Boys Like You, Juliana Stone

Pages: 283

Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire

Release Date: 6^th May 2014

Edition: e-proof, review copy

One mistake and everything changes.

For Monroe Blackwell, one small mistake has torn her family apart leaving her empty and broken. There’s a hole in her heart that nothing can fill, that no one can fill. And a summer in Louisiana with Grandma isn’t going to change that...

Nathan Everets knows heartache first-hand when a car accident leaves his best friend in a coma. And it’s his fault. He should be the one lying in the hospital. The one who will never play guitar again. He doesn’t deserve forgiveness, and a court-appointed job at the Blacwell B&B isn’t going to change that...

Captivating and hopeful, this achingly poignant novel brings together two lost souls struggling grief and guilt looking for acceptance, so they can find forgiveness.

I had really high hopes for Boys Like You. It sounded like a perfect summer read with a hot, sultry setting, music boys and all-consuming grief, but it fell a little short.

The setting of high summer in Louisiana is perfect for a steamy romance. The heat, the sweat, the lack of clothing, the opportunities for swimming. It all makes for a glorious summer, but I wasn’t feeling it. I didn’t connect with either Monroe or Nathan. I’m not sure what it what about them that stopped me empathising with them. There were well-rounded and had depth and were likable in their own way, but nothing. I had no desire for them to be together, to rise above their torment and accept their past. Nothing.

I did really love the way that Stone approached the physical side of Nathan and Monroe’s relationship, however. I seem to reading a lot of books lately that promote female sexuality healthily and it makes me so happy. It’s crazy important that teenage girls who are reading these books see their own feelings reflected in these characters and know that it’s okay to feel those things, that it’s natural and normal. I hope that someday soon we get to the point where a healthy look at female sexuality isn;t something that jumps out at you, it just is.

All in all, I wasn’t a huge fan of Boys Like You, but if you’re in need of a quick, easy contemp then this might be for you.

Thanks to NetGalley and Sourcebooks for the review copy.

Sophie

Way Back When: CosmoGIRL!/Piccadilly Love Stories

I often scan my shelves just letting my mind wander over the titles and the characters and the stories within them, and sometimes I take particular notice of an older book. Usually this is a book I read before I started blogging and one that I never hear anyone talk about and I wonder why on earth they don’t because I bloody loved it! I decided it was time that those old gems got dusted off and showcased again so I’m going to do a series of posts about books I Way Back When. The first is all about the CosmoGIRL!/Piccadilly Love Stories that were published by Piccadilly Press about 8-10 years ago.

Love stories have always been my kryptonite, especially ones that make my heart ache and my eyes leak. I’m just a sap really.

I discovered my first CosmoGIRL!/Piccadilly Love Story in my school library. It was called Tessa in Love by Kate le Vann and promised the tale of a shy girl who decides to take a stand when her local parkland is threatened and she joins a protest. There she meets Wolfie and they fall quickly in love. Then tragedy strikes. This book made me bawl my eyes out. I was a complete mess, and I adored it. I searched out the rest of Kate le Vann’s published novels at the time and waited eagerly for the next one (particularly The Things I Know About Love – another sobbing fest). I also realised that this was part of a collection by Piccadilly and I began to search.

Next I came upon Hilary Freeman’s Loving Danny. I think every girl loves a musician – I mean, who hasn’t crushed on a rock/pop star or twelve?! It’s the year after Naomi finished secondary school. All of her friends are off on adventures and beginning a new life at university while she’s going to work and living at home and being bored. Then on the bus home from work one day, Naomi meets Danny. Mysterious and intense, Danny turns her life upside down with his incredible talent and his band on the brink of stardom. But Danny has a destructive side that could put everything in shadow. Freeman introduced me to one of my first bad boy crushes and I’ve never forgotten him.

Anna-Louise Weatherly’s The Wrong Boy was by far one of my favourites from all I read of this series. I’m a big fan of the rather clichéd notion of rich-girl/poor-boy set up, and The Wrong Boy puts a bit of a spin on it – Grace had it all with her big house, posh school, horses and swimming pool, then here dad was incarcerated for fraud and she had to move to a small house on an estate with her mum. When she is bullied by some locals, her neighbour JJ comes to her rescue. They’re from different worlds – can they make it? This was another heart-wrenching one for me. Sadly, Anna-Louise is now a journalist and writes adult novels, the second of which was released last year, I believe. Maybe I’ll give them a go one day...

The final two titles, Love Divided by Vanessa St Clair and My Best Friend’s Brother by Laura Ellen Kennedy were my least favourites of the whole series. It may have been because there were no tears in these ones. I didn’t become as attached to the characters, either, but I still loved the element of forbidden romance and I feel affectionately towards them and always will.

I was gutted when I began to realise that no more in this series would be published. I had begun to rely on Piccadilly Press to deliver me heartache, sob-worthy stories that I could lose myself in. Luckily, all bar Tessa in Love are still in print so you can trundle off to Amazon to purchase shiny new copies, or very cheap e-books for most of them, if you prefer.

Do let me know if you’ve read any of these, or if you do at some point in the future – I’d love to hear your thoughts! Feel free to write your own series of posts about books you loved Way Back When!

Do you have any favourite publisher-led series?

Sophie

OUT AND ABOUT: Mark Grist's Rogue Teacher

What: Mark Grist’s Rogue Teacher

Where: The Hawth, Crawley

When: 15^th May 2014

Ticket Price: £11

What was it?

A former secondary school English teacher, Mark Grist is now a professional spoken word artist. Performing in all over the country and visiting schools to trying and get kids involved with and engaged in language and poetry. This is the story of how he got from teaching Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage to ‘Date a Girl Who Reads’.

