books Archives - The Y Logs

Yzabel / July 5, 2026

Review: How to Fake It in Society

How to Fake It in Society by K.J. Charles
My rating: 4/5

Synopsis:

It is 1821 and Nicolas-Marc, Comte de Valois de La Motte is making a splash in London Society. The son of Jeanne de Valois de La Motte, infamous for stealing a priceless diamond necklace meant for Marie Antoinette, Nico hopes to restore his wronged mother’s reputation, if only he can raise the funds. But he must operate with great secrecy, because the Bourbon dynasty murdered his mother, and he fears for his life.

At least, that’s what he tells Titus Pilcrow. Titus was a simple shopkeeper, making and selling artists’ paints, when he found himself suddenly married to an immensely wealthy woman who wanted to disinherit her nephew on her deathbed. As word spreads of his fortune, Titus finds himself a target of every scammer and beggar in London…including one Nicolas-Marc, Comte de Valois de La Motte.

Nico is on his last legs, out of money, and on the run from some terrifying gangsters. When Titus offers Nico a space in his household, it’s the perfect chance for him to exploit London’s newest golden purse–until he falls in love with the man he needs to cheat. Still, Nico is sure they can have a happy ending together. If he can just find his way out of his own web of lies…

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.]

An entertaining and engaging read, where romance felt well-integrated with the plot, both working together with what I’d consider proper balance. The story follows Titus, a paint maker whose shop is threatened after he’s had a falling out with his landlord (who was also his lover), and who finds himself able to get out of his conundrum by accepting a sudden and much unexpected marriage offer… An offer that attracts unwanted attention, from more or less savoury characters. Among the more savoury ones, we find Nicolas de la Motte, officially an exiled French nobleman… and officiously a scammer.

Titus, now finding himself a target, doesn’t realise Nico is playing him, and begins to trust him, and more. Nico plays his part well, including roping in his cousin Evie (who happily cross-dresses as Titus’s new valet, and has her own sights on some of the house’s personnel)—but, as you can guess, keeping a proper emotional distance from his mark turns out easier said than done.

As mentioned above, I found this a pretty entertaining story. It sometimes borders on the romp, but while not taking itself so seriously that this would jar, and the plot, in the end, holds together well. Titus and Nico have a strong and fun dynamics, each of them ending up baring themselves (in more ways than one…) more than they’d ever have expected to, at the same time they complement each other well. Titus is grappling with his own past, his family, and how this all shaped him into someone who can’t say no, can’t speak up for himself; not to mention he has no idea how to behave in society, having been propelled from a man struggling financially to one who can now buy what he wants—something Nico is all too happy to advise him about, with a helping for himself along the way. While Nico… Nico realises that with Titus, he could be something else than rogue (though he is, for all intents and purposes, a loveable one), only he has to figure out first what to do about, well, all the lies.

To be fair, I did guess some of the twists fairly quickly, as they were quite predictable. I’d say your mileage may vary on this: there are times when predictable is what we want, is exciting, and overall, this was one of those times for me.

Conclusion: A solid 4* for me. And yes, I did enjoy the (quite wholesome) romance.

Yzabel / July 4, 2026

Review: Mistress of Bones

Mistress of Bones by Maria Z. Medina
My rating: 3.5/5

Synopsis:

It’s been thousands of years since the gods lifted the continents into the air so humanity could thrive, chaining the lands down with their bones and turning them into Anchor.

Azul del Arroyo doesn’t care about gods or Anchor; she cares about being responsible for her sister’s death and getting her bones from the capital so she can bring her back to life. Again. But in her way stands the Emissary of the Lord Death, who will do anything in his power to stop her, because a necromancer like her shouldn’t exist—no matter how alluring.

As Azul and the Emissary’s cat-and-mouse game leads them to the dangerous Court of Cienpuentes, their fate becomes entwined with a count who begrudgingly works for a child king, a faceless witch who transforms Anchor into dreams she can peddle, and a long-lost half-brother with a secret of his own. It’s a time of enlightenment, of rapiers and scientific prowess, in a country where Anchor ceased to be something worth revering a long time ago, and people have forgotten the gods’ sacrifice.

