I'm a sucker for pretty endpapers...

I am a big fan of hardcovers. I never used to buy them; they can be pretty pricey after all, and not that many YA novels are actually published in hardback over here that often. But that seems to be changing. More and more publishers are taking the risk with hardcovers and even though I have a rule about buying hardcovers (the book has to be at least 300 pages long), it makes me very happy.

Why? Endpapers. I have a thing for books as objects. You may have seen my post about my Penguin Clothbound Classics editions or have heard me mention my need to collect the Penguin English Library and Penguin Modern Classics paperbacks, or even just seen me whinge on Twitter about a cover change mid-series. And even though you can’t see endpapers until you open the book, I know they’re there and that makes all the difference to me.

Sadly, when it comes to beautiful endpapers, the US are way ahead of us there. They are a luxury and must add quite a bit to the production costs of a book, but I really do think they’re worth it. They make a book into a desirable, collectible object. They’re definitely something aimed at booklovers or as a gift book; a sporadic reader will go straight to the chart paperback, I’m sure, but us booklovers are so worth the investment. We probably spend hundreds and hundreds of pounds on books each year.

I’m also a fan of how something like endpapers can brand a series or an author or even a publisher or a bookshop. When you see a large, grey cover with a white title and gorgeous vintage patterned endpapers you instantly know it’s a Persephone Books edition. Persephone Books are an indie bookshop and publisher in London that focus on rereleasing forgotten women’s classics from the 19^th Century. Sadly, I haven’t got my hands on any yet but I have a visit planned! I also know that I won’t be able to just get one…

I also love it when series’ have cohesive looks and endpapers. Becca Fitzpatrick’s UK hardcover editions of the Hush, Hush series have the same black and white feather design in all four novels and Charlie Higson's The Enemy series has patterned skulls; Darren Shan’s Zom-B saga have gorgeous comic strip endpapers throughout the series and the US hardbacks of the Blood of Eden trilogy has the same patterned endpapers but with a different colour in each book. It just makes me so happy.

Do you have particularly strong feelings about endpapers? What makes you invest in a physical copy of a book?

Sophie 

Emmy & Oliver, Robin Benway

Pages: 340

Publisher: S&S

Release Date: 16^th July 2015

Edition: UK paperback, review copy

Other Titles by this Author: Audrey, Wait!; The Extraordinary Secrets of April, May and June; AKA: Spy Society; AKA: Going Rogue

‘Oliver’s absence split us wide open, dividing our neighbourhood along a fault line strong enough to cause an earthquake. An earthquake would have been better. At least during an earthquake, you understand why you’re shaking.’

Emmy and Oliver were going to be best friends forever, or maybe even more, before their futures were ripped apart. But now Oliver is back, and he’s not the skinny boy-next-door that used to be Emmy’s best friend. Now he’s the boy who got kidnapped. A stranger – a totally hot stranger! – with a whole history that Emmy knows nothing about.

But is their story still meant to be? Or are their hearts like pieces of two different puzzles – impossible to fit together?

Emmy & Oliver is a beautiful, funny and thoughtful novel about family, love and friendship. I loved it.

Before I had even opened my copy of this book I was sure it was going to make me cry. And I definitely teared up a few times! Ever since Emmy saw Oliver being driven away by dad when they were seven, her mind has been consumed with thoughts of what he’s doing, where is he and if he’ll come back. And ten years later, he does. First emotional punch in the gut!

It became evident just has far the repercussions of Oliver’s kidnapping travelled. The small SoCal suburb was rocked by it and it never properly recovered. Being friends of the family and living next door, Emmy’s family was hit pretty hard. Emmy’s parents panicked and it has ruled her life ever since; they’re incredibly over-protective and very controlling, but it’s also interesting to see how the effects stretched even further.

Everyone expecting Oliver’s homecoming – if he had one – would mean a happily ever after for him and his family but it didn’t work like that at all. This is where the prominence of the parents in this novel really shone. At seventeen your parents are still vital to you, whether you like it or not. They still have a fair amount of control and you generally still need them and I loved how authentically the relationship between parents and teenagers was represented, particularly with Emmy and her family. Emmy may be frustrated by her mum’s ridiculous rules and precautions and having arguments about the same things but they still tease each other, share affectionate banter and, over everything, there is mutual love and respect – everything stems from that. I think (and hope) that this is actually much closer to real life relationships that the bitter, resentful, angry relationships you get between teens and their parents in lots of YA.

