Hello and welcome to my February reading wrap-up!
Not including my study of the Rig Veda and the Upanishads, I completed a total of 12 books in February. Surprisingly, I managed to get my hands on 3 new releases and wrote full reviews for them, which I will link to below along with my abbreviated thoughts. I’ve never been the type of reader to keep on top of new releases, but having this blog has made me more aware of what is happening in the publishing world, and I’m really enjoying reading books while people are actually talking about them! Of course, that doesn’t mean that I’ll stop reading classics or books that I’m a little late getting to, but I’ll try to read and review one or two new releases each month.
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Now, here are the 12 books I read in February…
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
My first new-to-me 5-star read of the year! This is the fascinating true story of the man who made the Oxford English Dictionary happen and the mental asylum inmate who did a lot of the research for him. I laughed, I cried, I nerded out, I lost track of my jaw several times, and overall I loved every second of it. If you love true crime, biographies, etymology, and/or stories of friendship and overcoming adversity, check this book out.
The Betrayal (The Fear Street Saga #1) by R.L. Stine
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Nora knows how the Fear Street horrors began 300 years ago, and she’s ready to tell her tale…
I first read this when I was about 13, and I was TRAUMATIZED. For a YA, it goes some crazy places that didn’t quite disturb me as an adult but certainly raised my eyebrows. Tween-me felt quite vindicated! (And all these years later, I still can’t handle that woman on the cover staring at me… 😅)
I’ve enjoyed returning to the Fear Street series over the past couple of years, re-reading one every few months just to enjoy the 90s teen horror vibes and the memories associated with them, but I genuinely enjoyed this one for its own merits. This has to be one of the best things R.L. Stine has ever written.
Demon Theory by Stephen Graham Jones
⭐⭐⭐⭐
I’m attempting to read through SGJ’s entire backlist, but a lot of them are hard to find, including this one. Randomly, my library had it available as an ebook, so I snapped it up. It’s a hard one to describe, so I’ll let the Goodreads blurb do the talking:
A psychological tale of cinematic horror.
On Halloween night, following an unnerving phone call from his diabetic mother, Hale and six of his med school classmates return to the house where his sister disappeared years ago. While there is no sign of his mother, something is waiting for them there, and has been waiting a long time.
Written as a literary film treatment littered with footnotes and obscure nuances, Demon Theory is even parts camp and terror, combining glib dialogue, fascinating pop culture references, and an intricate subtext as it pursues the events of a haunting movie trilogy too real to dismiss.
There are books about movies and movies about books, and then there’s Demon Theory–a refreshing and occasionally shocking addition to the increasingly popular “intelligent horror” genre.
Sadly, the footnotes function didn’t work in the ebook I read from, and there are a LOT of footnotes, but I understood most of the references and movie lingo that the footnotes explained, so hopefully I didn’t miss much. I think I would have still found this hard to follow, though. Gripping and wonderful… but REALLY hard to follow. I stopped trying after a while and just let it play out, and it came together in the end. Now I need to read it again! But I think I’ll wait for a reissue as a physical book. (That’s coming, right? Right??)
Loved the novelized-movie format. Loved the mind-bendy ending. Loved the SGJ-ness of it all. Highly recommend.
Mask of the Deer Woman by Laurie L. Dove
⭐⭐⭐⭐
I reviewed this one here, so briefly I’ll just say that this was one of my most anticipated new releases of 2025, and it didn’t disappoint. It’s a really impressive debut novel full of suspense and mystery, magical realism, and important social commentary about problems that Indigenous North American communities face, particularly the ongoing tragedy of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. I’m really intrigued to see what else Laurie L. Dove may write in the future.
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Mordecai Richler
⭐⭐⭐
This is a Canadian classic that has been sitting on my shelves for a while. Honestly, the only reason I picked it up was because I put together a TBR prompt jar, and the first prompt I pulled from it was “A book with a 5-word title.”
This is the story of young Duddy Kravitz, a Jewish kid from Montreal who believes that “a man without land is nothing.” Duddy wants to be someone, so he sets out to become a filmmaker with the goal of becoming rich and buying lots of land, but he keeps getting into trouble along the way. It’s hard to know whether to root for Duddy or not, since he’s an arrogant jerk most of the time, but I don’t think that liking him is the point. I’m actually not sure what the point is. I was confused right from the opening chapter, which is written from the pov of a character that soon disappears from the narrative, almost as though Richler wasn’t sure at first what the story was going to be. Overall, I found the writing sloppy and hard to get into, but I didn’t completely hate the book. If you know Montreal, you might enjoy it more than I did, since the city itself is a central character.
