What I kept thinking about was how hard it is to make real friends as an adult. That longing Eriko carries is not dramatic or theatrical. It is painfully ordinary. And underneath that is something Yuzuki handles with real honesty, the way women can sometimes be their own worst enemies, and each other's too.

Strange Buildings knocked the wind out of me. What starts as a clever, puzzle-based horror quickly turns darker and more disturbing than I expected. This is a book that doesn’t stop when you think it’s finished with you.

A steady, resilient multigenerational novel set in post–Cultural Revolution China, where women and families endure poverty, migration, and loss. Lei’s story especially pulled me in, and the ending felt like exactly where this book needed to go.

I went into Hunger expecting horror. I didn’t expect to finish it in tears. This is an intense, intimate love story told through grief, desperation, and a choice that refuses to let death be final.

My first time reading Ichiyo Higuchi, and I didn’t expect to love it this much. Five Meiji-era stories set in working-class Tokyo, full of sharp observation and women who feel real on the page. “Troubled Waters” and “Growing Pains” were standouts, and the new translation reads beautifully.

Winter Moon is raw and real. Joanne Yi’s All the Tomorrows After is a heart-wrenching YA novel about grief, first love, and complicated family ties. Honest, sharp, and deeply emotional.

The number four is unlucky in Taiwan. Iit sounds like the word for death. For Ah-Ma, Liv Kuo’s grandmother, that superstition became a lifelong wound when her husband gave their youngest daughter away without telling her. In The Fourth Daughter, Lyn Liao Butler blends Taiwan’s hidden history, family secrets, and the comfort of food into a story about resilience, memory, and the power of never giving up.

A quiet, slightly offbeat novel about burnout, books, and the strange comfort of working the night shift in a library that only houses the works of the dead. If you liked Morisaki Bookshop or Nakano Thrift Shop, this one belongs on your radar.

This book isn’t about the rape. It’s about everything around it and the silence, the denial, the survival, and the systems that so often fail to hold the right people accountable.

There were places where I got lost. But that disorientation felt intentional. This isn’t a clean manuscript. It’s a son trying to make sense of the pieces left behind.