A Little Bit Evil

March had absolutely no plan.
No TBR. No structure. No 'I will read X books this month.' Just vibes, mood shifts, and whatever my brain decided it could focus on that day.
And somehow... I finished five books.

🌱 March Intentions
📖 Read gently
🎨 Create something small
🧡 Protect my energy
😴 Rest often
📝 Simplify tasks
Looking back, March really did lean into these. The reading wasn't forced, creativity stayed small and manageable, and I gave myself permission to rest without turning it into a failure.

📊 By the Numbers
Books read: 5
Average rating:3.9 ⭐
A very solid, quietly successful month - especially coming out of February's one-book energy.

⭐ Standout Vibes
Not a single overwhelming five-star this month, but a strong run of *consistently good* reads - the kind that keep you engaged without wrecking you emotionally (which, honestly, was exactly the energy I needed).

📚 Everything I Read
Ali Hazelwood - Loathe to Love You ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide to Happiness ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Alison Maloney - Life Below Stairs ⭐⭐⭐½
Seanan McGuire - Beneath the Sugar Sky ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Nancy Warren - Mosaics and Magic ⭐⭐⭐⭐
A genuinely chaotic mix of romance, nonfiction, cosy mystery, and portal fantasy - which feels very on-brand for an unplanned reading month.

🧭 Reading Mood
March felt like a recovery month

After February's lack of focus, I found myself:
Picking up whatever held my attention fastest
Letting go of books without guilt
Leaning into comfort, familiarity, and lower-pressure reads
No overthinking. No forcing it. Just following the thread of 'does this work for me right now?'
And it worked.

💬 Mini Thoughts
Ali Hazelwood continues to be ridiculously readable - perfect for getting out of a slump
Beneath the Sugar Sky scratched that slightly surreal, emotional fantasy itch
Mosaics and Magic delivered peak cosy mystery vibes
Life Below Stairs was interesting, but didn't quite grip me the same way
Bill Bailey was exactly the kind of gentle, thoughtful nonfiction I needed this month

🌱 Final Thoughts
March didn't need structure to be successful.
It just needed permission.
Permission to read inconsistently. To follow moods. To enjoy books without turning them into a checklist.
And somehow, that led to one of the most balanced reading months I've had in a while.
If February was about softness, March was about trust.
Let's see what April brings.

The One-Book Month
February was... quieter. Not in life - absolutely not in life - but in reading.

I finished one book.

And instead of pretending that didn't happen, or dressing it up as something hyper-productive, I want to be honest about it - because this year I'm trying to let my reading life reflect my actual life.

📊 By the Numbers
Books read: 1
Pages read: 1,184
Average rating: 5 stars

That's it. That's the stats.

🌧️ What February Actually Looked Like
February was a month of:

Mental health wobbling in ways I didn't fully anticipate
University deadlines looming and then arriving all at once
Settling into a new job (which is good, but still takes energy)
Keeping up with tennis, because of course I am

And somewhere in the middle of that… a reading slump
Not the dramatic, “I hate books now” kind. Just the soft, heavy kind where picking up a book feels like one more task instead of an escape.

And I've learned enough about myself to know that when that happens, it's usually not about the book.

It's about bandwidth.

📖 The Book
The one book I finished in February was Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid - 368 pages of sharp tension, aching intimacy, and characters who completely took up residence in my brain.

But here's the thing: while I only finished one book, I didn't only read one book.

I read 1,184 pages in total this month. I started things. I dipped in and out of stories. I got halfway through books and then set them down because my brain needed something different.

February wasn't a no-reading month. It was a no-finishing month.

And that feels like an important distinction.

Heated Rivalry just happened to be the one that carried me all the way to the end - the one that held my attention when my focus felt fractured. There's something fitting about a romance built on long-term tension being the story I could commit to in a month where everything else felt unsettled.

🧠 Reading Slumps & Soft Expectations
I'm trying not to measure my reading in productivity terms.

