REVIEW: The Merge by Grace Walker

Grace Walker’s The Merge left me both unsettled and deeply moved. Set in a near-future Britain where two minds can be merged into one body, it explores what happens when love and desperation blur the line between salvation and surrender. Through Laurie, a mother fading into Alzheimer’s, and her daughter Amelia, who risks everything to preserve her, Walker asks haunting questions about memory, identity, and how far we’ll go to hold on to those we love. At its heart this is a story about a mother-daughter bond under extreme strain.

Quietly dystopian yet achingly human, The Merge balances speculative intrigue with emotional truth. It’s less about technology than about what it means to be known — and what we lose when we merge too much of ourselves for someone else’s sake.

A powerful, provocative debut that lingers long after the final page. Interestingly, I can't stop thinking about what fragrance Amelia and her mother would be wearing. The Merge embodies the fading memory and speak to Narciso Rodriguez for Her for its nostalgia and Juliette Has a Gun for its minimalism like consciousness pared down. 

Thank you to #NetGalley, the author Grace Walker and Mariner Books for a digital copy of #TheMerge in exchange for my honest opinion. The Merge will be published on November 11, 2025. 

REVIEW: Good Intentions by Marisa Walz

 

Marisa Walz’s debut Good Intentions is a gripping tale that lingers in the uneasy space between love, loss, and the moral blur of “helping” someone too much.

Cady, an event planner with a seemingly perfect life, loses her twin sister, Dana, in a sudden accident. While grieving she meets a grieving mother in the hospital, Morgan. Cady convinces herself that helping this stranger will somehow heal them both. What follows is a quiet, unnerving unraveling of identity and obsession. Walz pens this mystery-thriller with emotional precision, crafting the somewhat perfect unreliable narrator who we cannot help but be sympathetic towards.  She captures grief’s claustrophobic effect, and the lengths people are willing to go to in order to make sense of loss. 

This isn’t a fast-paced thriller; it’s a psychological portrait that poses uncomfortable questions about boundaries, intention, and the things we tell ourselves about being “good" and having "good intentions". It’s haunting, humane, and deeply unsettling in a pretty good way.

If this novel was a perfume it would be either Imaginary Authors - A City on Fire for its smoky sweetness and emotional unease or Le Labo – Iris 39 for its elegant, intimate, but unsettlingly detached feel.

Thank you to #NetGalley and #StMartinsPress and the author Marisa Walz for a digital copy of #GoodIntentions exchange for my honest opinion. Good Intentions will be published tomorrow February 3, 2026.