Reading with teafortiffany

Hi friends!!!!

Back at it with a Saturday post because Sundays are starting to get busy. I will probably be switching over to Saturday for a while because Formula 1 is starting up in March, and my Sundays will be filled with rich guys in fast cars.

I’m here today with my first ARC review of 2026! I don’t plan to do a ton of these, but I want to try to sprinkle them in here and there. I have been reading a bit more so far this year, so I’m thinking I’ll be able to get some more of these in.

Anywho, lets get into it!!

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Thank you Ballantine for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

Description from NetGalley

A bookseller must escape the infamously haunted library that holds her darkest secrets, but with a murderer in her tour group, escaping alive is not as simple as it seems, in this twisty locked-room thriller from bestselling author of You Are Fatally Invited.

“Irresistible—bright and sharp and rife with danger, like a shard of mirror.”—A. J. Finn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in the Window

Not all fairytales were meant for children.

Aria Stokes is finally feeling settled—she lives in a tiny New York apartment, works as a bookseller at a local shop, and has even taken a leap of faith in love by indulging her attraction to bookstore regular Jasper. And he seems to already know her so well.

As a Valentine’s Day surprise, Jasper gets the two of them tickets to an exclusive, after-dark tour of the Daedalus Library—the grandiose establishment famed for its immersive genre-based reading rooms and, more notoriously, its rumored hauntings. While Aria normally loves all things ghastly, this place holds more dark secrets than she’d prefer Jasper to know. Like that the last time she was here, she left a body behind.

But when the automatic-door entry malfunctions and Aria, Jasper, and the five other people in their tour group become trapped in the library, they are forced to venture through the storied rooms and hidden passageways of the Daedalus in search of escape . . . and Aria quite literally has nowhere to hide from the shadows of her past. Then the group learns there’s a murderer in their midst.

Now, as she tries to break out of the library’s intricate reading rooms, Aria has to decide who she can trust—and what secrets are best kept buried—if she wants to make it out alive.

Let’s see. Where do I start with this book?

I wasn’t sure if I was going to like this book when I first started out. I’ll be perfectly honest with you, I was worried that I wouldn’t like it and I would have to DNF it (which I really don’t like to do on NetGalley if it can be helped). I requested the ARC after being intrigued by the synopsis, and it didn’t pull me in right away.

This is one of those instances where I’m glad that I stuck with it. This book got me completely hooked. I had no idea what was going on, and I absolutely loved it. Something you might want to know about me as a reader is that I don’t try to solve the mystery as I’m reading. I really love going along for the ride and learning as it comes. The twists that hit me were great. They made me gasp. They made me furrow my brow. They made me make that “wha?” meme face. It was great.

This book is atmospheric in the best way, and the story is told through multiple POVs. The author does a great job of sprinkling in little bits of information about the different people through the view of those different people. And yet, I never really had a full grasp on the situation until that final “reveal”. I love the library and how creepy everything is. This book surprised me and I’m not mad about it.

That’s it for this week, my friends. I hope you all are enjoying the start to the year, and I hope I can continue to bring you more content soon.

Until next time!

Bye friends!!!