Review of The Last Session by Julia Bartz

*The Last Session* by Julia Bartz (2025). Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books.

If you’re new here and found this blog through the mysterious powers of the Internet, welcome! My name is Ashley, and I’m a dedicated reader and movie watcher who thought to turn this website into a little digital archive of sorts.

I was watching and reading so much that I wanted to keep track of it all, so I began blogging as a way to keep these books as memories somewhat forever.

That said, I recently fell into a period of unemployment, and this blog was a solace for me. Not only was it a way to make a little bit of money when there was nothing else coming my way really, but I found, after getting my finances in order, that I enjoyed sitting down to write blog posts when I had nothing else to do in my day.

I’ve been dubbing this period as funemployment while I look for a job, but the job market isn’t looking too great right now. Regardless, I spend a lot of time in my local library, and because I am such a big fan of simple living, I enjoy the little moments where I can find a book for free here or there, while also supporting such a critical aspect of my community.

While I do love a good book from the library, being funemployed has led to another new discovery: I can finally catch up on all of the advance copies I receive! In the past I found myself inundated with advance copies, which led me to realize I need to be a bit more picky and choosy about what kinds of ARCs I was inviting into my life.

I decided to tackle my list of advance copies during this period, and I managed to get through a good portion of them! I tend to blog about most of the books I receive, if not all (I can’t recall any that I haven’t reviewed lately, but that could be my memory failing me here), as I want to put out what I thought about these books before I forget I even read them (hence why I started this blog to begin with).

I received a copy of The Last Session a bit ago because I received an advance copy years prior of another one of Bartz’s books. It took me a bit to get to this one even, but I finally read it while on a three week trip to San Diego and Los Angeles.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble too much, as I know introductions can get quite long.

A concerned social worker, after a woman comes into a psychiatric unit, finds herself tied up in the affairs of a cult.

Our main character in this novel is Thea, a relatively ordinary social worker who finds herself in an extraordinary situation (like most novel protagonists, if I dare say so). Life at her work is fairly routine, until one day it isn’t. Her life is about to completely change in so many different ways.

A woman is brought into the psychiatric unit, and Thea can’t shake the feeling she has seen this woman before. As she starts to dig deeper into this woman’s past and what might have brought her into the state she is when she arrives at the hospital, it opens up an entirely new world.

But when this woman checks herself out, Thea continues to obsess over her. She starts digging into the details behind her appearance and what she was able to find out while she was there, and that leads Thea to a cult in the middle of the deserts of New Mexico.

Suddenly, she decides to spend all of the savings she has in order to find out what exactly is going on here. Led by two elusive leaders named Sun and Moon, Thea is going not only learn more about the characters she’s surrounded by at the wellness retreat, but more about herself as well.

As it turns out, Thea herself also has some trauma when it comes to her own religious upbringing. This bleeds into the narrative here and there, and by the end of the novel, we can see how it comes to shape her and her experiences with the cult that she later encounters in the novel.

So not only does this become a novel about unraveling the mystery behind Thea’s patient, who appeared just as quickly as she came into her life, but also about the mystery of Thea’s past. There are a lot of discussions about trauma throughout the course of the novel, as well as triggering subjects not only for the characters around her, but potential readers as well.

That said, not every character is particularly memorable here. I found that there was a lot of slug to get through while reading this novel, and everyone besides the main character isn’t particularly memorable. There’s a lot that goes into these characters, and some have their own backstories fleshed out to the point where we get to know them quite well, but I found myself unable to connect and invest with these people in the story.

However, Bartz is very good at setting up tension, and there’s certainly a lot of that and mystery element to wade through in this story. I was finding it rather difficult to get through at times because of the pacing, but I did find this novel to be a bit dense.

Overall Thoughts

I’ve already briefly mentioned that I found this novel to get through. When I say that, I really do mean it. I was splitting it up into increments to motivate myself to get through it because I was having such a difficult time. I try not to read books all the way through if I’m not interested in, but I quite liked Bartz’s The Writing Retreat.

I think I came in with too high expectations and was comparing it a little too much with the previous novel I read from her. I can see how other readers might like this a lot more than I did, especially if they’re into trauma and psychology. You can dig a lot deeper into how people act and react the ways they do with this novel.

All of this is to say that I think this is a decent novel, but it wasn’t for me. I thought in the beginning that it was an interesting concept, but the writing and way the novel is constructed simply wasn’t for me.

Go pick this up if you’re interested though! Don’t let one somewhat negative review cloud your interest; pick it up and figure for yourself if you like it or not.

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