Other
Titles by this Author: Fearsome Dreamer, The
Illusionists
Meet
the Graces
They
were waiting for someone different.
All
I had to do was show them that person was me.
Just
like everybody else in her small town, River is obsessed with the Graces. Just
like everybody else, she's been seduced by their wealth, their exclusivity,
their beauty, and their glamour.
But
unlike everybody else, River knows exactly what she’s doing.
Doesn’t
she?
The YA world has been raving
about ‘The Graces’ for goodness knows how long and I have to admit that I was a
little intimidated by the hype, but boy did it live up to it!
Within only a couple of pages I was
completely intrigued. ‘The Graces’ has that really nostalgic atmosphere of old
school paranormal romance that was the backbone of YA for so long and it was
such a lovely feeling. It did feel a little overwritten at first, a little
try-hard, but I soon fell into the rhythm of the story and became swept up in
the intrigue of the Graces.
A photo
posted by Sophie (@solittletimeforbooks) on
All the time I wasn’t reading ‘The
Graces’ I was dying to – it’s incredibly compelling. The mysteries got thicker,
the atmosphere got closer and everything got darker, all leading to a twist
that completely blew my mind. I was expecting a big twist, but that was still a
serious wow. One of my smaller theories did turn out to be correct though which
I was rather chuffed about that.
Every single character in this book
is completely messed up. The Graces live in a bubble of privilege,
overprotective parents and a strange intense relationship with each other. River’s
family life is equally unusual, but at the opposite end of the spectrum and she’s
desperate for love and acceptance. But all four of them take their messiness to
unexpected levels.
Dark, compelling and shocking, ‘The
Graces’ threw me for a loop. I can’t WAIT for book two!
In
Feminine
Gospels, Carol Ann Duffy draws on the
historical, the archetypal, the biblical and the fantastical to create various
visions – and revisions – of female beauty. Simultaneously stripping women bare
and revealing them in all their guises and disguises, these poems tell tall
stories as though they were true confessions, and spin modern myths from real women
seen in every aspect – as bodies and corpses, writers and workers, shoppers and
slimmers, fairytale royals or girls-next-door.
Mini-Review
I had incredibly high hopes for Feminine Gospels after loving Duffy’s
poetry way back at GCSE, but I was actually a little disappointed. While I
admired the poems, I never felt that I really knew what anything was about and
I felt no emotional connection to any of the poems. As I've enjoyed Duffy in
the past, I'm going to give another of her collections a go before I make my judgement
as I do love the themes of re-written history, feminism and female strength in Feminine Gospels.
Physical,
Andrew McMillan
64|Jonathan Cape|2015
Synopsis
Raw and urgent, these poems are hymns to the male
body – to male friendship and male love – muscular, sometimes shocking, but
always deeply moving. We are witness here to an almost religious celebration of
flesh: a flesh vital with the vulnerability of love and loss, to desire and its
departure. In an extraordinary blend of McMillan’s own colloquial Yorkshire
rhythms with a sinewy, Metaphysical music and Thom Gunn’s torque and speed –
‘your kiss was deep enough to stand in’ – the poems in this first collection
confront what it is to be a man and interrogate the very idea of masculinity.
This is poetry where every instance of human connection, from the casual
encounter to the intimate relationship, becomes redeemable and revelatory.
Mini-Review
I have
mixed feelings about this collection. On one hand, I love the vivid emotion and
the feel of the poems, but I also didn’t 100% get everything that Andrew
McMillan was trying to say. But I think that’s a fault of my own – I need to
remember that as long as I feel something about a collection then it’s mostly a
success.
And I did
feel for Physical. The poems
themselves have no punctuation, instead relying on word and line spacing and it
just gives the whole collection this sense of an uncontrolled outpouring of
emotion and the way that maleness is explored in unlike anything I've read
before. It’s unpretentious and honest and achingly, achingly sad. This is
definitely a collection I can see myself re-reading, and one that I think will
benefit from that.
Hold Your Own, Kate Tempest
108|Picador|2014
Synopsis
Kate
Tempest’s first full-length collection for Picador is an ambitious,
mmulti-voiced work based around the mythical figure of Tiresias, this four-part
work follows him through his transformations from child, man and woman to blind
prophet; through this structure, Tempest holds up a mirror to contemporary life
in a direct and provocative way rarely associated with poetry. A vastly popular
and accomplished performance poet, Tempest commands a huge and dedicated following
on the performance and rap circuit.
