominique. And yet the feeling persists: love is not dead. I am not dead. I still have faith in people. Once, that was my greatest weakness. Now it is my strength. My revenge.”

Gisele was buoyed up and given courage throughout the trial by the presence of hundreds of women who came every day to the court and gave her letters about how much they admire her courage in speaking out. This was truly a remarkable book, that both chronicles the darkest parts of human nature and the celebrates the courage to love in spite of it all.

I highly recommend this book.

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