Karen C. Murdarasi's 3 favorite reads in 2023

This book kept me up past my bedtime! It was so gripping and also so readable.

The characters are well-rounded and believable, and the interplay between them is as intriguing as the actual mystery they are trying to solve.

Because it’s a series, I already "knew" and cared about Robin, the female lead, so when she spends half the book in real and growing peril, there is an inescapable sense of dread.

The final reveal was satisfying (if horrific), and I didn’t see it coming, but it was the ride that I enjoyed as much as the destination.

I actually only ranked this book four stars out of five initially (I’m a harsh marker), but I couldn’t get it out of my head. Imagine a cross between the Narnia series and the Harry Potter series, but all the main characters are Edmund/Malfoy types. People sometimes do heroic things, but there are no heroes here.

It’s all much more muddy. This is a fantasy novel set in the real world, at least to start with, but there are also heavy elements of horror, and I think that’s why it put barbs into my brain – the things that happen to important characters are traumatic, unforgettable, and often very sudden.

A book that stays with you, whether you want it to or not.

What I loved about this book is that it was a love story, but not a romance. It’s so unusual to have the central love story of a book be a platonic friendship.

Sam and Sadie become friends as children, and despite breakups, bad relationships, misunderstandings, and tragedy, their friendship survives.

This is also a novel about computer games, but you don’t have to be a gamer to appreciate it. I think, as with Ready Player One (a favorite of mine), it helps to be a particular age so that you can remember early computer games, but I was drawn into the description of inventing and building a game, even though I have almost no experience of that because the relationships between the characters carry the story.