Fully-Booked: Literary Podcast

The Making of a Witch began when Judy Molland found her own last name in a book about English witch trials.

Meaghan is flying solo this week (Shirin is out sick) with a pre-recorded interview she has been sitting on since the spring. Judy Molland is a first-time novelist, a former French and English teacher, and a practising Wiccan who spent years chasing a woman almost nobody bothered to write down.

The Making of a Witch, out now fr...

The Whisper Man book vs movie, and the gap between them is wider than it looks. Meaghan and Shirin dig into Netflix's adaptation of Alex North's 2019 thriller, out August 28, and work out what got lost on the way to the screen.

Alex North (the pen name of Leeds crime writer Steve Mosby) wrote a slow, atmospheric novel about a widowed writer, a copycat killer, and a father and son who barely speak. James Ashcroft's film keeps the bo...

Season 3 Is the First One That Lost Us

• Shirin rewatched seasons one and two to prep for this and went in genuinely excited. Season 3 did not hold up.
• Ten episodes is too many. An eight episode season would have carried this story without the padding.
• The problem is not the cast. It is the writing, which shoehorns in conflict to manufacture drama instead of letting it build.
• Seasons one and two flowed. This one fel...

Cape Fear has finished its ten-episode run on Apple TV, and this is the full review: the finale, the cast, and the two episodes nobody needed. 

Meaghan is joined by Arthur for a wrap-up of Nick Antosca's Cape Fear adaptation now that all ten episodes are out. The Apple TV limited series is built on The Executioners, the 1957 John D. MacDonald novel that already produced the 1962 film and Martin Scorsese's 1991 remake, so this ...

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is finally here, and we gave all three hours a proper sit-down. This is our full spoiler review of the 2026 movie: what Nolan kept from Homer, what he changed, and why a 3,000-year-old poem feels this pointed right now.

Matt Damon plays an Odysseus who is very much not the perfect hero (he fires the extra arrow, and even his men know better). Tom Holland is Telemachus, Anne Hathaway is Penelope stuc...

Greek mythology retellings keep multiplying, and nobody can quite explain why. Christopher Nolan just dropped a $250 million adaptation of The Odyssey, a poem roughly 2,700 years old, and Meaghan and Shirin wanted to figure out what keeps pulling all of us (and Hollywood) back to these stories.

This one stays high-level, and neither of us was a classics major, so we'll own that upfront. We walk through what The Odyssey actual...

Enola Holmes 3 dropped on Netflix on July 1, 2026, and it is the first film in the franchise that neither of us actually enjoyed. Director Philip Barantini reportedly pitched it as the Prisoner of Azkaban of the series, the entry where the tone grows up alongside the characters. Enola is getting married. Sherlock has been kidnapped. There is stolen Afghan gold buried inside a story about British rule in Malta. On paper, this should...

📖 Romance & Escapist Picks

• Beach Read by Emily Henry (2020) — Two writers with opposite tastes swap genres for the summer. A film adaptation is currently in production starring Phoebe Dynevor and Patrick Schwarzenegger.
• The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren (Christina Hobbs & Lauren Billings) — Enemies-to-lovers enemies-forced-to-share-a-honeymoon. Part tropical, part surprisingly sincere.
• Fas...

Cape Fear is back, Apple TV's new 10-episode Cape Fear series stars Javier Bardem as Max Cady, and we're breaking down the first two episodes.

Meaghan is joined by Arthur (filling in for Shirin) to dig into the new Cape Fear adaptation on Apple TV, starring Javier Bardem, Amy Adams, and Patrick Wilson. We trace it back to John D. MacDonald's 1957 novel The Executioners and compare this version to the 1962 film (Gregory Peck, Robert...

Margo's Got Money Troubles season finale review — we break down every book-to-show change across episodes 5–8 of Apple TV+'s adaptation of Rufi Thorpe's novel.

In this episode of Fully Booked, we cover:

• Nick Offerman's performance as Jinx and why the Emmys need to pay attention

• Elle Fanning's version of Margo vs. the book's Margo

• Michelle Pfeiffer as Shyanne — the show's biggest character improvement

• The c...

Off Campus Prime Video review: Elle Kennedy's hockey romance adaptation starring Ella Bright and Belmont Cameli is finally here. We're reviewing the entire first season of Off Campus on Prime Video, the adaptation of Elle Kennedy's bestselling book series The Deal.

This is a full spoiler breakdown covering Hannah Wells and Garrett Graham's fake-dating-to-real-feelings storyline, Dean and Allie's surprise romance, and every major bo...

The Devil Wears Prada 2 review: Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway return but the sequel undoes its own characters. Full spoiler breakdown.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 reunites the original cast (Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, Stanley Tucci) twenty years after the 2006 film. Directed again by David Frankel with a screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna, the sequel picks up with Andy Sachs as a successful journalist who gets pulled bac...

Margo's Got Money Troubles on Apple TV: our full book vs. show breakdown of episodes 1–4. Elle Fanning, Nick Offerman, Michelle Pfeiffer, and the cast deliver.

We're talking about Apple TV's new series Margo's Got Money Troubles, based on the 2024 novel by Rufi Thorpe. This is our part one review covering the first four episodes of this David E. Kelley adaptation starring Elle Fanning as a young single mom who turns to OnlyFa...

Margo's Got Money Troubles hit Apple TV+ so we're talking OnlyFans novels, Ozempic horror & MLM mysteries — the books capturing this exact cultural moment and how they'll read in 30 years.

Shirin just finished Rufi Thorpe's 2024 novel AND the Elle Fanning adaptation (first three episodes streaming now), and that sparked a whole conversation about books as cultural time capsules. We dig into three recent reads doing that e...

How to Kill a Guy in Ten Dates is a slasher rom-com that might be Meaghan's favorite book of the year — and that's only one of the Q1 2026 reading favorites Meaghan and Shirin are unpacking in this spring roundup episode. Dungeon Crawler Carl, Murder Bimbo, Colleen Hoover adaptations, Emily Henry's first film, Wuthering Heights discourse, and body horror about Ozempic. Yeah.

 ────────────────────────────── 📚 BOOKS DISCU...

His & Hers (Netflix), 56 Days (Prime Video), Cold Storage, and Forbidden Fruits — we review every major book-to-screen adaptation we've watched in Q1 2026. 📚🎬

It's been a stacked few months for book adaptations. So we're doing something new: a dedicated mini-review roundup episode where Megan and Shereen run through the ones we've watched since January that haven't had a full episode yet — how they hold up against...

Project Hail Mary hit theaters on March 20, 2026, and it already has a 95% Rotten Tomatoes critics score, a 98% audience score, and an $80.5 million opening weekend to its name. It's the kind of opening that only happens a few times a decade for a non-franchise film — and it deserves the conversation. This week on Fully-Booked, Meaghan, Shirin, and Arthur dig into the full adaptation: the book, the movie, the differences, and...

Colleen Hoover is officially three-for-three at the multiplex, and Megan and Shereen are officially three-for-three at being surprised and disappointed. Reminders of Him hit theaters March 13, 2026, and the hosts were in the seats (Megan dragging a reluctant Arthur along for good measure).

On this week's Fully Booked, they break down the full adaptation: what the film changed from the 2022 novel, why the movie's version of the car ...

This week's episode is less about any single book and more about the way reading habits actually work — the seasonal pulls, the abandoned TBRs, the stack of books next to the bed that somehow keeps growing. Megan breaks down her seasonal reading calendar (spoiler: spring means fantasy, fall means thrillers, and October basically only means horror). Shereen reflects on her own identity as a comfort reader who goes back to fami...