About The Unseen Review
Welcome to The Unseen Review! I’m Jess, a lifelong reader now working as a book critic (the dream).
I read pretty widely. My foundations are in contemporary fiction, particularly literary and speculative work (with a special emphasis on where the two overlap), but that doesn’t mean there won’t be nonfiction or classics to mull over, too. For a full breakdown of my taste, you can read this post.
The aim of The Unseen Review is to highlight what books are worth your precious reading hours, hopefully pushing you outside your comfort zone from time to time, and scouring both the world of the new release and the undiscovered backlist gem.
It’s also my intention to help readers get more out of their books, to share some of what I’ve learnt in my 10+ years reviewing and analysing novels. I’ll be running courses and slow reads alongside my work as a reviewer.
Why subscribe?
As a free subscriber, you will have access to my monthly reading round-ups, reviews of new books, and the most recent issues of The Minutiae, my twice-monthly newsletter. Also, I hope to start occasionally reviewing children’s picture books, which take up a disproportionate amount of my reading life with my three-year-old daughter. If you have little ones in your life—stay tuned!
Paid subscribers will have access to the following in 2025:
The full archive of The Minutiae: a twice-monthly newsletter covering a wide range of things, mostly bookish but occasionally otherwise.
Novel Matters: a regular-ish series where I deep dive on a book that actually looks at the novel form itself. Learn about that weird thing—the novel!—with me.
Occasional interviews with authors.
How to Read and Analyse a Novel: running from March to May, in this course I will share some of my techniques for analysing a novel so that you can get the most out of your reading.
Slow Read of Little, Big by John Crowley: running from 26th June to the end of August, this slow read will give us time to really get into what makes this novel such a masterpiece.
Introduction to Speculative Fiction: running in September and October, this course will be an intro to the speculative for readers of literary fiction, showing you what the genre can do.
Slow Read of Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake: to end the year in November and December, we’ll be making our way through this one-of-a-kind selection of novels.
To adjust your notification settings to receive only those posts you’re most interested in in your inbox, click here. I’ll do a round-up of anything you may have missed in my monthly reading post just in case something does pique your interest outside of your usual settings.
Finally, I also run The Unseen Review book club, which I do consider to be one of the best places on the internet.
If you have any further enquiries, please feel free to contact me at jessie@unseenreview.com
