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June 2025

The Book Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2025
This week, I’m spotlighting a novel that’s poised to become one of the most talked-about books of 2025.
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Mel
​Nesting by Roisín O’Donnell: A Quietly Devastating Portrait of Survival​
This week, I’m sharing a novel that left a profound impact on me.
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Mel
Careless People and the Cost of Staying Silent
Power, complicity, and the personal price of speaking up
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Mel
A Love, A Choice, A Language of Limbs
This week we take a look at a book that cracked me open in that quiet, thoughtful way the best stories do.
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Mel

May 2025

The Quiet Courage of The Sunflower House
This week I’m sharing a book that completely took me by surprise.
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Mel
The Attic of Alternate Husbands
This week we’re heading up a very unusual set of stairs into The Husbands by Holly Gramazio—a delightfully offbeat novel about a magical attic that…
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Mel
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The Economy of Enough
This week we take a look at The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer - A generous, grounded invitation to rethink everything.
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Mel
The Ockham Longlist Broke My Heart (And Here’s Why That’s a Good Thing)
So, I set out to read the entire fiction longlist for this year’s Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
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Mel

April 2025

The Quiet Brilliance of Cathy Rentzenbrink: On Ordinary Time and The Last Act of Love
Some books arrive in your life quietly—no hype, no drama, no urgency.
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Mel
Why Did I Wait So Long? Falling Headfirst into The Covenant of Water
There are books that sit patiently on your “must read” list for months—sometimes years.
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Mel
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Would You Open the Box? Reading The Measure in an Age of Dystopia
I’ll be honest—I don’t always reach for dystopian fiction these days.
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Mel
© 2025 Mel
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