Eight books in January doesn't make me “better” than one book in February. It just means January had more space.

This year - especially with university and work balancing each other out - I want my bookstagram and blog to reflect reality, not output. Some months will be chaotic stacks and genre deep dives. Some months will be one dog-eared paperback and a lot of late nights staring at ceilings.

Both count.

🌱 Looking Ahead
If February was about surviving and stabilising, maybe March can be about rediscovering joy.

No pressure. No strict TBR. Just following whatever mood feels gentle and manageable.

If you also had a slow month - you're not alone. And if you devoured twelve books, I'm cheering for you too.

Reading seasons shift. We're allowed to shift with them.

So I have chronic insomnia, right? It’s pretty normal for me to still be awake at 2, 3 in the morning. 

⭐️⭐️⭐️ (3 stars)

Insurgent is an interesting but uneven middle book - one that kept my attention without ever fully winning me over.

I'm very aware that I'm not the target audience for this series, and I think that colours my response here. There's a lot in Insurgent that will work well for readers invested in the characters and the world, particularly the escalating stakes and constant forward momentum.

At the same time, the novel often feels busy rather than deep. The plot is packed with movement, faction politics, and shifting alliances, but emotional beats are rushed through in favour of action. As a result, moments that should land hard sometimes pass by without much impact.

That said, I was intrigued. The world-building continues to raise interesting questions about control, identity, and rebellion, and the series' larger ideas kept me turning pages even when the execution didn't fully work for me. Tris remains a compelling central figure, even if I never felt as emotionally connected as the story seemed to want me to be.

Ultimately, Insurgent is a solid, readable sequel that does what it needs to do to move the story forward. It didn't quite click for me, but I can absolutely see why it resonates with its intended audience.

It has been a week, y'all. It has been a week

I quit my job.

There isn't a shiny next thing lined up, no dramatic leap to a new role, no tidy narrative arc where I immediately land on my feet. Just... an ending, and the quiet (and slightly terrifying) space that comes after it.

A lot of this comes down to the airport and the ongoing issues there that have been grinding me down for a long time. Throw in the recent sale and murmurings of 're-organisation (but apparently our jobs are safe... uh-huh, not my first rodeo, my dude). Add in my disabilities - the ones that don't get better if you just push harder, the ones that flare when the world decides to be loud and unpredictable and physically demanding - and something finally clicked into place this week.

Full-time, on-site work is no longer sustainable for me.

That's not an easy thing to admit. I've circled around it for ages, tried to negotiate with myself, told myself I could just adjust one more thing, power through one more rough patch. But the reality is that the cost keeps getting higher, and I'm the one paying it with my health.

Li and I talked it through properly - not in a panicked way, but in that calm, practical, loving way that says okay, let's actually look at what life needs to look like now. And we've landed on a plan that feels... doable. Not perfect, not magically fixed, but realistic.

I'm going to start looking for either:

• full-time remote work, or
• part-time work that gets me out of the house without breaking me in the process.

It's a shift. It's also a bit of grief, if I'm honest - for the version of me who could just do full-time work without it costing everything else. But it's also a relief. Naming the limit instead of constantly crashing into it feels like an act of self-respect, even if it's a hard-won one.

Right now, I'm trying to sit in the in-between without spiralling too far ahead. Rest a little. Breathe. Let my nervous system unclench. Trust that making a choice in favour of my health isn't failure, even if it doesn't look like success the way it used to.

If nothing else, this week has been a reminder that I don't have to keep proving I can survive things that are actively harming me. I'm allowed to build a life that fits the body and brain I actually have.

More soon, probably. But for now: this is where I am. 

One of the things The Time Hop Coffee Shop does particularly well is sit with nostalgia without romanticising it.

Nostalgia is seductive. It smooths edges. It filters memory through warmth and familiarity, making the past feel safer than the present. We remember how things felt, not how they actually were - and even then, we remember only certain feelings. The ones that comfort us. The ones that reassure us that there was a time when things made sense.

