Happy pop culture Christmas everyone! – SparklyPrettyBriiiight

Festive wishes from Hiro and Baymax … and from me to you! Thank you for reading and just being here with me. (Image via Pinterest (c) **Sharkie19, Deviant Art**)

Christmas in July redux: Music review: Snow Waltz by Lindsey Stirling

This review was first published 9 December 2022. Christmas is supposed to be a thousand good and wonderfully light-as-air, joyously uplifting things. And while it often is – all that tree trimming, laughing with friends and brightness of decoration can only make you feel like a million festive bucks – Continue Reading

Christmas in July book review: Christmas on the Isle of Skye by Kirsty Ferry

Zac Fallon and Ivy McFarlane have a problem. They haven’t declared their undying love for each other to each other, what with suppressing how they really feel and not wanting to risk looking like a fool or deciding that a onetime dream of a goal trumps present bliss and happiness, Continue Reading

Christmas in July redux: Retro festive movie review: White Christmas

(courtesy IMP Awards) This review was first published Christmas Eve 2023 Returning to a much-loved Christmas classic many years after it was last watched is an interesting exercise. Our minds are fiendishly clever things but one of the interesting dynamics they employ is to appropriate snatches of a plot in Continue Reading

Christmas in July book review: Home Again for Christmas by Emily Stone

(courtesy Hachette Australia) When you have been hurt deeply, traumatically so, it’s understandable, especially if you’re a child and your ability to process the level and type of hurt isn’t yet developed enough to think it all through, to recoil and withdraw from whatever hurt you. Distance, we think, is Continue Reading

Movie review: Minions & Monsters

(courtesy IMP Awards) There’s a glorious sense of escapist release that comes from watching the Minions in action. They are, despite all their efforts to serve the greatest evil down throughout history and to do so with single-minded determination, as klutzy and ridiculous silly as they come, and while some Continue Reading

Christmas 2026 book preview: Stay Another Christmas by Phillipa Ashley

(courtesy Phillipa Ashley email) SNAPSHOTThe perfect festive Lake District escape from bestselling author Phillipa Ashley. After a life-changing accident, Katie’s plan for Christmas is simple: rent a spectacular island house in the Lake District, gather the people she loves, and enjoy snowy walks, crackling fires and the promise of a Continue Reading

The short and the short of it: Nube and the sacrifice and love of motherhood

(courtesy IMDb) SNAPSHOTAfter witnessing an old dark stormy cloud painfully rain and die in sorrow, Noma, a puffy white cloud realizes [sic] that Mixtli, her daughter, a dark stormy cloud, is in danger of raining prematurely. Nube is an animated short film written and directed by Mexican filmmakers Diego Alonso Sánchez de Continue Reading

Graphic novel review: Step by Bloody Step by Spurrier-Bergara-Lopes

SNAPSHOTTHERE IS A GIRL. She has no memory and no name. Nothing but a GUARDIAN. An armored giant who protects her from predators and pitfalls. TOGETHER THEY WALK across an extraordinary fantasy world. If they leave the path the air itself comes alive, forcing them onwards. Why? The girl doesn’t Continue Reading

Deep TBR book review: Geraldine by Andrea Thompson (2025)

(courtesy Fremantle Press) As I discovered fairly early in life, much of the world has very fixed and fiercely defended ideas about a “normal” person should be. And if you don’t fit that mold, then woe betide you because you will finds yourself battling against terrifyingly intense forces that won’t Continue Reading

Mini-mass of movie trailers: Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom, Ghosts: The Possession of Button House + Klara & the Sun

(via Shutterstock) This is a time grand confessions – I don’t particularly love popcorn. Scandalous, right? Actually, not really, but when you go to the movies as much as I do, a popcorn ambivalence doesn’t really fit with the usual moviegoing vibe (thought I do love choctops and lollies aka Continue Reading

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