Read in January 2026
My reading year is off to a good start for the first month of 2026. I started January with a fairly clear reading plan, with a few books I really wanted to read, but that plan was quickly turned upside down. Not due to a lack of time or a reading slump, but because one book completely consumed my mind and unceremoniously dragged me into a series that had been sitting unread on my bookshelves for far too many years.
And as much as I like to approach things logically, a reading plan should primarily remain a guideline, not a fixed schedule that I must adhere to at all costs. So I happily let go of that TBR, letting my reading itch flow and completely lose myself in the story!
In the end, I read a total of 8 books in January, totaling 2946 pages. That brings the average January book to 368 pages.
It was also a strong month in terms of reviews. No individual book received five stars, but the series I read as a whole undoubtedly deserves a full five stars in my heart. Most books fluctuated between two and four stars, with clearly more high scores than low ones. The average book of January thus comes to 3.4 stars.
What surprised me a bit was that this month scored so well, even though I read a relatively large amount of Young Adult books, a target audience that has become increasingly less appealing to me in recent years. Of the eight books I read, three were YA titles (all part of the aforementioned series). The remaining books were intended for an adult audience, which amounts to 5 adult books.
My reading formats also varied considerably this month. I read three books entirely as audiobooks, one as a combination of e-book and audio, and the remaining titles all came from my own collection. In total, I read 4 books from my bookshelf.
The genres remained varied as well, with 4 different genres: thriller (1), mystery (1), horror (1), and fantasy (5).
I also read one book in Dutch – a Japanese translation – and the remaining seven in English, in their original language.
Below is a list of the books I read in January, along with my star rating.
Click the link to jump to the blurb and my review. As always: be aware that both the blurb and the review may contain spoilers, especially for sequels in a series. Sometimes I hide spoilers behind a foldout or blacked-out text.
- Garber, Stephanie – Caraval (Caraval #1) ★★★★
- Kent, Minka – The Silent Woman 🎧 ★★
- Yambao, Samantha Sotto – Water Moon ★★★
- Garber, Stephanie – Legendary (Caraval #2) ★★★★
- Jackson, Holly – Not Quite Dead Yet 🎧 ★★★★
- Kawaguchi, Toshikazu – Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Before the Coffee Gets Cold #1) ★★
- Hendrix, Grady – We Sold Our Souls 🎧 ★★★★
- Garber, Stephanie – Finale (Caraval #3) ★★★★
Garber, Stephanie – Caraval (Caraval #1) ★★★★
Genre: Fantasy
Scarlett has never left the tiny isle of Trisda, pining from afar for the wonder of Caraval, a once-a-year week-long performance where the audience participates in the show. Caraval is Magic. Mystery. Adventure. And for Scarlett and her beloved sister Tella it represents freedom and an escape from their ruthless, abusive father.
When the sisters’ long-awaited invitations to Caraval finally arrive, it seems their dreams have come true. But no sooner have they arrived than Tella vanishes, kidnapped by the show’s mastermind organiser, Legend. Scarlett has been told that everything that happens during Caraval is only an elaborate performance. But nonetheless she quickly becomes enmeshed in a dangerous game of love, magic and heartbreak. And real or not, she must find Tella before the game is over, and her sister disappears forever.
Easy four stars. Caraval was such fun: enchanting, rich, vibrant and utterly vivacious. The world felt gloriously unhinged, a little insane in a Wonderland sort of way, all twisty, cruel and seductive, sweeping you along in one dazzling whirlwind of madness.
The writing does lean a bit young at times and there’s some repetition, but I honestly didn’t mind because the imaginative, vivid setting completely won me over. I might have enjoyed being able to solve the clues alongside the characters, but the relentless chaos is part of the charm, and it works brilliantly.
I really, really enjoyed this. Caraval has been on my TBR for years, and I think I was scared to finally read it in case it didn’t live up to the hype or the promise I’d built up in my head. I’m so happy to be proven wrong. Sometimes it’s tempting to stay in the unknown with the idea of a great book, a bit like Schrödinger’s cat, but this time, opening the box was absolutely worth it.
🎧 Kent, Minka – The Silent Woman ★★
Genre: Thriller
Three years ago, the original Mrs. Westmore suffered an unfortunate accident—and hasn’t uttered a sound since. Not a physician, psychologist, or world-renown specialist has been able to elicit so much as a word from the silent woman … until now.
On an ordinary Tuesday while Wells was away—despite instructions to never disturb the fragile woman—Jade visited her isolated predecessor bearing a peace offering: a bouquet of white lilies. Only she wasn’t expecting Sylvie to have something for her as well: a slip of torn notebook paper with a single word scrawled in shaky black ink.