But the gods haven’t. Because the gods want their bones back, and they’re not opposed to becoming players in their own game.

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.]

Another NetGalley review that is long overdue, but better later than never!

The world depicted in this novel is quite interesting: a rotting civilisation on the verge of falling into the void after depleting said world of a precious resource that is actually its very bones—and some of the gods, namely the god of Death, aren’t very happy with that, and their emissaries will try to ensure people stop breaking the world. The concepts linked to this (bones used as magic), as well as the Spanish Renaissance atmosphere, full of intrigue, masks and swashbuckling, bathing the story, definitely grabbed my attention, and once I got how it all worked, I was excited.

A note about necromancy in general: I tremendously enjoys necromancy. It can be very gruesome, sure, and in itself, riding on death, it comes across as a very negative kind of magic… but this is precisely why I enjoy it all the more: because it opens the door to so many opportunities to try and see whether it can be something else than “just death and animating skeletons”! And in this book, I could see this. Azul didn’t start on that way for power, because she worshipped death, because: she started out of love, her love for a much-admired elder sister, little girl far from home that she was at the time. And I will respect that.

There is also a bit of romance, but… maybe I should call it attraction, or perhaps romance-bait more than anything else? There’s something strange and fascinating to this dance between an emissary of Death who, against all expectations, does not dabble in necromancy and even finds it anathema, while the necromancer is actually full of life and willpower, simply wanting to get back the person she loves most in the world. I’m not really sure if I enjoyed it or found it bizarre? It’s not your typical romance, which can be a good change, or not such a good thing, depending on preferences. No spoilers about how it goes.

Where I enjoyed the novel less was in its execution. I have no problems in general with multiple POVs and switching between two timelines, but this still needs to be executed well in order to work, and here, it was just a tad bit… messy? Not impossible to follow, but demanding more effort from me than similar narratives normally do. I had trouble to focus at times, which in itself detracted from the world building.

Conclusion: 3.5*. While this was not a 4* or 5*, overall I still enjoyed it, and would be interested in picking the next instalment as well (I think it’s meant to be a duology)?

Yzabel / December 6, 2024

Review: Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari
My rating: 3/5

Blurb:

For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite allour discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI—a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive?

Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence.

Information is not the raw material of truth; neither is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and in doing so, rediscovers our shared humanity.

Review:

I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

Alright, I received a cipy through NetGalley quite a while ago, and just didn’t get to post an actual review until now. Which I should’ve done at the time for sure. Oh well. I still remember enough of the book, in any case, to be able to do so now.

This isn’t the first book by Harari that I read. Regardless of what one may think of the research itself, there is no denying that this author has a knoack for storytelling and for grabbing a reader’s attention (in a good way), all things that are a strong point when it comes to non fiction just as well as for fiction. Especially on the theme if information networks and their latest child (so to speak), the artificial intelligence, a pretty current topic.

Overall, it was quite an interesting read, and one that I would recommend, even though it wasn’t my favourite one by Harari—the latter being caused, perhaps, by the amount of information in the book, which means that each piece couldn’t be prodded in much depth. It does give food for thought, though, and a foundation for a reader to go and do more research on this or that aspect of it—sometimes, all we need is the idea of “check this out” for us to realise that, well, said topic is A Thing. That said, if you’re looking for something with, well, more depth and deeper analysis, this is not the book.

