The Last Page completely stole my heart. What started as a cozy bookish romance slowly turned into such an emotional and comforting story about grief, belonging, love, and finding a place that feels like home.

As a book lover, the indie bookstore setting was honestly magical to me. The Last Page felt so vivid and alive that I genuinely wished I could step inside it. Ella’s deep emotional connection and passion for it also made the story feel incredibly sincere. Reading this made me want to work in a bookstore, reorganize shelves, and recommend books to strangers PLSSS😭

This was also my first book by Katie Holt, and I absolutely loved her writing style. It felt warm, immersive, and genuine in a way that made the story so easy to sink into. The pacing of the emotional development especially worked for me because nothing felt rushed.

One of my favorite things about this book was Ella and Henry’s relationship. Their story begins with tension and mistrust, but it never felt overdramatic or forced. Ella’s frustration toward Henry was understandable, and Henry himself turned out to be far more layered and lovable than the “rich grandson who inherits everything” trope initially suggests. Watching them slowly move from awkwardness and resentment into friendship, trust, and eventually love felt so natural and satisfying.

I also really appreciated that the romance allowed space for emotional intimacy to grow first. Their softer moments together ended up meaning so much more because the story took its time building them. Somewhere in the middle of the book, I realized I had become completely emotionally invested in them without even noticing. NEW FAV COUPLE ALERT!!

And the ending absolutely got me 😭 It was so heartfelt, tender, and emotionally rewarding that I genuinely cried. By the end, I felt attached not only to Ella and Henry, but also to the bookstore itself and everything it represented.

All in all, The Last Page is such a charming and heartfelt romance filled with cozy bookstore vibes, emotional depth, lovable characters, and a relationship that slowly but beautifully blossoms over time. If you love stories about books, found family, and heartfelt romance, this one is absolutely worth picking up.

I picked up The Idiot because I kept seeing it described as a campus novel for people who find campus novels too breezy. That description is accurate, but it does not fully prepare you for how deliberately, almost stubbornly, uneventful this book is. Elif Batuman follows Selin, an 18-year-old Turkish-American student starting her first year at Harvard in 1995, through an academic year and then a summer in Hungary. On the surface, not much happens. No dramatic crisis, no big revelation, or clean ending. What you get instead is Selin's mind, and her mind is a genuinely interesting place to spend four hundred pages, even when it is also deeply frustrating.

I feel like Selin is one of those characters who is very smart in a way that does not help her at all. She thinks deeply about language, about what words mean, about why people say the things they say, and none of it makes her better at actually talking to people or making decisions. She notices everything around her but remains somehow passive, always watching, never quite acting. I found her both fascinating and exhausting, often at the same time. She is not naive exactly. She just chooses not to push. She would rather sit with confusion than force a situation to resolve itself.

One thing that I like about Selin as a character is that Batuman never mocks her or asks you to look down on her. She is written with complete seriousness. Her confusion is treated as valid. Her long silences and over-analysed emails are not presented as flaws to grow out of; they are simply who she is at eighteen, and the book trusts that this is enough to build a story around. I respected that choice, even on the pages where I wanted to shake her cuz SAME.

Batuman has a gift for the small, strange, perfectly observed detail, like a professor's odd phrase, a dormitory smell, the specific embarrassment of being in a foreign country and not understanding a joke. She is clearly a very intelligent writer, and I really enjoyed her writing even though at time it was really dragged.

All in all, a slow, smart, honest book about being young and not knowing what to do with yourself. Worth it, but bring patience.

Pls check TW before reading: infant loss, heavy grief, depression, suicidal thoughts, death/funeral home setting, and emotional isolation.

This is one of the most honest depictions of grief I've ever read. Not the “beautiful” side of grief, but the ugly side. The type of grief that fills you with bitterness, isolation, and even transforms your very identity. Cleo is not always the “likeable” grieving character, and it's precisely that aspect of her that made her so realistic to me. She alienates others, hates Paloma in such a vicious yet somehow sympathetic way, and at times lets her grief turn into a haunting and disturbing sense of despair because what's the point of anything anymore?

And I think that is what affected me most. The way the novel does not hurry her healing. Grief is not something one "gets over". It hangs around, dragging out time, making days seem infinite and hollow. At times, it seems as if Cleo will never recover from the grieving process, as if she is permanently trapped in that state. and the storyline does not attempt to fix this problem swiftly, making it all the more poignant as it seemed realistic.

Also how she is supported by others yet finds herself completely alone broke me. Because I feel like grief is just a lonely thing, It shows how even with others trying to help you cope, grief makes you feel isolated. Like love is surrounding you yet unable to get through to you.

The setting at the funeral home was truly brilliant. The constant presence of death makes Cleo come face-to-face with her own grief, which is both comforting and painful at the same time. Yet in all of this, there are times when little bits of life slowly start seeping in and she begins he journey of healing.

Mai Nguyen's writing is magnificent. There were so many lines on persevering despite grief that... stuck with me, and by stuck with me, I mean painfully.

This is not an easy read. Please check trigger warnings before going into it, because it goes to some very heavy places, including that deep, hopeless kind of grief that makes you question everything. But if you’re ready for it, this book is such a powerful exploration of what it means to lose and somehow, still keep going.

This is a tiny book that carries an unusual amount of weight. At under 150 pages, it follows five Iranian women in 1953 Tehran whose lives eventually intertwine, and although each woman wants something different, they are all searching for freedom in some form. Freedom from men, from social expectations, from shame, from violence, from the feeling that their bodies and lives do not fully belong to them. I appreciated that Parsipur never simplifies these women into symbols or stereotypes but allows them to be complex, flawed, vulnerable, and entirely human. This is definitely not a plot-heavy book where everything is explained clearly. It is more about emotions, freedom, womanhood, trauma, and the invisible cages women are forced to live inside.

Parsipur’s writing feels deceptively simple because underneath it, there is so much symbolism and emotional depth. A woman turning into a tree, dreamlike conversations, sudden shifts between fantasy and reality, nothing seems arbitrary. Magical realism, which is really folkloric, almost deadpan, is employed to convey the unrepresentable aspects of emotion and trauma. At times, the book was really perplexing for me to read.

One more element of Parsipur's writing that appealed to me was how she writes about horrifying things in a tone that is almost completely flat. A brother kills his sister in the same register as someone describing what they had for breakfast. This is a deliberate choice, and it really helped the horror land and leave an immense impact.

The novel's historical context further adds value to the importance of the novel. The novel itself was subsequently banned in Iran, and Parsipur had been censored and imprisoned because she dared to talk about female sexuality, defied patriarchy and political systems so openly. It becomes all the more chilling knowing such a history exists behind the novel.

Women without Men is not a perfect book. But it is a necessary one, and it stays with you longer than books three times its length.