That word? Run.
The Silent Woman started with a premise I genuinely liked, but it never lived up to its potential. The mystery is telegraphed so clearly that there’s little room for suspense. I kept waiting for a twist, hoping the story would subvert the obvious direction it was pushing me toward, but in the end, it played out exactly as I had guessed from the blurb. No surprises, no reversals, no payoff.
Ironically, the novel seems to acknowledge this from its very first line:
“I fan to the end of my drugstore paperback and read the last page first. Surprises have never been my thing.”
Unfortunately, that sentiment ends up describing the reading experience all too well.
I did enjoy the setup and especially the side plot involving the old Hollywood starlet, which I wish the book had leaned into far more. A deeper dive into that golden-age atmosphere could have added much-needed texture and intrigue.
As an audiobook, it was perfectly easy to listen to – smooth, accessible, and never demanding – but also just as easy to forget once it was over. Ultimately, this felt like a missed opportunity: pleasant enough in the moment, but predictable, underwhelming, and lacking the spark needed to make it memorable.
Yambao, Samantha Sotto – Water Moon ★★★
Genre: Fantasy
On a backstreet in Tokyo lies a pawnshop, but not everyone can find it.
Most will see only a cosy ramen restaurant. And just the chosen ones – those who are lost – will find a place to pawn their life choices and deepest regrets.
Hana Ishikawa wakes on her first morning as the pawnshop’s new owner to find it ransacked, the shop’s most precious acquisition stolen and her father missing. And then into the shop stumbles a charming stranger, quite unlike other customers. For he offers help, instead of seeking it.
Together, they must journey through a mystical world to find Hana’s father and the stolen choice – through rain puddles, hitching rides on paper cranes, across the bridge between midnight and morning and through a night market in the clouds.
But as they get closer to the truth, Hana must reveal a secret of her own – and risk making a choice she will never be able to take back.
Water Moon feels deeply Japanese in spirit and atmosphere, often reminding me of Spirited Away with its whimsy, absurdity and quiet magic. The world is delightfully strange and charmingly silly, governed by dream logic rather than rules. Anything feels possible, and that’s part of its appeal.
The writing and structure are fragmented and choppy: short chapters and sections, shifting points of view, and a constant movement between memories, flashbacks and the present. While this could easily have felt disorienting, it actually read very naturally, mimicking the way thoughts flow, how one idea triggers another, which sparks a memory or a half-forgotten story. At the same time, this approach creates a sense of emotional distance; everything and everyone feels slightly removed, as if viewed through a soft haze.
Scattered throughout are genuinely beautiful, lyrical sentences and delicately expressed sentiments, though the tone and style are uneven. The world-building is whimsical and imaginative, but therefore also unanchored. We’re shown many intriguing ideas and places, yet only ever in fleeting glimpses, tumbling from one setting to the next without fully settling anywhere. Over time, this constant jumping begins to feel clunky and undermines the charm.
The romance, unfortunately, is vastly underdeveloped. Despite becoming a central driving force of the plot, it lacks proper foundation. I never truly felt the connection between the characters or understood why they were in love, which weakened the emotional impact. Combined with the book’s length and its tendency to remain vague and surface-level, this made the second half feel drawn out. While I initially flew through the pages, the momentum stalled a little over halfway, and I found myself less eager to pick it up.
Overall, Water Moon offers a journey filled with interesting ideas, fleeting beauty and moments of quiet magic, but its emotional distance and lack of narrative grounding ultimately kept it from fully coming together for me.
Garber, Stephanie – Legendary (Caraval #2) ★★★★
Genre: Fantasy
After being swept up in the magical world of Caraval, Donatella Dragna has finally escaped her father and saved her sister Scarlett from a disastrous arranged marriage. The girls should be celebrating, but Tella isn’t yet free. She made a desperate bargain with a mysterious criminal, and what Tella owes him no one has ever been able to deliver: Caraval Master Legend’s true name.
The only chance of uncovering Legend’s identity is to win Caraval, so Tella throws herself into the competition once more. Caraval has always demanded bravery, cunning, and sacrifice, but now the game is asking for more. If Tella can’t fulfill her bargain and deliver Legend’s name, she’ll lose everything – maybe even her life. But if she wins, Legend and Caraval will be destroyed forever.
The games have only just begun.
Legendary completely derailed my January TBR, and I regret nothing. I hadn’t expected Caraval to linger so vividly in my mind, but I couldn’t stop thinking about that intoxicating world, the chaos, the magic, the sheer fun of it all. In retrospect, I should have given it 5 stars instead of stingily sticking with 4, purely because of how much it consumed me! So rather than fight it, I leaned in and returned immediately to the game, and Legendary rewarded that decision in every way.