Yzabel / April 20, 2024

Review: The Trading Game

The Trading Game: A Confession by Gary Stevenson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Blurb:

“If you were gonna rob a bank, and you saw the vault door there, left open, what would you do? Would you wait around?”
Ever since he was a kid, kicking broken soccer balls on the streets of East London in the shadow of Canary Wharf, Gary Stevenson dreamed of something bigger. And he was good at numbers.
At the London School of Economics, Gary, wearing tracksuits and sneakers, shocked his posh classmates by winning a competition called “The Trading Game.” The a golden ticket to a new life, as the youngest trader at Citibank. A place where you could make more money than you’d ever imagined. Where your colleagues are dysfunctional geniuses and insecure bullies, yet they start to feel like family. Where against the odds you become the bank’s most profitable trader, closing deals worth nearly a trillion dollars. A day . Soon you are dreaming of numbers in your sleep—and then you stop sleeping at all.
What happens when winning starts to feel like losing? It’s 2008 and now you have a front-row seat to the global financial crisis. A time when the easiest way to make money is to bet on millions becoming poorer—like the very people you grew up with. The economy is slipping off a precipice, and your own sanity starts slipping with it. You want to stop, but you can’t. Because nobody ever leaves .
Would you stick, or quit? Even if it meant risking everything?
This is an outrageous, unvarnished, white-knuckle journey to the dark heart of an intoxicating world—from someone who survived the game and then blew it all wide open.

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

Quite an interesting memoir in many ways, from an ex-trader whom a lot of people must have seen as an unlikely candidate for such a job (or, at least, I bet a lot of people would expect traders to come from a more specific pool with families closely related to financial matters, for instance).

Gary Stevenson worked at Citi for a few years after university, and managed to find his place there… or did he? For not everything was so peachy, even though he made money and things looked, for all intents and purposes, as if they were going the right way… for him, not necessarily for the rest of the world caught in the 2008 crisis. And reading about that was definitely interesting, because it is no secret that as a lot of people suffered from that very crisis, there were also those who managed to get an upper hand, so to speak, and leave the table rather wealthier. Which is partly the moral dilemma that Gary went through here, finding it more and more difficult to reconcile his success with the realisation that the markets were going crazy, and soon going down in flames.

I had a bit of a harder time, though, with the portrayal of the trading world—entertaining in a way (everybody in there seemed to be a prick of some sort or other), but it’s the kind of portrayal that grows a little… stale after a while? Note: I have no idea how people behave on the trading floor, it may or it may not be that this environment is pretty toxic in general and in nature, and I wouldn’t be surprised if indeed it was. It just grew old after a while. Also I was somewhat annoyed at the last part of the book, because in the end it read more like constant anger cum trying to get as much money as possible from Citi before leaving, but without the deeper introspection I would’ve expected from this?

Conclusion: 3 stars, it is an interesting read, the author just doesn’t come off as very reliable or relatable. (Not sure if he was supposed to be, to be fair.)

Yzabel / January 11, 2024

Review: Hidden Potential

Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things by Adam M. Grant
My rating: 3.5/5

Blurb:

We live in a world that’s obsessed with talent. We celebrate gifted students in school, natural athletes in sports, and child prodigies in music. But admiring people who start out with innate advantages leads us to overlook the distance we ourselves can travel. We underestimate the range of skills that we can learn and how good we can become. We can all improve at improving. And when opportunity doesn’t knock, there are ways to build a door.

Hidden Potential offers a new framework for raising aspirations and exceeding expectations. Adam Grant weaves together groundbreaking evidence, surprising insights, and vivid storytelling that takes us from the classroom to the boardroom, the playground to the Olympics, and underground to outer space. He shows that progress depends less on how hard you work than how well you learn. Growth is not about the genius you possess—it’s about the character you develop. Grant explores how to build the character skills and motivational structures to realize our own potential, and how to design systems that create opportunities for those who have been underrated and overlooked.

Many writers have chronicled the habits of superstars who accomplish great things. This book reveals how anyone can rise to achieve greater things. The true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak you’ve reached, but how far you’ve climbed to get there.

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

A pretty interesting read in general. Maybe not the most original theme, nor anything that hasn’t been written about aplenty, but as a condensate of examples illustrating how we have plenty of hidden potential we could tap with (but don’t always realise we can), I found it inspiring nonetheless. Inspiring for myself, that is, but also as a resource for deeper thoughts when it comes to making my way on the path of leadership, since all in all, I’m still fairly new to it. And, perhaps, it was simply also a book that reached me at the right time, in the right frame of mind? (Hello, Impostor Syndrome my old friend? Can you go back into the closet again? Thank you!)

