Chanterelle Solace | Your favourite Cottagecore Librari...

Your favourite Cottagecore Librarian is here this monday with a book recommendation

Your favourite Cottagecore Librarian is here this monday with a book recommendation and this time, its a bit different than the usual recs you get on ...Show more

Chanterelle Solace

Sabie
• May 23 2025

Book Recommendation

1 Book

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Just a Highland Fling

Review:
This is my first book by Naina Kumar and I fell in love with her writing and the whole book! I really loved following along with Neelu and Jacob in this book, going on a road trip with them in the highlands and spending time in Aberdeen too. OH AND AN MMC who is a bagpiper AND a poet who wears glasses? What else could we want🤭
We get to see them come together, through Neelu's POV in this book. We also get to learn about Neelu and her dad's relationship plus we get to understand more about Jacob and his grief. I did love how Grief was addressed here as a theme and how we got to dive into it. I also really love how we get to see both characters address their vulnerabilities in a single POV book and how they help each other through their strengths.
Just a Highland Fling focuses on finding love between two people while also just finding your home in your person. It's about rekindling your relationship with your loved ones and finding your chosen family. It truly was a wholesome book and the only thing I could ask for (other than for more about Neelu & Jacob) is that I wish we could have learned more about Neelu and her father. We definitely get to see and understand some of what happened but it was something that I wanted to dive deeper into.

Seriously though, this book was SO fun to read and so wholesome! I can't wait to read more by Naina Kumar and go back to read her two other books.

The Midnight Muse

Review:
If there's a Sporror book, I have to have it and The Midnight Muse was a fun clash of Mushroomcore with Metal Horror and a focus on who we are. The Midnight Muse starts with a search of well, a muse, by the lead singer (Brynn) who eventually vanishes. Her band continues to exist and the story takes place a year after she vanishes. We follow along with the band members and see all of their lives unfolding. We see how and what motivates them and really, we see how far some of them would go to get what they want.
My favourite parts are that The Midnight Muse is set in an isolated forest/wood area and how on the edge this has us as we are reading it. There are the sporror part, which I loved and there is the exploration of who we are as humans and what is worth giving up some part of us to get what we want.
This is a great sporror book to read, one that leaves you wondering if everything that you are reading has really happened or not!
I was provided a free advance reader copy and I’m sharing my honest thoughts.

The Other Moctezuma Girls

Review:
What a book! I loved everything about The Other Moctezuma Girls, from the historical aspect of it, to the characters and the story telling/writing style. It is descriptive and so emotionally powerful that it breaks your heart a little in the best of ways.
We follow Isabel's POV mainly but we get journal entries from her mother, Tecuichpoch and follow the journey of her life and how everything came to be. It genuinely was such a captivating story that broke my heart, reading about how everyone was harmed with colonialism. It also dives into how colonialism can happen with the help of people living in the area and we get to read about why people make the decisions they do.
I also loved reading about Catina, who is deaf after getting sick (coming from someone who is deaf too) and how they developed a way to communicate with her. All the characters in this book were written so well that you couldn't help but feel an emotional connection to them or dislike them. We get to explore the family dynamic and watch Isabel find her footing and who she is in the world as someone who doesn't appear "ladylike".
I am so excited to read more from the author and to continue reading books set in the same time period. I was provided a free advance reader copy and I’m sharing my honest thoughts.

Home Sick

Review:
Overall, I did like Home Sick as the writing was atmospherical and descriptive while the story left me wanting to know more. I think I just went into it expecting something different and it's definitely because I didn't realize it was heavily a psychological Horror.
I'm not a huge thriller reader but I will say that the book felt more of a mesh between Psychological Thriller with some horror and folklore in it. We also have a little bit of an unreliable narrator, which was very fitting for the story too, but I dont usually read a lot of Psychological Horror OR books with unreliable narrators so this was an interesting experience for me in wondering what the point of the book was (and getting the answers in the end, which tied everything up to make it a good read).

Review Continued:
I picked up Home Sick as it was folk horror with a cottage setting (cottagecore), which I love in most genres. After reading this, I can definitely say it had some folklore and it definitely played a role in the story but to me, Home Sick is definitely much more heavier on the Psychological Horror/Thriller than the Folk Horror.
All in all, the story was very atmospherical in the first half, which I loved and it gave us that whole Cottagecore vibes and added to the folklore aspect of it. The author does descriptions really well, whether it's nature based on of the cottage. We also get to know Tamsin and there's a lot of conflicting feelings about who she is and we, as the readers, feel that with her.
At the core of it, Home Sick is about not fitting in anywhere and the effect of it on Tamsin after a whole life time of trying to fit in and it never working out. I think I would have loved a deeper dive into the folklore aspect as I am a huge fan of adding folklore in horror and learning more about it.
I would recommend this book to people who enjoy both psychological horror and thriller generally as it might be a great book to expand into folk horror as a sub-genre as well. It's also a good book for people who want a mesh of both thriller and horror, as there are some external horrors in here but Home Sick is mainly about Tamsin and her internal fears with it manifesting externally. I was provided a free advance reader copy and I’m sharing my honest thoughts.