Mini-Review
Taking inspiration from the
ancient myth of Tierias, Hold Your Own talks
about everything we experience in life via a sharp, observant and modern eye
and it’s completely brilliant. There is so much power in Tempest’s words and
ideas and themes, lots on sexuality, feminism, school and society that sucker
punch you with its simple truth. This is a collection I’ll be reading and re-reading
over the years, I just know it. I now have a desperate need to read everything
Kate Tempest has ever written. Beautiful.
My edition: The new YA Originals paperback from
Penguin.
WHEN
I Discovered This Classic
This is actually a title that I didn’t
know about until I was offered the chance to review a few of the YA Originals.
WHY
I Chose to Read It
I read Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and
Men’ way back in Year 9 and I hated it. Completely and utterly. It’s been
around 10 years since then and I figured it was about time I gave him another
shot.
WHAT
Makes It a Classic
‘The Pearl’ is a fable about the
evils of greed and the danger of the poor rising up and threatening the status
quo.
WHAT
I Thought of This Classic
I’m just going to come out and
say it: I really didn’t like ‘The Pearl’. In fact, if it had been any longer
that it's 115 pages I wouldn’t have finished it. Kino is a poor Mexican pearl diver who finds the Pearl of the World - huge pearl worth thousands. Kino is blinded to the threat and danger of the pearl by the promise and glory of what it can achieve for him.
As I mentioned, this novel is a
fable and it felt very heavy handed. The story and writing was very simplified,
the message obvious and verging on preachy and I hated the oppressive feel of
the message behind Kino’s story. But aside from that, I found it kind of
boring. Being a fable, the general direction of the story and the journey of
the characters was expected and there were no real surprises in the narrative.
A photo
posted by Sophie (@solittletimeforbooks) on
One of the things that I remember
not liking about ‘Of Mice and Men’ is that the character of Curley’s Wife is
just his wife – she doesn’t even have a name. She’s a device without a
personality, agency or depth, and I found the same problem with Kino’s wife
Juana. She is simply there to function as a conscience to Kino, to refute his
ideas about the pearl and she is constantly derived and squashed down by her
husband. It made me ragey and lose all sympathy I had for Kino and his plight.
It's safe to say that John
Steinbeck isn’t for me and I won't be giving him another try.
WILL
It Stay a Classic
Probably. Steinbeck is seen as a
master of American literature and he continues to be studied across English
classrooms. Poor kids.
WHO
I’d Recommend it To
- Honestly, I’m really not sure.
Unless you’re a fan of Steinbeck already, I don’t really recommend ‘The Pearl’.
A photo posted by Sophie (@solittletimeforbooks) on
What’s it all about?
Ruby Oliver is fifteen and has a
shrink. But before you make up your mind about her, you should know that she
has had a pretty awful (and eventful) past ten days. She has: lost her
boyfriend (#13 on the boyfriend list), lost her best friend, lost all her other
friends, did something suspicious with a boy (#10), did
something advanced with a boy (#15), had an argument with a boy
(#14), drank her first beer (someone handed it to her), got caught by her mom
(ag!), had a panic attack (scary), lost a lacrosse game, failed a math test,
hurt Meghan's feelings, became a social outcast, and had graffiti written about
her in the girls' bathroom. But don't worry, Ruby lives to tell the tale.
Through a special assignment to list all the boys she's ever had the slightest,
little, any-kind-of-anything with, comes an unfortunate series of events that
would be enough to send any girl in a panic.
The Verdict:
The Boyfriend List
I
first read the first two books in this series when they were originally
published in the UK back in 2007-ish but the last two never made it over here.
Hearing that the whole series is being re-released by Hot Key Books this summer
made my day!
I
was a tad worried that I wouldn’t like Ruby as much, but I worried for nothing
– The Boyfriend List was just as
brilliant at 24 as it was at 14/15! I'd forgotten about the footnotes that
pepper Ruby’s story, but I love them. Sometimes they can be annoying, but they
worked brilliantly well in Roo’s story. This must have been one of the first
times I ever encountered anxiety and panic attacks in YA and I love how it’s
handled – with humour, normalcy and positivity. Ruby’s misadventures are
hilarious and charming and I’m so looking forward to getting back to her
already.