To be fair, for someone who has read several books on this theme already, this one won’t bring anything really new, even though it reads easily and is engaging. Otherwise, it will provide food for thought.

Conclusion: 3.5 stars

Yzabel / September 23, 2020

Review: The Big Book of Mars

The Big Book of Mars: From Ancient Egypt to The Martian, A Deep-Space Dive into Our Obsession with the Red Planet by Marc Hartzman
My rating: ★★★★☆

Blurb:

Mars has been a source of fascination and speculation ever since the Ancient Sumerians observed its blood-red hue and named it for their god of war and plague. But it wasn’t until 1877, when “canals” were observed on the surface of the Red Planet, suggesting the presence of water, that scientists, novelists, filmmakers, and entrepreneurs became obsessed with the question of whether there’s life on Mars. InThe War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells suggested that we wouldn’t need to make contact with Martians–they’d come for us–while, many years later, Nikola Tesla claimed that he did make contact.

Since then, Mars has fully invaded pop culture. It has its own day of the week (Tuesday, or martis in Latin), candy bar, and iconic Looney Tunes character. It has been the subject of iconic novels and movies, from Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles to Mars Attacks! to The Martian. And it has sparked a space-race feud between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who both hope to send a manned mission to Mars in the near future.

Filled with entertaining history, archival images, pop culture ephemera, and interviews with NASA scientists, The Big Book of Marsis the most comprehensive look at our relationship with Mars–yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

Originally, I received an excerpt, but promptly proceeded to order the actual book once I started reading it. (The paper version itself is hefty and printed on thick glossy paper and smells good, and yes, I know, I like smelling my books.)

This book deals with how we have perceived Mars, currently and historically, whether in reality or in fiction works, starting with the Victorian period. It abunds in colourful illustrations, which makes its reading all the more pleasant – especially if you do that in little chunks rather than all at once (but really, “all at once” is very tempting, because it is definitely interesting). The style is fairly humoristic in places, making for an entertaining read on top of an informative one – perhaps even more information would’ve been good here? I can never get enough when it comes to Mars, I guess.

I couldn’t decide at first whether I liked the choice of going by theme rather than purely chronologically, but in the end, the “themed” approach worked well enough. The other way might have been too much of a catalogue of dates. Also, it makes it easier to come back to it later knowing roughly what I’m looking for (“fiction about Mars”, and so on) even if I’ve completely forgotten by then when exactly that “thing” happened.

All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable book, and a pretty one to boot.

Yzabel / September 15, 2020

Review: The Other People

The Other People by C.J. Tudor
My rating: ★★★★☆

Blurb:

She sleeps, a pale girl in a white room . . .

Three years ago, Gabe saw his daughter taken. In the back of a rusty old car, covered in bumper stickers. He was driving behind the car. He watched her disappear. But no one believes him. Most people believe that his daughter, and wife, are dead. For a while, people believed that Gabe was responsible.

Three years later and Gabe cannot give up hope. Even though he has given up everything else. His home, his job, his old life. He spends his days and nights travelling up and down the motorway, sleeping in his camper van in service stations, searching for the car that took her. Searching for his daughter.

Katie spends a lot of her life in service stations, working as a waitress. She often sees Gabriel, or ‘the thin man’ as she has nicknamed him. She knows his story. She feels for him, because Katie understands what it’s like to lose a loved one. Nine years ago, her father was murdered. It broke her family apart. She hasn’t seen her oldest sister since the day of the funeral; the day she did something terrible.

Fran and her daughter, Alice, put in a lot of miles on the motorway. Not searching. But running. Trying to keep one step ahead of the people that want to hurt them. Because Fran knows the truth. She knows what really happened to Gabe’s daughter. She knows who is responsible. And she knows that if they ever find them, they’re dead.

