Fanciful Feature | My Top Five Reads of 2025

This book is perhaps cheating, as it doesn’t come out until the 3rd of February this year, but I read it last year, so I’m counting it.

This book was fun. Super fun. It was funny, gory, full of slasher and rom-com tropes and analysis, and just a really good read. I had a bit of a hard time in the beginning, because the amount of references to different movies that the MC has watched was a bit much, but that evened out as the book continued. I’m sure a lot of the rom-com aspects went over my head, as it isn’t a genre I particularly enjoy, but the slasher aspects were a good time. The combination of the two genres was a refreshing take. And there were plenty of fun easter eggs to find.

Diavola was a gloriously atmospheric read. I saw a lot of people critical of the soap opera-esque dynamics of the MC’s family, which I understand, but I thought that was an interesting aspect of the story (that may have been amplified by the haunting anyway).

The setting? Spectacular. The bulk of the story takes place in a villa in a rural Italian countryside, where the whole family has gathered for their annual holiday. I wish I could stay there honestly, ghosts be damned.

And boy were there ghosts. They were interesting, heartbreaking, and creepy all at once.

The main character was an artist, so it was interesting to learn about painting through her.

My second Silvia Moreno-Garcia book (Mexican Gothic lives in my brain rent free), and I adored it. This is a story with three different POVs that span a century. You have early 20th century rural Mexico, Depression era and 1990s New England university campus. Each POV was distinct, evoked the era that they were a part of, and came together at the end to tell a fascinating tale of three women bound together by similar experiences.

I love multi timeline stories, and books within books, and this had both. It also had witches, Mexican folklore and urban legends, and some Dark Academia lite elements. I don’t buy a lot of physical print books, but I am so glad I decided to here.

I was lucky enough to get to read this as an advanced copy, and I am so glad I got that opportunity. This was an interesting, tragic, and at times humourous look at sharing life with demons, metaphorical and less metaphorical.

Here we have a house full of demons, that Cleo has just inherited from her deceased, estranged mother. She used to live there part time as a child, but doesn’t remember much of the experience. Then she finds a copy of the book her mother wrote about living with the demon that possessed that very home, annotated for Cleo to read. She begins to remember, but are they truly her memories or her mother’s, whom everyone believed to be mentally ill? This had elements of what is real and what isn’t, a book within a book, and a setting at the centre of the trauma of a family.

This was my first Rachel Harrison, but certainly won’t be my last.

Yet another ARC I was lucky enough to read last year. This is a novel adaptation of Reddit stories by the same author, and I loved every moment of it (I know I said I wasn’t putting these in any particular order, but this was probably my favourite read of the year, if I was really pressed to choose).

I loved the setting of a campsite on old land, filled to the brim with supernatural creatures that the MC has to keep an eye on as they live alongside the human campers and residents of the town just outside the campgrounds.

The mix of different cultural folktales, the MC’s family collecting journals over the years full of information about how to deal with the entities that are likely to show up at the grounds, and the current day plot are all things I absolutely love! I am very much looking forward to book two in this series!