Btw,
Team Noel. 100%.
The Boy Book
When The
Boy Book kicks off Roo has a total of two friends, but she does have a cool
job at the zoo and a driver’s license.
At the beginning of every chapter we get
an excerpt from The Boy Book and Ruby’s serious skill at relating moments in
her life to movies throughout. I felt like I really started remembering so many
of things I'd forgotten about Roo in the many years since reading these for the
first time and I just feel head over heels for her again: her encyclopaedic
movie knowledge, her love of mystery novels and vintage clothes, her tendency
to treat animals like people and her capability for serious ridiculousness. I
love her.
Still Team Noel.
The Treasure Map of Boys
Oh,
Noel, you have SO let me down.
We
get a hefty dose of boy and friend problems in Roo’s third adventure, and a
whole lot of changing allegiance on my part. A lot of The Boy Book was about the natural changing of friendship groups as
you get older and that continued into The
Treasure Map of Boys.
I
thought that I liked Nora. She came back to Roo, even though she had a little
wobble, and stayed loyal, but in this book we realised how wrong we were about
her. She’s just as selfish as Roo is (hello, teenagers) and she doesn’t really
understand Roo at all. Plus she was totally unfair with the Noel debacle and I
think Roo’s better off without her. And maybe even Noel too. He had so much
promise, but he really let himself down by not trusting Roo and buying into the
gossip and Roo’s ‘reputation’. In sweeps Hutch. Could I be switching my
allegiance…
(I
am so glad Roo finally told Jackson where to go in The Treasure Map of Boys. It was a long time coming and I genuinely
cheered out loud as Roo finally realised what a jerk he is.)
Real Live
Boyfriends
It’s Ruby’s senior year. Her and Noel
are thoroughly in love, she’s got solid ways of preventing her panic attacks
and it all seems to be going well. Until her grandmother dies, sending her dad
into a spiral; her mum gets crazier than usual and after a trip to NYC, Noel seems
to have lost interest. Life is never quiet for Ruby.
Real Live
Boyfriends definitely took a more serious turn that
the previous books, but it still kept the humour and charm I've come to love
and expect from this series. And in the background there was always boy drama,
but for the first time I felt like Roo actually knew what she wanted and what
she deserved from the boys in her life which was a bit of a revelation. She's still
100% Ruby, but she grew up a lot in this final instalment.
Watching her explore the questions of
love, friendship and popularity that she's struggled with during the whole
series through the documentary she as making for her college applications
really showed that off and it even made me feel a bit emosh.
Overall
I loved this series even more the second
time around than I did the first and I’m so happy Hot Key Books have reprinted
them all so I finally got to see Ruby’s story through to the end. It’s fun,
charming, silly and also has a surprising amount of depth. I'd recommend it to
every fan of contemporary YA – brilliant.
A
comical, fantastical and witty re-imagining of the Tudor world, perfect for
fans of Pride
and Prejudice and Zombies. Lady Jane
Grey, sixteen, is about to be married to a total stranger - and caught up in an
insidious plan to rob her cousin, King Edward, of his throne. But that’s the
least of Jane’s problems. She's about to become Queen of England. Like that
could go wrong.
I couldn’t have loved My Lady Jane any more than I did – sass,
wit, humour and a whole lot of fun. Perfect!
This is an alternative history
that’s really quite alternative. We follow Kind Edward IV and Lady Jane Grey along
the recorded path (sort of) for a while, but when we diverge, we really
diverge. I loved the twist Ashton, Meadows and Hand put on the story,
especially how strong their presence at the narrators was – it could have come
across as really heavy handed but I loved it.
The magic and sense of humour in My Lady Jane could easily have become
ridiculous, but it definitely erred on the side of brilliantly ridiculous for
me. I laughed aloud on nearly every page and I was always surprised by what
happened next. I did find that it really brought out my inner history nerd and I
often found myself googling what really happened and researching bits and bobs
that caught my interest. I now know two versions of Jane, Edward and G’s
stories – and I definitely prefer this one.
My
Lady Jane has
jumped straight to my 2016 favourites and I’m really, really hoping these three
write together again very soon. Please?
