Books from January 2025

Reviews and recommendations from my month of reading.

Sundaze Book Café is the home of everyday magic, joyful living and conversations likely to be had over a hot drink with a friend in your favourite café, capturing the syrup-slow feel and glow of a Sunday. I’m Michelle, and I’ll be your host today.

January is usually a fruitful month of reading for me. Not only do I often have a big stack of book gifts from Christmas, it’s an almighty cold one here in England – perfect fodder for getting cosy and sinking hours between the pages. I had a pretty successful January of books this year, too, finding a five-star read and making my way through an 894-page tome amongst the nine books I read. Thank goodness for my Kindle, because I’d never have got through such a chunky one without it! All those queue and station wait reading sessions really add up!

Something that I also realised is how much more I’m enjoying my books since starting to keep a reading journal. Making notes and delving into the what and why is nurturing my dormant English student brain of yore, and it’s rewarding to pick through the sentences. Of course, sometimes, I’m just copying down my favourite quotes, but I totally recommend giving it a go. I’m also now out of my (successful) year-long book-buying ban, and I’m surprised at how strange it feels to peruse bookshops now.

(Perhaps a musing for another time!)

Find me on Goodreads and StoryGraph to see what I’m reading and reviewing in real-time.

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January books

• The Lotus Shoes by Jane Yang

• Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison

• Bethnal Green by Amélie Skoda

• Orbital by Samantha Harvey

• The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

• Three Days in June by Anne Tyler

• Beloved by Toni Morrison

• The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

• Life Hacks for a Little Alien by Alice Franklin

• Immortal by Sue Lynn Tan

• How Trees Can Save the World by Peter Wohlleben

In review

The Lotus Shoes by Jane Yang

Thanks to Spectre and NetGalley for my advanced reader copy of this book!

Rating: 4 stars

Starting the year with this sisterhood saga historical fiction set in late 19th century China felt important and apt. In The Lotus Shoes, Little Flower is raised in a loving, but poor, family. From the age of four, her mother has diligently taught her her worth in the world, making sure to carefully bind her feet to ensure she’d have the perfect ‘golden lilies’ – a ladylike sign that you’re worthy of being married. But, Little Flower is soon sold as a ‘muizai’ (a domestic servant in an affluent household; directly translating to ‘little sister’ in Cantonese) to the Fong household.

Linjing also knows her worth. Born to a wealthy family, she is her father’s favourite and has servants to cater to her every whim and, soon, Little Flower becomes her newest. Yet when her beloved father decides to leave her feet unbound – making a case for modern values – Linjing’s perfect bubble is burst. How can she be a lady and master to Little Flower and her golden lilies?

Beautifully told in lush, meandering prose, The Lotus Shoes charters the story of Little Flower and Linjing as their worlds converge in a tangle of resilience, self-belief, jealousy, sisterhood, femininity and womanhood in a fast-changing new world between Shanghai and Hong Kong. For Yang’s debut, this is a brilliantly immersive, moving tale. I had a few issues with pacing, but this is quickly patched over by the incredibly sharp vignettes Yang paints to deepen the story and paint China’s cultural history, and its societal and gender values. This is a dual perspective story, which of course might not work for everybody, but does a great job in highlighting the marked frustration of each character. A gorgeous, moving story.

Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison

Rating: 3 stars

Set in a dystopian 1999 New York City (population: 35 million), Make Room! Make Room! is an uncanny speculative fiction about overpopulation and overuse of the planet’s natural resources. I think all novels and reading is political, and this one is explicitly so as well as incredibly depressing, which is good to bear in mind ahead of your own choice to read.

When a gangster is murdered amidst the endless Manhattan heatwave, the city’s police force are under pressure to solve the crime. But due to the overpopulation in NYC, the police have stopped investigating cases since they’ll never be solved anyway – their MO is to control the crowds and keep them in check. And, it’s difficult to catch a killer in streets crammed full of people stretched to their limit, rioting about their circumstances, desperate in a water shortage and fighting over soy and lentil ‘steaks’.

At its heart, Make Room! Make Room! is a social commentary on how humanity would act and work at the brink of ecological and societal collapse. The two work hand in hand here. Written in 1966 and set at the turn of the millennium, it’s fascinating to see how on the nose Harrison was with his agenda. Harrison writes an excellent sentence and bashes out some unnerving social commentary using deeply realistic snapshots of life in this dystopian New York, but sadly the actual story here missed the mark for me. First, the racial slurs throughout made me feel deeply uncomfortable and I’d extend a warning to my East Asian, Black and Hispanic readers here. Second, I just didn’t gel with the whole following a cop around and cop-gets-girl vibe. But, I appreciate the overall commentary being made.

