Save It for the Pod

Ove has been forced into retirement, is a few months a widower, and is convinced the modern world is staffed entirely by idiots. Then a new family moves in next door and backs a trailer into his mailbox. Full spoilers throughout, including the ending, plus a comparison with the Tom Hanks adaptation. Content note: suicide. Alex and Lindsey get into Ove as a man with an enormous heart and a very sma...

Natalie is a tradwife influencer with a farm called Yesteryear, an audience across America, and a hired staff quietly doing the work she's filmed doing. Then she wakes up with no electricity, no plumbing, and a husband and children who seem wrong. Full spoilers throughout, including the twist. Content note: child abuse and sexual assault. Alex and Lindsey get into Natalie as a woman who refuse...

Alicia Berenson shot her husband five times and has not spoken since. Theo Faber is the psychotherapist who takes a job at her secure unit specifically to treat her. Full spoilers throughout, including the twist. Content note: suicide. Alex and Lindsey get into Theo as a narrator you're set up to trust and shouldn't, and the gap between being fluent in therapy language and having actually...

Clementine is twenty-nine, a book publicist in New York, six months into grieving the aunt who left her an apartment. The apartment occasionally deposits her seven years in the past, where a man is subletting for the summer. Full spoilers throughout. Content note: suicide. Alex and Lindsey get into what the book argues about change: that loving someone means falling for them again as they become n...

Darrow has spent nine months in a box. Morning Star picks up there and closes out the Red Rising trilogy. Full spoilers throughout, including the ending, plus Hunger Games spoilers in the final segment. Alex and Lindsey argue that this is actually Sevro's book rather than Darrow's, and trace him from imitating his father and Darrow to the moment he stops performing and does something real....

Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, seen on 70mm in a sold-out theater. Full spoilers throughout. Neither of them has read the poem all the way through, so this is about Nolan's retelling rather than Homer. Alex and Lindsey get into the Trojan Horse as a violation of the one rule nobody broke, that a stranger at your door might be a god in disguise, and what happens to a society after that pact i...

An 86-year-old stranger arrives in the small Georgia town of Golden, buys all 92 pencil portraits hanging in a local coffee shop, and begins returning them to the people they depict. Full spoilers throughout. Alex and Lindsey get into Theo's governing idea that to love someone is to be curious about them, what happens to a novel when its protagonist arrives already fully formed, and whether the bo...

A review of Golden Son by Pierce Brown.

A review of Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden.

A review of The Invisible Life of Addie Larue by VE Schwab.

A review of Red Rising written by Pierce Brown.

A review of The Correspondent by Virginia Evans.

A review of Jane Austen's Emma.

A review and discussion on Broken Country, written by Clare Leslie Hall.

A review of Project Hail Mary, the movie, starring Ryan Gosling, directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller. We also talk about the book which was written by Andy Weir.

A review of Suzanne Collin's Sunrise On the Reaping.