Book Reviews

Explosion in the Physics Lab: Ali Hazelwood’s Sweet, Sappy and STEM Surprise

Reading Time: 4 minutes

By Shannen Lim (24A01A)

Raffles Reads is a collaboration between Raffles Press and Times Reads which aims to promote a reading culture among Singaporean students.

Rating: 4/5 stars

“Can I take you out?” 
“You want to murder me?” 

Ali Hazelwood books are often looked at as being frivolous, cheesy and elevated fan fiction. To that, I ask, so what? Belonging in the Ali Hazelwood Literary Universe alongside her hit novel “The Love Hypothesis”, Love Theoretically proves that, just like a woman in STEM, a romance book can truly have it all, with a little bit of effort.

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‘The Hurricane Wars’: Exciting enemies-to-lovers tale, drowned out by complex worldbuilding  

Reading Time: 6 minutes

By Arissa Binte Kamaruzaman (24A01A) 

Raffles Reads is a collaboration between Raffles Press and Times Reads which aims to promote a reading culture among Singaporean students.

Rating: 3/ 5 stars

Two pairs of eyes—one blazed in gold, the other sunk in shadow—meet across a battlefield.

Their gazes speak of diametrically opposed magic: Alaric, a prince of the night spars against Talasyn, a lost princess of the light.

Whether they know it or not, they have already hurt each other in many ways. Even before that very moment. Their ancestors’ spilt blood rests on their daggers, thrust towards each other out of vengeance. What are they to each other? Not strangers, but the heirs of rival empires, tethered by the invisible string of fated contempt.

Thea Guanzon’s The Hurricane Wars twists and turns this invisible string until its threads reveal that perhaps, those who are fated to hurt can, unknowingly, be fated to heal each other instead.

This novel embraces all the ingredients of a ravishing enemies-to-lovers tale. (Think: Kylo Ren and Rey from Star Wars, but immersed in the geopolitics of Shadow and Bone). Yet, like a dish made with an ambitious palate of flavours, it often confuses rather than delights the taste buds.

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After that Night: Hearing the Unspoken

Reading Time: 5 minutes

By Jessica Zhu Yunjie (24A01E)

Raffles Reads is a collaboration between Raffles Press and Times Reads which aims to promote a reading culture among Singaporean students.

Rating: 4.5/5 

Make a list of everything that terrifies you. That’s me.

This line (or rather, text message) gives us a first taste of the darkness revolving around a seemingly isolated case of sexual assault—later uncovered to be caught deep in a web of organised crime. 

The horror aspect of After That Night lies not within the fictional eldritch beasts with too many eyes and razor sharp teeth, but in the unassumingly normal-looking people delighting in all sorts of depravity. Perpetrators of its crimes are so realistically crafted that you’ll be able to find traces of them in those around you; it’s true that monsters walk amongst us, but the fact that they’re wearing human faces is far more terrifying.

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The Sentence: When Law isn’t Black or White

Reading Time: 5 minutes

By Chia Kei Yin (24S03C)

Raffles Reads is a collaboration between Raffles Press and Times Reads which aims to promote a reading culture among Singaporean students.

Rating: 4/5 

When I picked up ‘The Sentence’ by Christina Dalcher, I understood that it was a book about the death penalty. But little did I know that death didn’t just make an appearance in order for the book to count as a social commentary. Death permeates every page as the main character grapples with the choice she has made—sending a convicted child murderer to the electric chair.

The novel is set in a semi-dystopian universe in which the United States has implemented a law named the State Remedies Act in order to ‘remedy’ wrongful executions. 

The Act states that any prosecutor who requests that the accused receives the death penalty must be executed as well if the latter is proven innocent posthumously. Such a law was put in place after the US abolished the death penalty altogether but encountered a particularly horrific serial killer who escaped the fate he caused his victims. 

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Raffles Reads: Year On Fire

Reading Time: 3 minutes

By Claire Jow (23A01B)

Raffles Reads is a collaboration between Raffles Press and Times Reads which aims to promote a reading culture among Singaporean students.

Rating: 3.5/5

It started out with a kiss, how did it end up like this?

Year On Fire opens with sixteen-year-old Immie wondering about the kiss that “blew up” her life: a kiss with her best friend’s boyfriend that she did not have, but had claimed responsibility for. The novel follows Immie, her brother Arch, and her best friend Paige as they navigate the messy ups and downs of their junior year in high school—all while there’s a mystery arsonist on the loose.

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