Bethnal Green by Amélie Skoda

Thanks to Manilla Press and NetGalley for my advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Rating: 3.75 stars

Bethnal Green is a hopeful coming-of-age story set between London and Penang in 1971. Suyin has just arrived in London as a student nurse at Bethnal Green Hospital, following in the footsteps of her sister who has recently, suddenly, moved home to Malaysia. As Suyin explores London, she finds herself falling in love with the city, its people, and the immersive, rewarding work of caring and nursing for her patients.

At its heart, Bethnal Green is a gorgeous historical fiction that brings together sisterhood, self-discovery and hope. I loved Suyin so much; she felt like a little sister to me: switched-on, naïve, relatable and resilient. And it's true what the marketing says: this is a love letter to the NHS and the teams of nurses that keep it running. There isn't too much medical speak in the story, just a warm undercurrent of just what nurses do for us all.

I read this book over the course of 36 hours and was completely addicted. I love an immigrant story and especially all of the beautiful descriptions of my own beloved Malaysia. I just wish we had a bit longer in the story: Suyin talks about her sister's London A-Z map but I didn't get a satisfactory reason to why it'd been mentioned so much. The last 'part' felt a little disjointed and rushed, too, with more of the family-between-seas thread explored than in any other part of the book.

All in all, an enjoyable debut from Amélie Skoda that really got me in the heart.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Rating: 3.75 stars

“The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.”

Orbital is a quiet little novel following six astronauts and their thoughts as they live on a spacecraft, hovering above Earth. Although it won the Booker Prize for Fiction 2024, I must admit that I went in not knowing a huge amount about the book or author, and that was a good way to go in.

First, a warning that this is not a book for those that require plot, pace and action. Almost nothing (and everything) happens in Orbital. Second, I’m here to let you know that there are no speech marks. I’ll let you sit with that.

So onto my thoughts! Orbital took my breath away with some truly illuminating and poetic passages. The lilting prose and blended dialogue served to play with time and I’d go as far as to say it played with my mind too. It felt like I was floating in space, which is quite a feat from my squishy sofa. There’s some gorgeous vignettes about life aboard spacecraft, but it’s mostly a book that nudges you to question what it means to be human and how much of our humanity is directly laced to the planet on which we reside. As a big nature lover, I appreciated the thought of experiencing Earth’s beauty from afar and quite liked the use of a typhoon to impress the skies’ eye view of a marker of climate change.

My main bugbear is that while all the themes work as brilliant devices, we never get any depth! The book plays with you and spits you out. An interesting one to start 2025 off with, but this one won’t be for every reader.

P.S. I need the damn quotation marks!

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

Rating: 5 stars

A stunningly realised feminist high fantasy, in The Priory of the Orange Tree we’re plunged into a word divided where Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm and the House of Berethnet. Despite being nearly 900 pages long, The Priory of the Orange Tree is action-packed from start to finish with multiple perspectives and plenty of story too – it’s clear than Samantha Shannon has poured endless research into the flawless world-building. It’s also incredibly ‘high fantasy’, featuring everything from dragons to other mystical creatures, astrology to romance, queendoms and epic battle scenes, religion and tribalism. Characters experience beautiful arcs and I adored getting to spend plenty of time with each one. Plus, the pacing is pretty good for a chunky tome: the chapters end on strong cliffhangers that keep you sat and reading for hours on end. It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything like this and I already want to read it again.

Three Days in June by Anne Tyler

Thanks Vintage and NetGalley for my advanced reader copy!

Rating: 3 stars

A perfect palatable novella at just 176 pages, Three Days in June offers a searingly sharp gaze into the everyday minutiae of normal people. Gail is in her early 60s, about to lose her job, and also about to attend her only daughter’s wedding. This book covers three days (in June): the day before, of and after said wedding. Written in an incredibly literary tone full of humanness and sincerity, Tyler showcases the art of mundane storytelling here, deftly touching on the little things that build and shape us into our later years. Gail is confident, funny, insecure, grumpy, caring, uncaring, and she’s all of us, really. This is a beautifully human novella told with humour, care and wit – nothing groundbreaking, but perhaps you need that as much as I did?

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Rating: 4.25 stars

I’m not entirely sure where to begin with Beloved, this complex novel that unfurls dark, horrifying layers to piece together an almighty, painful story and stories. In post-American Civil War Ohio, Sethe – a formerly enslaved woman – and her family are living in a (haunted) house, reckoning with their new lives in the wake of the abolition of slavery. Naturally, Beloved is full of heavy topics, including slavery but also many others that I recommend looking up trigger warnings for.