But comfort is not the same as happiness.

In The Time Hop Coffee Shop, the chance to revisit the past isn't framed as a gift without consequence. Returning to old moments doesn't magically restore joy or fix what went wrong. Instead, it exposes something quieter and more unsettling: how easy it is to confuse “I miss this” with “this was good for me.”

There are moments in our lives that glow in hindsight because they belong to a version of ourselves that felt younger, more hopeful, or more certain. But that glow often comes from distance, not truth. When we look closer, the happiness we think we're remembering is threaded with anxiety, exhaustion, compromise, or unspoken hurt. Those things didn't disappear - they were just edited out of the highlight reel.

The book gently suggests that nostalgia is less about wanting the past back and more about wanting relief from the present. When life feels uncertain, heavy, or unkind, the past becomes a refuge - not because it was perfect, but because it's finished. Nothing new can go wrong there.

And yet, revisiting the past doesn't offer the safety we expect. It can't give us the things we didn't know to ask for at the time. It can't make people behave differently, or turn near-misses into fulfilled dreams. What it can do is show us how far we've come, and how much we survived without realising we were surviving at all.

What I loved most about The Time Hop Coffee Shop is that it doesn't shame nostalgia. It understands why we cling to it. But it also refuses to let nostalgia pretend it's happiness. The book treats memory as something to be acknowledged and honoured - not something to live inside.

Because happiness isn't a place we can return to. It's something that has to be built, slowly and imperfectly, in the present we're standing in now.

Sometimes the most meaningful thing the past can offer us isn't a second chance - it's permission to stop chasing one.

There's a particular kind of grief that Every Heart a Doorway understands instinctively: not the grief for something that died, but for something that *was real* and is now unreachable. A world that fit. A version of yourself that made sense. A door that opened once - and then closed.

Seanan McGuire doesn't treat portal fantasy as escapism. She treats it as truth. The children who come back from their doors aren't delusional or confused; they're bereaved. And the cruelty of the so‑called real world isn't that it doubts their stories - it's that it insists they should be fine now. That they should move on. That whatever made them *whole* somewhere else was a childish phase, best forgotten.

That insistence is where the harm lives.

Nancy's grief is quiet, bone-deep, and constantly misunderstood. She doesn't express her pain in ways that make adults comfortable. She doesn't soften it, decorate it, or rush toward recovery. Instead, she carries it with her - the stillness, the restraint, the refusal to pretend she wants what the world expects of her. And for that, she is punished.

What struck me on this read was how much of that punishment is rooted in gendered expectations. Nancy's refusal to be warm, expressive and compliant - her resistance to the emotional labour so often demanded of girls - is framed as a problem to be solved. She is cold. She is difficult. She is wrong. The school exists to help children who've returned from impossible worlds, but even there, the pressure to become legible, palatable, *normal* seeps in.

Normal, in this book, is not neutral.

Normal is enforced.

McGuire is especially careful - and radical - in how she writes asexuality. Nancy's asexuality isn't a puzzle, a symptom, or a phase to be corrected. It's simply part of who she is, as intrinsic as her longing for the Halls of the Dead. Yet it's precisely this refusal of expected desire - romantic, sexual, reproductive - that places her further outside what the adults around her are willing to accept.

There's an unspoken rule in our world that healing looks like reintegration. That recovery means wanting what you're supposed to want. That if you don't crave the right things - romance, ambition, domesticity, forward momentum - then something must be broken in you.

Every Heart a Doorway quietly but firmly rejects that.

The children who found their doors didn't escape because they were weak. They escaped because those worlds *recognised* them. Some needed logic, some needed chaos, some needed rules, some needed blood and shadow and endings. None of those needs is treated as lesser. None are pathologised — until the children are forced back.

That's where the real violence happens.

The book keeps circling one devastating idea: that being forced to abandon the self you were allowed to be is a form of trauma. And that pretending otherwise doesn't make it kinder - it just makes it lonelier.