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley and Pigeonhole, in exchange for an honest review.]

The time I needed to read this book doesn’t correspond to how enjoyable it was—I would normally have read it faster, only I made the mistake of starting it during a period where what I really wanted to read was non fiction. So, even though it took me one month to finish, I actually liked it (more than other novels by the same author, in fact).

The story’s premise rests on something a parent’s worst nightmare (or so I assume): seeing their child abducted or killed. One fateful evening, Gabe came back from work only to see his only daughter riding in a stranger’s car, then find out his wife and daughter were savagely murdered… but wasn’t the little girl in a car on the motorway? Since that day, Gabe has been travelling the roads in the hopes of finding information about his missing daughter—a daughter that everyone else sees as dead—aided only by a mysterious man who calls himself “the Samaritan”.

The novel has us follow different characters: Gabe himself, of course, but also Fran and Alice, a woman and her daughter who may or may not have strange powers, and Katie, who works as a waitress in a restaurant off the motorway. While their trajectories appear independent at first, they gradually start to tangle and make sense, for all of them are, in fact, involved in what is unfurling here. This goes on at a pace that I found just right for me—not too quick, not too slow, with just enough information to make me imagine what was going on, without allowing me to guess the ending.

Overall, the story here is dark and creepy, often raising so many questions that one can’t help but wonder if all of them will get answers. And they don’t always—at the end of the novel, there were still a couple of things I couldn’t explain, even though overall there was an explanation to most of the ploy. This was partly annoying (I’m thinking of the ‘supernatural’ aspect here, to be more specific), but I found it didn’t detract from my enjoyment, or not as much as I thought it would, so that still makes it 3.5 stars for me.

Yzabel / August 2, 2020

Review: Saved by Science

Saved by Science: The Hope and Promise of Synthetic Biology by Mark J Poznansky
My rating: ★★★★☆

Blurb:

With all the advances in science in the last century, why are there still so many infectious diseases? Why haven’t we found cures for difficult cancers? Why hasn’t any major headway been made in the treatment of mental illness? Why did 36 million people die of hunger in 2019? How do we expect to feed the additional two to three billion people expected by 2050? And how do we intend to stop, and not only that but reverse , global warming and the climate crisis? In Saved by Science , scientist Mark Poznansky examines the many crises facing humanity while encouraging us with the promise of an emerging synthetic biology. This is the science of building simple organisms, or “biological apps,” to make manufacturing greener, energy production more sustainable, agriculture more robust, and medicine more powerful and precise. Synthetic biology is the marriage of the digital revolution with a revolution in biology and genomics; some have even called it “the fourth industrial revolution.” Accessible and informative, Saved by Science provides readers with hope for the future if we trust in and support the future of science.

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley and Pigeonhole, in exchange for an honest review.]

Quite an informative book on the current state of biology as well as extrapolation on what we could do in the future in regards to synthetic biology. Hopefully in the near future, too, because as far as I can see, starvation and climate change aren’t going anywhere soon.

The scientific explanations are easy to follow, so you don’t need a deep scientific background to get something out of this book. Will any of this happen? Maybe, maybe not, but envisioning the possibilities was made easy and, dare I say, exciting—the author seems to have an optimistic train of thought here, and it shines through. Even though there are concerns about certain things (GMOs, etc.), I must say my own outlook on this would veer more towards the positive than the negative, for sure. Shall we play with DNA? Is that our place? Maybe not, but it wasn’t our place either to pollute and wreck the planet, so maybe it’s time we do something about it.

If anything, I’d say it could’ve done with being a little longer, although a few parts were also slightly repetitive… so maybe a compromise here?

