September 2026 reading wrap up

I started September with Thistlemarsh, which was a lovely, although occasionally terrifying, urban fantasy story set after WWI. Corrigan wraps magic beautifully into our world, with connections to Jane Eyre, little English villages and British aristocracy, while still keeping the traditional fae rules that I would absolutely live by if required.

The house and grounds have their own magic, the faeries are charming and deceptive, there is a lot of house renovating, tea drinking, and a dragon. What else does one need in a story?!

I also loved that underneath all the faerie chaos was a story about very mortal ideas of morality and choosing to be a good person simply because it’s right. And honestly, the fae themselves get a little more leeway from me than human characters do. They don’t lie, but they don’t tell the whole truth. They may look lovely (although somewhat inhuman), but they aren’t nice. That is excellent faerieing.

The little references to old traditions — like leaving milk out — also sent me down a mental rabbit hole about the similarities between household spirits (like in Slavic mythology) and faerie traditions across geographically distant mythologies. Apparently this is what happens when you give me folklore and then leave me unsupervised.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (4/5)

September was also the month I continued buddy reading Sierra Simone’s entire backlist (with Ruby), and despite not being religious, I have spent an extraordinary amount of time voluntarily reading about Catholic guilt. Which reminds me of my school years… maybe not so fondly.

On reread, Priest was good — but definitely hovering near the ‘fine’ end of my rating scale. While I was IN the book, I was engaged. Tyler’s desire, guilt and yearning create enormous momentum. Once I stepped away, I could see the cracks more clearly.

Tyler does go through a learning process, but the story revolves so heavily around his Catholic guilt that Poppy barely gets an arc of her own. And because Tyler refuses to get his head out of his butt and have an actual conversation, the final hurdle involves some ridiculous timeframes prior to resolution.

Then I read Midnight Mass. I can confirm that Tyler retained approximately zero of the lessons from Priest.

I understand that IRL learning curves are not linear, but also: this is not reality. It’s fiction, and we deserve more from fictional men. Particularly those in romance books.

Midnight Mass isn’t badly written, it’s just frustrating to read. Simone’s author note helped me understand what she was trying to do. But most of the worthwhile material could have made a lovely extended epilogue to Priest without manufacturing another round of Tyler Refuses To Communicate™ simply to extend the story.

For someone who is studying a PhD, he’s not very bright.

Priest: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ (3/5)
Midnight Mass: ⭐️⭐️ (2/5)

The Floating World has taught me something genuinely useful about how I consume books: fantasy goes in the eyeballs; romance can go in the ears. Which I actually knew from my disastrous attempts to finish Her Majesty’s Royal Coven, Furyborn and The Priory of the Orange Tree… but apparently I keep forgetting.

I listened to this one on audiobook technically over the space of three months, but I kept restarting it. (I am very across Rin and her family.) While I really enjoyed the overarching story, many of the characters merged into two or three bundles in my head, with Rin being the major exception.

I don’t think that’s the book’s fault — fantasy asks me to retain more names, worldbuilding and moving pieces than romance does, and apparently I need to SEE those things in order to keep them straight in my brain.

However, I am slightly frustrated (mostly with myself) because I REALLY wanted to love this after The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea, which was a five-star read for me earlier this year. I still enjoyed The Floating World, and because it is only the first half of a duology, I hope the story becomes more to me with the next book.

I will, however, read my physical copy of The Demon World and see if that changes the experience. (But I was trying not to because it’s my FairyLoot edition!)

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (4/5)

Sinner taught me that I don’t actually dislike age-gap romances. I dislike power-imbalance romances.

On paper, Sean has most of the obvious power: he’s older, wealthy, experienced, and he knew Zenny when she was younger. But none of those things really translates into power over her, because Zenny doesn’t particularly care about what he has and Sean doesn’t use those advantages as leverage.

Yes, he can buy her anything she wants. But the things that Zenny appreciates are the small things and the experiences. His money may facilitate the experience, but it can’t manufacture the intimacy.

Power doesn’t necessarily need to be equal, but agency does.

And then there was the storyline with the Bell brothers’ mother, which was devastating. The religious aspects of this series don’t particularly resonate with me, but grief does, and I absolutely bawled my eyes out during this story.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (4/5)

Here’s the thing: I want to love Elizabeth Stephens’ books. The ideas and the premise are great. There’s generally something unique about the characters. The worlds are fun and you can really visualise them. Sadly, it’s the execution that kills it for me.

The pieces are there in The Bone King and the Starling. There is trauma, backstory, interesting fantasy material and characters who have depth when you start piecing everything together. But at under 200 pages, the reader has to piece everything together because so much of it is touched on and then moved past before it can really matter.

Why give Calai all of that trauma if we aren’t going to unpack what it has done to him? Starling has an entire backstory that could have carried enormous emotional weight, but so much of it ends up functioning as a relatively light plot device. Characters who have hints of backstory but are small blips in the book could have had more meaningful roles.

I don’t think this story needed more things to happen. In fact, it probably needed less things if it wants to fit to the page count. Or it needed more room for the things that already happened to matter.

By the end, it felt like the condensed version of a much richer book. And that’s a shame, because I think that richer book is hiding inside this one.