This sequel keeps the same whimsical, seductive atmosphere that made Caraval such a joy but deepens it. The setting is new, the lore richer, and the story feels more purposeful and driven, transforming the dreamlike madness into a sweeping, high-stakes adventure. There’s still that delicious nonsensical air, but now it’s paired with sharper momentum, more mystery, and a sense that everything is moving toward something bigger.
I was initially hesitant about the shift in perspective from Scarlet to Donatella, and I did miss Scarlet and Julian more than I expected. Still, Donatella quickly won me over. Her strength, resilience, and determination make her a compelling lead, and the cast of new and returning characters soon filled any remaining gap with ease. The writing also feels more confident and mature this time around.
What did bother me was the shock I got every time the sisters’ ages were mentioned. Donatella is sixteen in this book and only turns seventeen in the epilogue, and honestly, that didn’t fit the story at all. While reading, I automatically imagined them as women in their early twenties or older, and I found myself largely ignoring their official ages to comfortably follow the story. Especially with Donatella, her minority sometimes felt awkward, especially given the book’s romantic and sensual undertones. So I won’t dwell on that too much.
Aside from that, I found Legendary to be a shimmering, dangerous, utterly enchanting adventure, that has made me more than curious about Finale.
🎧 Jackson, Holly – Not Quite Dead Yet ★★★★
Genre: Mysterie
Jet is the daughter of one of the wealthiest families in Woodstock, Vermont. Twenty-seven years old, she’s still waiting for her life to begin. I’ll do it later, she always says. She has time.
Until Halloween night, when Jet is violently attacked by an unseen intruder.
She suffers a catastrophic head injury. The doctor is certain that within a week, the injury will trigger a deadly aneurysm.
Jet has never thought of herself as having enemies. But now she looks at everyone in a new light: her family, her former best friend turned sister-in-law, her ex-boyfriend.
She has at most seven days, and as her condition deteriorates she has only her childhood friend Billy for help. But nevertheless, she’s absolutely determined to finally finish something:
Jet is going to solve her own murder.
Not Quite Dead Yet pulled me in from the first chapter. As an audiobook (after acclimating to the unique voice of the narrator) it was especially compelling, tense, and fast-paced, making it perfect for binge-listening. I needed to know what had happened, and that sense of urgency carried me all the way to the end.
That said, this was far from a flawless story. It asked for quite a bit of suspended disbelief, especially when it comes to what Jet is physically and emotionally capable of after her attack and diagnosis. The cast of characters didn’t always help either, since many of them are deeply unlikeable, and the family dynamics in particular are frustrating to watch. The fact that most of the supposed adults came across as far younger and more immature than their reported ages was also a source of annoyance. At times, it felt like a story that began life as YA and was later “aged up.”
Still, despite all these issues, the book worked remarkably well where it matters most: tension and emotional impact. The mystery was gripping, the pacing rarely faltered, and the ending was genuinely heartbreaking. It hit me much harder than I expected.
Overall, this was a conflicting but memorable experience. It was messy, occasionally frustrating, and not always believable, yet undeniably addictive.
Kawaguchi, Toshikazu – Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Before the Coffee Gets Cold #1) ★★
Genre: Fantasy
In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.
In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer’s, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.
But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .
Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?
Read in Dutch (Voordat de koffie koud wordt)
Before the Coffee Gets Cold initially appealed to me because, after reading Water Moon, I noticed I’d missed the Japanese narrative style. That style is clearly present here as well: fragmented, slow, and rather traditional in its message and perspectives. The book is structured as four separate stories, which results in a lot of repetition when read one after the other. While the basic premise is beautiful, the execution unfortunately struggled to resonate with me. The characters remained distant, the pacing often felt dragging, and despite its limited length, I found it surprisingly long-winded. I even resorted to the audio version to get through it, which didn’t really enhance my reading enjoyment. Unfortunately, this remained an interesting premise for me, but the execution wasn’t very compelling.
🎧 Hendrix, Grady – We Sold Our Souls ★★★★
Genre: Horror
Two decades later, former guitarist Kris Pulaski works as the night manager of a Best Western – she’s tired, broke, and unhappy. Everything changes when she discovers a shocking secret from her heavy metal past: Turns out that Terry’s meteoric rise to success may have come at the price of Kris’s very soul.
This revelation prompts Kris to hit the road, reunite with the rest of her bandmates, and confront the man who ruined her life. It’s a journey that will take her from the Pennsylvania rust belt to a Satanic rehab center and finally to a Las Vegas music festival that’s darker than any Mordor Tolkien could imagine. A furious power ballad about never giving up, even in the face of overwhelming odds, We Sold Our Souls is an epic journey into the heart of a conspiracy-crazed, paranoid country that seems to have lost its very soul…where only a girl with a guitar can save us all.