What makes this hit especially hard is how familiar it all feels. You don't need to have walked through a literal door to recognise the shape of this grief. Many of us have known spaces - identities, communities, ways of being - where we were briefly, astonishingly at home. And many of us have been told, explicitly or implicitly, that those selves were unsustainable. Unrealistic. Inappropriate. Something to grow out of.

Queer people. Asexual people. Disabled people. Neurodivergent people. Anyone whose existence disrupts the tidy story of what a life is supposed to look like.

We're often asked to trade authenticity for acceptability. To sand ourselves down until we fit back into the world that never quite wanted us.

McGuire doesn't offer easy comfort here. The doors don't reopen on command. Not everyone gets to go back. Some losses remain permanent. But what the book does offer is recognition - and the insistence that this grief is real, that it matters, and that refusing to "get over it" can be an act of truth rather than failure.

There's something profoundly compassionate in a story that says: you were not wrong for loving that world. You were not broken for wanting to stay. And you are not obligated to desire the life you were handed simply because it's the only one currently available.

Some doors close.

That doesn't mean what was on the other side stops being part of you.

And maybe the quiet, radical hope of Every Heart a Doorway is this: that even when the world insists on normalcy at all costs, there will always be people - and stories - who understand the cost of that insistence, and who will sit with you in the grief of what almost was.

This week's reading stack feels very deliberately split between intensity and comfort, which honestly says a lot about where my head is at right now.

On one side, I'm continuing with Insurgent. It's fast-paced and emotionally charged, full of difficult choices and escalating consequences. I'm always struck by how much this book is about identity under pressure - how people behave when the systems around them are breaking down, and neutrality stops being an option. It's the kind of read that pulls you along whether you're ready or not, and it definitely demands attention.

On the other side of the stack is Time Hop Coffee Shop, which couldn't feel more different if it tried. This one is all warmth and whimsy — alternate universes filtered through steaming mugs, quiet conversations, and the discovery of the things in life that really matter can be surprising. It's gentle without being dull, and it feels like the sort of book you read slowly, letting it settle.

Together, they make an oddly satisfying pairing. One is about upheaval and rebellion; the other is about pauses, connection, and care. Big stakes versus small kindnesses. Sprinting through plot versus lingering in atmosphere.

I think that balance is exactly what I want from my reading right now - something to engage me fully, and something to remind me to breathe.

If you've read either, I'd love to know how they landed for you. And if your reading week looks completely different, tell me what mood you're in - I'm always curious how other people balance their stacks.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (5 stars)

Every Heart a Doorway is a small book that carries an astonishing amount of emotional weight.

At its heart, this is a story about children who have been somewhere else - worlds that loved them, shaped them, and made sense in ways this one never quite does. Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children offers care, understanding, and the quiet acknowledgement that returning is often its own kind of loss.

What Seanan McGuire does so beautifully here is refuse to frame those experiences as delusion or escapism. The portal worlds matter. The longing matters. The grief of being shut out of a place where you belonged is treated with seriousness and compassion.

The writing is sharp, spare, and deeply empathetic. In a very short space, McGuire creates characters who feel fully realised, each carrying their own kind of ache. Themes of identity, belonging, queerness, and neurodivergence are woven into the story without spectacle - simply allowed to exist.

There's darkness here, and tragedy, but also a fierce insistence that every child's story is real and worthy of care. This is fantasy as emotional truth, and it lingered with me long after I finished.

Title: Begin Again
Fandom: Tennis RPF
Chapters: 1/1
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Darren Cahill/Simone Vagnozzi
Characters: Darren Cahill, Simone Vagnozzi
Additional Tags: First Kiss, Mutual Pining, Getting Together, Coffee Shops, Rain, Inspired by Taylor Swift
Summary: Eight months after a breakup, Darren has convinced himself that love only ever breaks and burns.

On a quiet Wednesday afternoon in a café near the courts, Simone proves him wrong.

Link to fic on AO3