3 enthralling books

featuring magic, more magic, and hoarding 🤷🏼‍♀️

Feb 24, 2026

If you want to know why I read books exclusively on my phone, here’s what’s going on:

Would you want to hold a chonk of a novel, while also holding a chonk of a sleeping baby? If so, your wrists are stronger than mine.

Last weekend, my family and I travelled to my youngest brother’s wedding, and, boy, have I been invested in a doorstop-size book ever since, reading it in snippets while holding sleeping children and/or their snacks in one hand, and my phone/book in the other.

This despite my general reluctance to read doorstop-size books.

In fact, I started the book, hoping I would be bored in the first few pages (as I usually am by most books) so I could return it to the library.

Then I was hoping I’d be bored by the first fifty pages…

Then I hoped I’d be bored by the first two-hundred pages…

What can I say? I really don’t crave a doorstop-size book.

But I am enthralled by this epic:

The Wayfinder imagines the fight for a kingly succession in a South Pacific empire. It’s brutal, it’s magical, it’s strange, it’s like family. There’s a community stranded on an island. There are boats sinking at sea. A girl who will save her people. Home and redemption and people at their very best and their very worst.

I’m almost finished, and last night I had a rehearsal end early, so I read a chapter in my car before heading home. The kind of chapter with a twist that literally left me breathless, wiping tears from my eyes. I ended up reading it three times last night, marveling. (It was Ch 31, fyi, and since writing this newsletter, I’ve read it a fourth time.)

So be warned - if you read the first few pages, you might fall in love and be stuck reading a chonky-chonk book for a while and crying over it.

(Audiobook readers - sometimes literary books are difficult to listen to, imo. However, I’m pretty sure you would be able to follow and enjoy this one.)

Another enthralling book I read recently is The Everlasting. It follows a young soldier-turned-historian who’s tasked with writing a tale of his nation’s founding - the legend of a lady-knight that inspires national fervor. But his life and the knight’s life are intertwined in time-travel-ish way, and they eventually have to figure out the looping nature of their relationship in order to defeat one of the best villains I’ve ever read.

Great writing, compelling love story, complex characters. And importantly - the ending is 10/10, which is so difficult to do in a time-bending story.

If you read and loved Jeannette Walls’s memoir The Glass Castle or Tara Westover’s Educated, this is a book for you:

Destroy This House tells the story of charismatic parents who are not particularly invested in truth or community, and whose tendencies lead to hoarding and financial instability.

Early in the book, as Amanda Uhle sets up her relationship to her parents and especially her grief, she writes:

Mourning my mother and father was an endeavor that had started so long ago I couldn’t properly recall it. It began at some unknowable point in my childhood and continued for decades. Sometimes I was mourning their deaths. I more often mourned reality and sanity, the facts as they appeared to everyone on Earth except my parents. At other times, I mourned the imagined normal relationship with them I longed to have, something like the one I thought we’d had before I got old enough to know better. In a thousand revelations over thirty-some years I stuttered toward understanding them amid their endless contradictions and mysteries and deceptions. The more I knew, the less I understood. I grieved incessantly. I lost them little by little.

It’s a wild, difficult story, told by a skilled, compassionate writer who clearly loved her parents.