Playing the Long Game: A Memoir by Christine Sinclair with Stephen Brunt
⭐⭐⭐⭐
I’ve been following the Canadian Women’s National Team for over a decade, and Christine Sinclair has always been its star player. In 2022, she broke the record for the most international goals scored by any soccer player ever, and shortly thereafter this memoir was published. She has since announced her retirement as a player and is now helping to build up Canada’s own professional women’s soccer league (which she passionately argues for at the end of this memoir), with co-ownership of Vancouver’s brand new team, the Rise.
This memoir manages to straddle the fence between her intense desire for privacy in her personal life and appeasement of fans who want to know how she became the legend she is. It chronicles her soccer journey from her childhood to 2021’s Olympic gold medal, and all the ups and downs in between. The only time it delves more deeply into her personal life is to talk about her mother’s struggles with multiple sclerosis, which inspired Christine to become a spokesperson for the MS Society of Canada. I’ve seen criticisms about the lack of further information that we didn’t already know, but I went into this knowing how private and shy she is, and I got exactly the type of memoir I was expecting. I really enjoyed it, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is a fan of women’s soccer.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
I’ve held back for a while on reading my first Grady Hendrix because he seems to divide horror readers between “LOVE!!” and “meh,” and I couldn’t figure out why. His books always sound like potential 5-star reads to me, but then readers whose opinions I value say they’re disappointing. But I couldn’t resist the pull of this IKEA-catalogue-inspired novel forever.
Count me solidly in the “LOVE!!” camp. The humour in this is exactly my vibe, the horror is exactly my EEK, I fell in love with the characters, the ending left me wanting more in all the best ways… I really don’t understand the “meh” reviews at all. This book is FUN. And it reminds me a lot of Night of the Living Trekkies, which I also loved. Yay, I have a new fave horror writer!
The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray
⭐⭐⭐
Extraordinarily interesting subject matter – J.P. Morgan had a “personal librarian”? And this librarian was a powerful woman who built his literary collection into one of the finest in the world?? And she was Black passing as white??? The second I heard this novelized account of her life existed, I tracked it down and devoured it.
Sadly, it kind of fell flat for me. For one thing, the dialogue was often of the “include exposition in an argument even if it wouldn’t make sense for people to be yelling their entire backstory at each other” type. For another thing, the fact of Belle’s passing as a white woman, while obviously an inescapable fact of her daily life, started to feel repetitive in the narrative after a while. There are only so many times that the reader wants to read the same thought process from their narrator, you know? For another thing, there was way too much focus on Belle’s sex life for me to be comfortable. She (and her partner) is not a fictional character. Do we really need the play-by-play of her most private moments? They really could have closed the door on that and nobody would have minded.
But most of all… where were the books? I swear we spent more time on how art and J.P. Morgan’s mood swings made Belle (allegedly) feel than on the library itself, though maybe that’s my own lack of interest in those particular topics talking. I don’t know, I was disappointed.
Really cool lady, with a story that deserves to be told. Not the greatest execution, in my opinion. I’d love to read a nonfiction about her, or maybe her letters.
Beta Vulgaris by Margie Sarsfield
⭐⭐⭐⭐
I reviewed this book here, but in a nutshell… this is a flawed but clever and enjoyable psychological horror from a debut author well worth keeping an eye on. A writer who can make “woman talks to beets and maybe starts to become one” into a decent debut novel has great things coming her way.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
⭐⭐⭐⭐
This is another one that I have reviewed, which you can read right here. The Goodreads blurb for this book states, “From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an Empire which doesn’t consider you fully human.” This nonfiction is a powerful, moving, eye-opening read that I hope a lot of people will pick up and allow to sink in.
The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon
⭐⭐⭐⭐
This horror novel follows three women in two different timelines as one writes a diary that the others later find. The diary contains information about why people in this rural town keep going missing, and what might be lurking in the woods. I don’t want to say too much more in case I spoil something, but I really enjoyed this book for the most part. There were a couple of things that annoyed me about the narrative structure and the plot development, but if you go into this expecting spooky wintery vibes and a cool twist on a common horror trope, you won’t be disappointed.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
After speeding through so many deep, dark reads in a row, I felt the need to end the month on something light and fluffy, so I picked this up on a whim after a discussion with friends turned onto the Magic Tree House books. I never read this series as a kid (they came along as I was transitioning away from middle-grade books), and I was curious to see what they were like. This is a graphic novel adaptation of one of the early books in the series, but I enjoyed it and could tell that I would have loved this series as a youngster. A brother and sister having time travel adventures and learning about history firsthand? I can see why they’re so popular!
So those were the 12 books I completed in February. However, I also made progress in 4 others that I hope to be finishing soon:
I plan to post a review of Chrystia: From Peace River to Parliament Hill by Catherine Tsalikis on March 6, so please check back then if you’re interested.
Do you have any thoughts to share about any of these books? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below. I hope you had a good reading month, and I hope that March will be even better! Thanks for visiting my blog. Happy reading!