Conclusion: 3.5 stars

Yzabel / July 25, 2020

Review: Sur les traces du coupable (Dans les Yeux de Lya #2)

Sur les traces du coupable by Carbone
My rating: ★★☆☆☆

Blurb:

Lya va peut-être enfin connaître l’identité du chauffard qui l’a renversée la veille de ses 17 ans. Elle tient dans ses mains le dossier subtilisé dans le bureau de maître Martin de Villegan. C’est pour ce dossier qu’elle s’est faite embaucher comme stagiaire dans ce cabinet d’avo-cats. Tout ça pour ça. Mais Lya peut compter sur ses deux alliés fidèles, Adèle sa collègue dévouée et Antoine son meilleur ami. Sur le terrain, l’enquête pour la vérité vire à la série noire.

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

I was a little less satisfied with this one than with volume one. It’s still a pleasant read, and I definitely like the artwork as much as I did originally, but after the cliffhanger on which volume 1 ends, I was expecting a little more in this one. Instead, what Lya finds leads to more questions (not necessarily a bad thing in itself), yet in the end, the additional answers she gets aren’t so interesting. At least for me, the latter probably stems from the fact we do get a name at last, but it doesn’t have much impact. (I’m trying hard not to spoil anything here, so let’s say that it’s akin to someone being super known/loved in certain circles, but if you’re not part of these circles/not interested in that person, you don’t feel emotionally involved in their lives.)

Yzabel / July 17, 2020

Review: Stopping the Next Pandemic

Stopping the Next Pandemic: The Pandemic that Never Should Have Happened, and How to Stop the Next One by Debora MacKenzie
My rating: ★★★★☆

Blurb:

Over the last 20 years of epidemics, we learned every lesson needed to stop this coronavirus outbreak in its tracks. We heeded none of them. The result is a pandemic on a scale never before seen in our lifetimes. In this captivating, authoritative, and eye-opening book, science journalist and researcher Debora MacKenzie lays out the full story of how and why it happened: the previous viruses that should have prepared us, the shocking public health failures that paved the way, the failure to contain the outbreak, and most importantly, what we must do to prevent future pandemics.

Debora MacKenzie has been reporting on emerging diseases for more than three decades, and she draws on that experience to explain how COVID-19 went from a manageable outbreak to a global pandemic. Offering a compelling history of the most significant recent outbreaks, including SARS, MERS, H1N1, Zika, and Ebola, she gives a crash course in Epidemiology 101–how viruses spread and how pandemics end–and outlines the lessons we failed to learn from each past crisis. In vivid detail, she takes us through the arrival and spread of COVID-19, making clear the steps that governments knew they could have taken to prevent or at least prepare for this. Looking forward, MacKenzie makes a bold, optimistic argument: this pandemic might finally galvanize the world to take viruses seriously. Fighting this pandemic and preventing the next one will take political action of all kinds, globally, from governments, the scientific community, and individuals–but it is possible.

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

I must be a glutton for punishment for reading this kind of book while the world is still not done with COVID-19. However, I also want to stay informed and learn things without having to wade through the dramafest that news in general have become, so all in all, this was a very appropriate read: informative, interesting, considering the ecological impact as well (no, killing all the bats is not a solution, plus it would collapse the whole ecosystem anyway), on the whistle-blowing side yet also covering what could be done (a.k.a not being alarmist just for the sake of being alarmist)… and not so depressing or anxiety-inducing as I had feared.

I didn’t know the author before reading this specific piece of her work. As a scientific journalist who’s been working that field for decades, she was able to bring her own experience and point of view, gathered from observations made on previous outbreaks, and that also gave the book a more personalised tone. In general, “COVID-19” seemed to me well-researched, easy to grasp and follow (no reliance on over-complicated scientific terms here), and a reflection on how countering such viruses is definitely not only scientists’ responsibility, but also governments’, for implementing (or choosing not to…) the policies that will help fund research and curb the spreading. (Let’s just say I wasn’t too impressed with the UK and the USA on that one… though they were far from being the only ones farting in their hands about this).

Conclusion: Perhaps not the kind of book I’d recommend to an audience who already knows a lot about SARS-CoV-2, because it reads more like an introduction—but as, well, a good intro and recap on the topic, it did the job top notch for me.