We Sold Our Souls was an absolute blast, especially as an audiobook. As a metal fan, I adored the premise and all the loving nods to music culture, from the countless references to the chapter titles named after metal albums. Those details made the story even more fun. Grady Hendrix clearly writes this as both a tribute to cult horror and heavy metal or music-fandom itself.
The story plays with the classic “selling your soul for fame” myth and twists it into something even more selfish and scary, while simultaneously making it wildly satirical. The story was far gorier than I had expected, with plenty of gross-out moments, but it balanced that exceptionally well with sharp humor and plenty of self-awareness.
I loved Kris as a protagonist. Choosing a female guitarist navigating a brutally male-dominated scene was both refreshing and powerful. She refuses to fade into the background or relinquish the art she created, which made me root for her from start to finish.
The pacing was quite fast and intense, and the story is genuinely suspenseful. The mysterious lost album plotline had me completely enthralled. While the ending felt a little anticlimactic and slightly confusing, it didn’t diminish how much fun I had getting there. Overall, this was a loud, bloody, creepy, and thrilling ride.
Garber, Stephanie – Finale (Caraval #3) ★★★★
Genre: Fantasy
It’s been two months since the last Caraval concluded, two months since the Fates have been freed from an enchanted deck of cards, two months since Tella has seen Legend, and two months since Legend claimed the empire’s throne as his own. Now, Legend is preparing for his official coronation and Tella is determined to stop it. She believes her own mother, who still remains in an enchanted sleep, is the rightful heir to the throne.
Meanwhile, Scarlett has started a game of her own. She’s challenged Julian and her former fiancé, Count Nicolas d’Arcy, to a competition where the winner will receive her hand in marriage. Finaly, Scarlett feels as if she is in complete control over her life and future. She is unaware that her mother’s past has put her in the greatest danger of all.
Caraval is over, but perhaps the greatest game of all has begun―with lives, empires, and hearts all at stake. There are no spectators this time: only those who will win…and those who will lose everything.
Finale was, in many ways, exactly what I expected from the conclusion to the Caraval trilogy: fun, imaginative, and steeped in the same shimmering magic that made me fall in love with this world in the first place. And yet, despite enjoying it, I never felt quite as urgently compelled to race through it as I did with Caraval and Legendary. Something about it kept me at a slight distance, and I’m still not entirely sure why.
One of my biggest struggles with this installment was the romantic focus, particularly the love triangle between Legend, Donatella, and Jacks. It felt unnecessary and, at times, uncomfortable, especially given Donatella’s age, which bothered me even more here than in the previous book. The increased emphasis on physical romance made her feel less like a fully realised character and more like a prize to be fought over, which didn’t sit right with me. I also found myself questioning why both men were so intensely drawn to her, as their motivations never felt fully convincing.
I was happy to spend more time with Scarlet again, but her storyline felt rushed and underdeveloped. The subplot involving the Count, in particular, struck me as wasted page time. From the beginning, it was clear how that situation would resolve, and I would much rather have seen those pages used to deepen other parts of the story.
And that’s perhaps my main frustration with Finale: there are so many fascinating elements here that never quite get the space they deserve. The expanded lore surrounding the Fates and their mythology is genuinely intriguing, and I would have loved to explore it in much more depth. Instead, we only skim the surface, which makes the climax feel rushed and, ultimately, a little too easy. For a story with such high stakes and such a rich magical foundation, the resolution felt surprisingly low-impact.
I’m aware that part of this may come down to me reading this as an adult who has grown up on fantasy, and who perhaps hoped for something darker, grander, or more emotionally devastating. Still, I couldn’t help feeling that this finale had the potential to be more epic than what we ultimately got.
That said, none of this means I didn’t enjoy Finale. I did. A lot. The whimsy, the atmosphere, and the sense of wonder that defined the first two books are still very much present. Even when the plot felt rushed or slightly unfocused, I was happy to be back in this world, surrounded by its glittering danger and theatrical magic.
Looking back, my relationship with this trilogy feels a little contradictory. Each book individually earned four stars from me, yet the series as a whole has completely consumed my reading life this month. It lingered in my thoughts, pulled me back again and again, and reminded me just how powerful pure escapism can be when it’s done well. For all its flaws, Caraval gave me a reading experience I won’t soon forget.
So while Finale didn’t fully live up to my hopes, I’m incredibly glad I finally read this series. I’ll always remember its mad magic, lush atmosphere, and sense of spectacle. And I’m more than curious to see what Stephanie Garber does next.