The Show

Mark’s story begins with three boys in his year group that are getting into some serious trouble. They started to spend break and lunchtimes together to try and encourage some better behaviour in the boys. The poetry didn’t go down overly well, but the boys were a fan of lyrics and hip hop and they started to teach Mark about it. It started something. When the boys’ behaviour worsened, a deal was made: if they survived the term under the radar then mark would do whatever they wanted. That resulted in a rap battle.

Mark’s career-making battle with Blizzard

Just before the interval, we got to hear a few poems from another spoken word artist that Mark has worked closely with over the years: Mixy. I really enjoyed his short set and I’m really interested to have a look and see what happens when they do a set together as they have in the past. Their styles are quite different so I imagine they complement each other brilliantly in that way that clashes often do.

‘I’m Really Good at Board Games’

Throughout the event, Mark talked about his teaching, his love of working with teenagers and how the adults in his life became the problem. I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I would have loved to have a teacher like him. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had some wonderful teachers, especially English teachers, but Mark sounds like something else. To feel so strongly and so passionately about language isn’t really something I experienced until university. It made me miss education even more than I already do.  

‘Why I’m Angry’

Mark gave up teaching to pursue spoken word as a career and during that time completed an MA in Creative Writing. It was during this time that his style of poetry and writing was questioned and after being told that what he was doing wasn’t right, he gave it up to write ‘literary poetry’ if you will. But he hated everything he wrote. I experienced this in one of my creative writing classes where a tutor told me how she felt that YA wasn’t something worth writing; it had no literary merit, skill or value to it whatsoever. I wasn;t a fan of that idea. I wrote what she wanted for a little while and I hated it. I soon decided that I’d had enough of that and went back to writing the YA that I love and I’m actually okay at. I walked out of her class with a first for that module. I’d made a point to overturn every opinion she had about my genre and prove her wrong so I completely knew where Mark was coming from when he turned rap battles into the focus of his MA.

‘Date a Girl Who Reads’

Overall Opinion

As my first spoken word show, I didn’t know what to expect other than readings of performance poetry which I had seen before and loved. Rogue Teacher is funny, touching and so much fun. I really hope I get to see more spoken words events, and hopefully a rap battle or two, in the future.

Verdict: 10/10

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I was in no way asked, encouraged or paid to review this show.

Sophie

All Lined Up, Cora Carmack

Pages: 322

Publisher: William Morrow

Release Date: 13^th May 2014

Edition: e-book, purchased

Other Titles by this Author: Losing It, Faking It, Keeping Her, Finding It

In Texas, two things are cherished above all else – football and gossip. My life has always been ruled by both.

Dallas Cole loathes football. That’s what happens when you spend your whole childhood coming in second to a sport. College is her time to step out of the bleachers, and put the playing field (and the players) in her past.

But life doesn’t always go as planned. As if going to the same college as her football star ex wasn’t bad enough, her father, a Texas high school coaching phenom, has decided to make the jump to college ball...as the new head coach at Rusk University. Dallas finds herself in the shadows of her father and football all over again.

Carson McClain is determined to go from second-string quarterback to the starting line-up. He needs the scholarship and the future that football provides. But when a beautiful redhead literally falls into his life, his focus is more than tested. It’s obliterated.

Dallas doesn’t know Carson is on the team. Carson doesn’t know that Dallas is his new coach’s daughter.

And neither of them know how to walk away from the attraction they feel.

Cora Carmack’s books are my guilty pleasure so as soon as I saw that she had a new one out, I ran to Amazon and snapped it up. I lasted an entire day before I dove in...

Like Carmack’s previous books, All Lined Up is told in fresh, current and on point prose. It just feels so relevant and real, even if the American uni experience is alien (more on that in a minute), and I couldn’t help but fall in love with Dallas and Carson. Told in dual perspective, I got to know them both pretty well. The fact that neither character is censored in their thoughts about the other, there embarrassing reactions to each other, the swearing when it all gets too much: they are eighteen year olds and it comes across that way. Everything about their voices resonates appropriately and false words aren’t thrown into their mouths at all. It feels completely genuine.

I especially found this in Carmack’s approach to female sexuality. It would be expected that Carson would think inappropriately about Dallas in his perspective, but sometimes the girl’s lust and desire is completely ignored, but not in All Lined Up, or any of her books, for that matter. There is no secrecy or shame or ridicule in Dallas’s sexuality which is so, so important in the unfortunate society we live in. I think the topic is covered sensibly and respectfully, but very realistically. (Whoops, quite a few adverbs there...) Carmack’s book pose a really nice rebuttal to the recent article from Caitlin Moran about the need for sex in YA that sent my Twitter feed into a rage.

If it wasn’t for the fact that All Lined Up is written by Cora Carmack I probably would have steered clear; American football is a mystery to me. Because they just call it football, I had a few confused moments. It just doesn’t really exist over here, does it? I have no idea. Me and sports aren’t exactly familiar with each other... I have to admit that even though when the events of the games were being played all I heard was ‘blah blah score blah ouch blah’. I pretty much just skipped over those sections. But American football is like a religion for US universities and it just sounds like such a cool atmosphere. There’s nothing like that in UK unis – nothing that unites the whole school in the same way. Of course we have sports teams, but they just play their games and come back and no one really notices. There really is something very appealing about US unis and I’d love to go, although we’re definitely one up with our student loans and such – I could never afford to go to uni in America.

I thoroughly enjoyed All Lined Up and I can’t wait to get my grubby hands on the next instalment of the Rusk University series.

Sophie