Letterbox Love #86

Letterbox Love is a way to show you all of the lovely, lovely books I’ve gotten in the post, bought and everything else over the last week. Summaries are taken from the cover, or Amazon/NetGalley/Goodreads in the case of e-books, unless otherwise stated. Hosted by Narratively Speaking.

For review:

One, Sarah Crossan (proof)

Grace and Tippi are twins – conjoined twins.

And their lives are about to change.

No longer able to afford homeschooling, they must venture into the world – a world of stares, sneers and cruelty. Will they find more than that at school? Can they find real friends? And what about love?

But what neither Grace or Tippi realises is that a heart-wrenching decision lies ahead. A decision that could tear them apart. One that will change their lives even more than they ever imagined.

This moving and beautifully crafted story about identity, sisterhood and love ultimately asks one question: what does it mean to want and have a soulmate?

Goodness me, this sounds excellent! And it’s written in verse as well – can’t wait. Thanks Bloomsbury!

House of Windows, Alexia Casale (proof)

Nick says he’s not a genius. He’s just going to Cambridge University aged fifteen because he works hard. And, secretly, he only works hard to get some kind of attention from his workaholic father.

Not that his strategy is working.

When he arrives at Cambridge, he finds the work hard and socialising even harder. Until, that is, he starts to cox for the college rowing crew and all hell breaks loose…

I love Lexi so I can’t wait to finally read one of her books! Thanks Faber!

Made For You, Melissa Marr (paperback)

Eva Tilling wakes up in hospital to discover she has been the victim of a hit-and-run.

As she struggles to understand who in the sleepy town of Jessup would want to hurt her, she is plagued by visions of her friends dying – and then a slew of murders takes place, with eerie messages to Eva left beside the bodies.

An old friend offers his help and protection, but the killer is obsessed and wil stop at nothing to get to Eva…

I’m a huge Melissa Marr fan and it feels like I haven’t read anything from her for ages so thanks HarperCollins!

I also received the new movie-cover paperback of Paper Towns from Bloomsbury – thank you!

A History of Glitter and Blood, Hannah Moscowitz (e-proof)

Sixteen-year-old Beckan and her friends are the only fairies brave enough to stay in Ferran when war breaks out. Now there is tension between the immortal fairies, the subterranean gnomes, and the mysterious tightropers who arrived to liberate the fairies.

But when Beckan’s clan is forced to venture into the gnome underworld to survive, they find themselves tentatively forming unlikely friendships and making sacrifices they couldn’t have imagined.

As danger mounts, Beckan finds herself caught between her loyalty to her friends, her desire for peace, and a love she never expected. This stunning, lyrical fantasy is a powerful exploration of what makes a family, what justified a war, and what it means to truly love.

This sounds utterly bonkers, and potentially amazing. Thanks NetGalley and Chronicle Books!

Bought:

The Last Summer of Us, Maggie Harcourt (paperback)

A story of love, lies, grief, friendship and growing up.

A story of three best friends crammed into a clapped-out car full of regrets and secrets, on a journey that will change their lives for ever.

A story you’ll never forget.

A UKYA roadtrip? I’m in! And so many bloggers have already raved about this so when I spotted it in Foyles I snapped it up!

The Lottery and Other Stories, Shirley Jackson (paperback)

An excellent host finds himself turned out of his home by his own guests; a woman spends her wedding day frantically searching for her husband-to-be; and in Shirley Jackson’s best-known story, a small farming village comes together for a terrible lottery…

The creeping unease of lives squandered and the bloody glee of lives lost is chillingly captured in these tales of wasted potential and casual cruelty by a master of the short story.

My endeavour to widen my reading continues, and The Lottery is a story that influenced The Hunger Games!

A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf (paperback)

‘But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction – what has that got to do with a room of one’s own?’

A Room of One’s Own grew out of a lecture that Virginia Woolf had been invited to give at Girton College, Cambridge in 1928. Ranging over Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë and why neither of them could have written War and Peace, over the silent fate of Shakespeare’s gifted (and imaginiary) muse, over the effects of poverty and chastity on female creativity, she gives us one of the greatest feminist polemics of the century.

I have already read this – I did a university module where we read all of her novels! – but I hate my Oxford World Classics edition; this one is much prettier! I’d really like to re-read Woolf’s work.

Sophie