⭐️⭐️ (2/5)

(This was The Romance Revelry Society’s Book Club read for September.)

I had SO MUCH FUN reading this book.

The premise is fantastic. An office-administration-type character finding someone performing an exorcism in the office after hours felt weirdly appropriate and possibly cathartic, and immediately after finishing I gave it four stars based almost entirely on how much I enjoyed the ride.

And then I started thinking about the story. This is sometimes a mistake.

In fact, the more I thought about Luke’s character arc (our MMC), the less convinced I was that he actually had one. For plot reasons, and also to stop normal people running screaming from him or locking him in psychiatric wards, he can’t share a lot of his history. So, the original lies? Mitigating circumstances accepted.

But once Brie (our FMC) knows the impossible stuff is real — and once they have literally promised each other, courthouse-style, to tell “the whole truth and nothing but the truth” — Luke continues withholding the whole truth. Chemistry can only accept lies so many times before I start yelling “that is a red flag dressed in a trench coat!”

And then there were the suspicious extra Lego pieces…

It felt a little like Mackenzie Reed bought a Lego set, looked at the picture on the box and said, “I’ve got this.” At the end, the finished model looks mostly like the box — but there is a suspicious pile of unused pieces sitting on the table, and I can see several places where they might have made the finished thing even better.

There was enough red string coming out of this book to give a conspiracy theorist a really fun time. Between the angels and demons and curses and magic and random characters, this could have been borderline more mystery than urban fantasy romance. But… nothing really comes from these setups.

So… this book inadvertently became the perfect example of my new next-day test: four stars for immediate enjoyment; three stars once I examined the character and story construction.

It’s possible that I need to stop thinking about books after I finish them. Just enjoy the ride. Stop writing little notes about them and then falling down a rabbit hole.

This seems unlikely.

⭐️⭐️⭐️ (3/5)

I also reread The Love Hypothesis this month, mostly because I was working on my book-versus-movie comparison post.

And yes, it remained a four-star read for me.

There are things I still really enjoy about Olive and Adam, and there are things — particularly around that first kiss and consent — that I continue to have reservations about. The reread was especially useful because it let me look more closely at how the book handles the Title IX material compared with the film adaptation.

I have, however, already written an entire post about this, so I’m not going to repeat myself again. You’re welcome to go read that post though!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (4/5)

Saint was… long. Unnecessarily long. As is this mini-review. But I have opinions.

I liked Saint considerably more than Priest, despite the fact that I rated them the same.

I think Aiden and Elijah have the most meaningful relationship of the three Bell brothers I’ve read so far. Tyler and Poppy felt like insta-lust. Sean saw Zenny, wanted her and went after her. But Aiden and Elijah have proper history.

They have texture and depth and years of love, hurt, resentment and unfinished business between them. Possibly too many years of unfinished business.

There is so much self-denial in this book that reading it became almost painful at times. Aiden’s monastic life is described in enough detail that I genuinely started to feel the repetition of his days. Maybe that was intentional, in which case: congratulations, Sierra, it worked.

The trip through Europe also dragged for me, as did the sheer volume of Aiden’s self-loathing. It takes an absurdly long time before the story really gets into what I think is at the heart of Aiden’s character: his mental health and depression. I felt like I was strung along for the same five years as Elijah, despite reading all 415 pages in less than a week.

There are periods where Aiden and Elijah are happy together in Europe (albeit sneaking around) but how the trip ends actually feels weirdly justified. There was consequence in it, and it was earned.

However, after all that pining, anguish, self-hatred, more pining, sneaking around, bargaining with God, realisation, confession and then MORE anguish and pining, I wanted to actually enjoy them being together.

Most romance stories have the couple break up or face some drama around the 75-80% mark, which then gets resolved around 90% so the reader can spend some time with the characters while they are in love and happy again.

That is not how this book ends.

I’m not saying any more, but I’m disappointed because of all the Bell brothers (so far), Aiden and Elijah are my favourite couple. Their relationship is richer and more meaningful to me than the previous couples because they have an actual shared history. The issue is, I don’t love their book.

I will say that with all of the guilt, self-hatred and pining across this story, it felt very Catholic. Which, admittedly, may be the point of the entire series.

⭐️⭐️⭐️ (3/5)

And finally, I returned to the Psy-Changeling world, which is just never disappointing.

Mine to Possess follows Clay and Talin, childhood friends reconnecting as adults. Which sounds nice in theory. But also, one of them is a leopard, they both have childhood trauma, and there are Luke-tier lies in this.

Their romance was nice, they’re good together, and they’re fine. Did they completely work through all of their shared childhood trauma? I’m not entirely sure. But Clay says his cat is fine with what happened, and I’m not a changeling, so apparently we’re accepting the cat’s professional opinion and moving on.

However, the romance was not the part of this story I was most excited about.

Maybe it’s because I’m four books deep now, or because I only read the previous book last month so all the politics are still fresh in my head. Either way, I’ve reached the point in this paranormal romance series where I’m more excited about political strategy and world-building than I am about the romance.

So, be prepared for the Psy-Changeling series to take over my monthly book challenge space from the Game Changer series now that I’m caught up on it.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (4/5)