Down the Rabbit Hole

Author Grady Green is having the worst best day of his life.

Grady calls his wife to share some exciting news as she is driving home. He hears Abby slam on the brakes, get out of the car, then nothing. When he eventually finds her car by the cliff edge the headlights are on, the driver door is open, her phone is still there. . . but his wife has disappeared.

A year later, Grady is still overcome with grief and desperate to know what happened to Abby. He can’t sleep, and he can’t write, so he travels to a tiny Scottish island to try to get his life back on track. Then he sees the impossible — a woman who looks exactly like his missing wife.

Wives think their husbands will change but they don’t.
Husbands think their wives won’t change but they do.

I wasn’t totally familiar with Alice Feeney’s work previously, but at the bookstore it seems like she does have quite the selection. Anyway, glad to have picked this up, although ultimately it wasn’t the kind of book for me.

Beautiful Ugly mostly takes place on a tiny (isolated) Scottish island, where our protagonist, Grady, goes to try to finally write a book to get his life back on track. His wife Abby had disappeared over a year ago one night, mysteriously, and Grady had not recovered since. The island seems to be a peaceful idyllic getaway, far from distractions of modern London life. However, Grady, who has slowly been descending into madness, seems to see his missing wife everywhere he goes. And mysterious messages appear, targeted just at him, the lone visitor on the island. Just what happened to his wife that fateful night?

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3.5 star, YA

ARC Review: All the Way Around the Sun by Xixi Tian

October 6, 2025October 5, 2025 Andge @ Down the Rabbit Hole

From the acclaimed author of This Place is Still Beautiful comes an evocative, achingly romantic road trip story about grief, diasporic identities, and deep-buried secrets that haunt us, perfect for fans of Past Lives and The Farewell.

Stella Chen’s life ground to a halt when her brother unexpectedly passed away a year ago. Raised together by their grandmother in the Chinese countryside before rejoining their parents in the United States, his absence destroys the connective tissue in her family. With another jarring move her senior year, from rural Illinois to unfamiliar surroundings in San Diego, she is left alone and adrift in her family’s suffocating silence and the void of unanswered questions around her brother’s death.

So when Stella’s parents force her to join her estranged childhood friend Alan Zhao for a college tour all over California, Stella dreads it. Alan is a reminder of everything Stella wishes she could be — popular, gregarious, unburdened — and a reminder of how lost she is.

As this road trip takes Stella and Alan down beautiful coastlines and through fraught family dynamics, Stella can’t help but feel the spark of why she and Alan were once so close. Before long, they find themselves pulled into each other’s orbits, forcing unspoken feelings and long-hidden truths into the light.

Thank you to Books Forward for this copy. All quotes are subject to change.

I tell you that we are the only two people in the world who have lived the same lives. The same memories growing up. The same arc. We flew over the sea together, you and I. I think this must mean that even though you are gone, I carry the parts of you onward.

One thing I have come to enjoy about Xixi Tian’s writing is the way she interweaves the Chinese immigrant experiences into her characters’ lives. While it may not be everyone’s exact experiences, including my own, the heart of our people’s collective struggles is there and that is something I find truly powerful to see in an English novel where only a decade ago it would not have been a story easily shared for the masses.

All the Way Around the Sun features themes of grief and finding one’s way through life after momentous changes. Told from Stella’s perspective several months after her older brother had passed away in college, I thought the best part of this book was the slow unfolding of her and her brother Sam’s story. As children they had grown up in China with their grandmother while their parents had come to America to make money first so they could give their kids a better life before bringing them over. I know these are the experiences of some Chinese immigrants and I cannot imagine the depth of hardship it would be for the parents to sacrifice time with their children during momentous milestones in their youth, but also for the children to uproot their childhood into a foreign place with people that are family but also strangers.

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3 star

ARC Review: Keep Your Friends Close by Cynthia Murphy

July 19, 2025 Fives @ Down The Rabbit Hole

Chloe Roberts is on top of the world at Morton Academy. She’s a shoo-in for Head Girl and the lead spot in the school’s secret Jewel and Bone. But then her best friend, Nikhita Patel, betrays her, and life comes crashing down.

Things take a darker turn when Chloe stumbles upon the Book of Crime and Punishment – a record of every misdeed committed by Morton students and the fitting penalty. And it’s not long before entries in the book start to match up with murders of Jewel and Bone members. Anyone could be a suspect.

Can Chloe get to the bottom of this twisted game before she’s next on the killer’s hit list . . . ?

**When We Were Monsters comes out September 2, 2025**

Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for this copy in exchange for an honest review.

I haven’t been reading a lot of thrillers lately so it’s been nice to jump back into a few in a row. This premise had the makings of something really great, but I think ultimately fell a bit short of 4-star for me with its execution. It was an enjoyable summer read, and had pretty good pacing, but was simultaneously predictable and unpredictable. There’s a surprise twist at the end, but for some reason it was not too impactful? Overall not a bad story but just isn’t one of the greats for me

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