Haunted by the ghost of ‘Beloved’, her two-year-old child, Sethe then also reunites with somebody from her past and, soon, past meets present as a young woman around the age Sethe’s late daughter would have been appears in her life. Through dense prose thickly laced with poetic narrative devices, Morrison weaves a patchwork story that feels cloying and nightmarish, a fitting way to tell the horrors that belay those directly affected by slavery. I read this with a notebook to hand so I could pick apart the tiny moving doors and threads that took us deeper into Sethe’s history, Denver’s story, Paul D’s worst nightmares, until the circumstances of Beloved’s death come to light.

Beloved is not an easy read both for its subject matter and linguistic style, but it is an incredibly moving and haunting story that’ll stay with me for a long, long time.

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Rating: 3 stars

This tiny novella felt like a cheat to add to The StoryGraph, for it is only 30 pages. It is a vivid little psychological romp through the narrator’s experience living in a yellow wallpaper-ed room as she suffers postnatal depression. I don’t have much to say about it, but it’s perfectly haunting and there’s some great imagery.

Life Hacks for a Little Alien by Alice Franklin

Thanks Quercus Books and NetGalley for my advanced reader copy!

Rating: 3.75 stars

Life Hacks For a Little Alien is a sweet story about humanness, language, and the differences that makes us ‘us’. Written in a second-person narrative, I admittedly found this really hard to read – I’m unused to this style. However, I soon found my footing and thought it was a smart device to make you, the reader, feel as uncomfy as our narrator, a young girl with autism. As she traverses through school, homeschooling, and other such milestones in childhood, we see the narrator’s struggles with being different to the other children. Her observations of the world are searing, laser-sharp, only the grown-ups don’t understand, the other kids call her an alien, something she’ll remember for years and even begin referring to herself as. Franklin’s treatment of the narrator is tender and soft, and peels back how it feels to live in a confusing world.

This is a sweet, heartwarming story that provides a mirror-clear representation of what it’s like to be neurodivergent. Having said that, I’m neurotypical so it might be best to take that with a pinch of salt! Once you get past the unusual second-person perspective, the story is genuinely lovely and I’ll be recommending this to many!

Immortal by Sue Lynn Tan

Rating: 4 stars

Sue Lynn Tan has quickly become one of my favourite authors. Ever since her Daughter of the Moon Goddess duology and discovering her background is so similar to my own, I’ve been besotted with her gorgeously evocative writing style that interlinks with the Chinese mythology I grew up with. Immortal is her first standalone romantic fantasy novel and, although I’m not a romance reader, I thoroughly enjoyed this.

Liyen is next in line to the throne and, saved by her beloved grandfather after her near-fatal poisoning, has sparked the wrath of the Immortal Queen. Her first task? To confront the immortals and discover their secrets to protect her queendom and people. But when she meets the God of War, soon she must navigate the tightrope between duty and desire. Their chemistry is undeniable, their fates entwined.

As with all of Tan’s stories, the world-building is impeccable and it is stunning, too. We return to the Celestial Kingdom, exploring Tianxia and its surrounding lands, enchanting forests and landscapes lushly realised through surprising, spellbinding prose. I loved the introduction of even more magical creatures, building on the world and moving the plot forwards rapidly. It’s a really special, perfectly wrought antithesis to the slow-burn romance between Liyen and the ruthless God of War. Plus, there’s plenty of room for growth: we watch Liyen flourish in her new role as she wades through grief, stumbles through becoming a ruler, to toughening into a brave woman.

How Trees Can Save the World by Peter Wohlleben

Rating: 4 stars

Peter Wohlleben is my favourite nature writer at the moment; his love of trees and knowledge of them is incredible. Having loved many of his previous books and really getting into my tree era whilst working at Stella McCartney, I was very much looking forward to a deeper dive into trees. In How Trees Can Save the World, Wohlleben offers a comprehensive education into how trees work, think and act through the seasons and spanning the years, decades, centuries. Climate change is now right at our doorsteps and it’s imperative that more of us become knowledgeable about the key facts, and how carbon capture – easily achieved through ancient forests and trees – is a simple, low-effort way to combat the worst effects. At its heart, this book is another stunning love letter to forests, and one that is perfectly accessible to early nature readers.

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What was your favourite book from January? And, please share your own monthly bookish wrap-ups in the comments.