Hi all my lovely supporters of women's wrongs! It seems we've tempted fate with this quest; we are now in the position of evaluating a real life woman's alleged wrongs.

There's been some chatter in this quest forum already about Mia Ballard, author of Sugar (in this quest) and Shy Girl. Here's a quick and very simplified primer for those unaware:

Ballard is a Black poet and indie author. She debuted with Sugar in 2024 to great success, and followed up in 2025 with Shy Girl which earned her a book deal with publisher Hachette. [Editing to add for clarity: Shy Girl was also indie published and very successful; after Shy Girl's success, Hachette made a deal with Ballard to traditionally publish.] A few months ago, the online book space became suspicious of Ballard's writing in Shy Girl specifically and called out many "tells" of AI writing. Booktuber Frankie's shelf outlined their suspicions in a 2hr 40min YouTube video, calling Shy Girl "AI slop". In March 2026, Hachette dropped Ballard and pulled Shy Girl from publication (link to the NYT article here ).

This has stirred much discourse. On one side, people see this as a win for human created art and a vote for keeping AI out of the book space (which we love). On the other side, people warn of ruining authors' careers over AI allegations when AI detection is so flawed. Ballard maintains that she did not write Shy Girl using AI, however she did hire an editor who used AI without her knowledge. There is also the added element of Ballard being a Black debut indie author, and also the first to have a book deal canceled over AI. Some argue the injustice of Ballard taking the fall for this when Hachette is just as responsible for the editing of the work they ultimately published.

Amidst all this discourse, I want to ask you all: how do we feel about Sugar's inclusion in this quest? As someone passionate about keeping AI out of the arts (and the book space in particular), I feel conflicted about having Ballard represented in this list. On the one hand, having a "better safe than sorry" stance against AI in books is reasonable, and I would not want to advocate for the consumption of AI generated novels. On the other hand, Sugar was not accused of being AI generated (there is some suspicion about the cover art, but it's pure speculation--Ballard is adamant she modified it herself off a free image she found online). It is also a sort of poetic irony that this discussion is happening in a quest titled Supporting Women's Wrongs. There's something to be said about the discussion value of including morally grey women.

I'm very curious to hear what you all think, and what you believe should be done about Sugar. Do we keep it in, or do we remove it?

Hi everyone! I wanted to share how this quest was curated, and how suggestions and new additions will be evaluated. This quest first and foremost celebrates women behaving badly, whether that's through revenge, selfishness, unhinged desire, or simply a loose screw. There are (thankfully) many examples of such women in every genre, but this quest leans towards the "weird girl lit fic" realm. Weird girl litfic isn't an official sub genre of course; it's more of a vibe, you know it when you see it. Books in this sub genre tend to be literary or contemporary fiction with some thriller and horror mixed in, which is reflected in the quest list.

For new additions, I will be prioritizing new releases. There may be some exceptions if I missed an excellent backlist book, but in general I want the quest list to grow with books that will be published in the months and years to come :) Right now, I'm going through books published in 2025 that would be excellent fits. What Hunger by Catherine Dang was just added - let me know which other standout titles were published in 2025 and I'll do some research!

There are some popular backlist titles I intentionally did not include since they're well represented in other Quests (for example, Gone Girl and Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil). Others fit the theme but not the genre (examples: Poppy War and Iron Widow).

Hope this clarifies the criteria and helps steer suggestions! Stay bad 🔪💄🚬

Hi everyone, we've been quietly releasing new features and quality of life updates over the past month on all platforms, please make sure your app is updated to see the latest improvements!

One of the biggest updates is moderation improvement. We have new tools for both our moderators (who run the PageboundGuide account) and for the community:

• You can now report a post, review, or comment for spoilers
• You can send a post or comment to PBGuide for Content Guideline violations
• Of course, you can still flag a post, comment, review, or user profile for hate speech, harassment, self-promo, etc

PageboundGuides will review all reported content and either:

• add a spoiler tag to posts & reviews
• flag comments with spoilers
• approve flags for posts/reviews/comments/profiles that violate the Terms & Conditions (hate speech etc)
• archive Posts that do not meet the Posting & Content Guidelines

What is archiving? When a post does not meet the Content Guidelines (link here, quick version under Account & Settings -> Posting Guidelines in the app) PBGuide can archive the post from the book forum. The post is hidden from the default forum view but stays on your profile and book journey. You can include archived posts in your forum view by changing the forum filter from "All Posts" to "Include archived posts"

The PBGuides have been working hard behind the scenes to clean up very busy forums (especially the readalong forums). We know this has been a point of frustration for many, and giving everyone the ability to send these posts to PBGuide for review is just one of many ways we will be improving forum quality over the coming months.

Other New Features & Improvements

• Feed filters on your Main Feed and Following feed
• Message on your Yearly Challenge letting you know if you are ahead or behind on your goal
• Streaks! & editing past reading progress (click the streak widget to edit and view historical progress)
• Navigation changes on app: Profile is it's own tab where More menu used to be. The More menu is now on the top left next to the Pagebound logo
• Block & Report users from the profile page
• Reading progress bar added to the Book Page for currently reading books

Right now we are working on a huge, exciting project: Format tracking, stats, and monthly wrapups. Goal is to have this out in the next month!

You can always check the Roadmap to see what we're working on. If you want to support the continued development of Pagebound and add feature requests to the roadmap, please consider joining Pagebound Royalty (crown icon in the navbar)! Our Royalty members make it possible for us to provide a high quality, ad-free experience for all 🙏

Happy Reading, Jennifer & Lucy