Then again, I can’t imagine it’s difficult to get along with Emmy. She’s funny, smart, cheeky and completely genuine in her narration and I just want to be her friend. The friendship between her, Caro and Drew was completely perfect. They knew each other inside out in that way that you only really get if you go to school/uni together or grow up alongside each other – I think it’s an intrinsically teenage friendship. Their world is changing and so are they, but they’re changing together. These three have been through a lot together and it shows in the way they care for each other, but also sometimes take each other for granted.

Oliver coming home disrupted that friendship as Emmy tried to get back that childhood friend that she had so desperately missed while also trying to ease his transition into his new life. There are so seriously heartbreaking moments between these two as Oliver shares how he really feels about being home and explains his conflicted feelings about his dad. Though Emmy can’t empathise with Oliver’s feelings, she listens and she tries and it was so lovely to watch them fall in love with each other, to see them spark and connect.

I completely loved Emmy & Oliver and I just recommend it to everyone. Everyone. Right now. Go get it.

Thanks to S&S for the review copy.

Sophie 

Blog Tour: Frenchman's Creek, Daphne Du Maurier

Today I’m lucky enough to be part of the blog tour for the beautiful YA reissues of three of Daphne du Maurier’s novels, Frenchman’s Creek, Jamaica Inn and Rebecca so I’ll be reviewing Frenchman’s Creek for you. As it’s a modern classic novel, I’m blending the blog tour with my monthly Blast From the Past classic novel review. Enjoy!

Originally published in 1941 by Victor Gollancz Ltd

My edition: the gorgeous new YA chalkboard effect paperbacks from Virago Modern Classics

What’s it about?

Lady Dona St Columb is fed up with the shallowness of life at the Restoration Court. Despite always being at the heart of the court intrigue, there is a secret Dona who longs for freedom and honest love, even if it spiced with danger. She leaves London for Navron, her Cornish estate, seeking peace and solitude. But she finds that Navron is being used as a base by a pirate – a Frenchman who, like Dona, would gamble his life for a moment’s joy. Her passion and thirst for adventure have never been more aroused, and together they embark upon a quest rife with danger and glory.

Why now?

I had planned to read a Daphne du Maurier this year for the Classics Challenge and then I got an email from Little, Brown offering me the new editions and a spot on the blog tour – perfect timing! So today’s post is a Blast From the Past, but it’s also a tour stop!

The verdict:

I had always assumed that my first Du Maurier would be Rebecca as I honestly hadn’t heard much about her other novels, but with the promise of romance, adventure, pirates and the constraints of society I was intrigued by Frenchman’s Creek. I was shocked to find how thoroughly I enjoyed it.

I was rather unsure of Dona when I first started reading; she’s not at all what I expected. From the summary I was expecting a flighty young girls in her late teens/early twenties with no ties, but Dona is nearly thirty (which she repeats as if she can’t quite believe it), is married to Sir Harry and has two young children. She seemed arrogant and self-centred and bored so I was really glad when I really started to get to know her.

Dona is fed up of her life as Lady St Columb. She’s fed up of her desires for romance and adventure being repressed by her sex and her society (the novel is set in the mid-to-late 1600s, during the reign of Charles II). She escapes London to the Cornish coast and the old house she hasn’t visited since her wedding six years ago. At the bottom of the gardens lies a secret creek and a hidden pirate ship where she meets the Frenchman – the captain of La Mouette. I loved how Dona came alive. Du Maurier’s dreamy, poetic prose perfectly captured the Dona’s heady infatuation with the Frenchman turn into love against the background of a scorching English summer. It’s both romantic and Romantic.

Du Maurier paints Dona as both a woman of her time and a woman beyond her time. Dona is tired of being closeted, of going to dinners, dressing up as expected, pretending to love her husband passionately, and feigning contentment in her humdrum, but luxurious, life. What she really wants is freedom. The freedom to go out on her own, to explore herself outside of the confines of ‘wife’, ‘mother’, ‘Lady St Colomb’, ‘woman’ is something she had never experienced until she met and fell in love with the Frenchman. He encouraged her to learn and develop new skills, he pushed her out of her comfort zone, trusted her strength and abilities and met her on an intellectual and emotional level; things she never experienced with Harry. One of the things I love most about Frenchman’s Creek is that I know that Dona will never again be the woman she was in the beginning of the novel. Though she won’t be able to be the woman she was with the Frenchman all of the time, she’ll be there below the surface: Dona will know that there’s more to her and her life that she could ever have dreamed.

I fell in love with Frenchman’s Creek and I really wasn’t expecting to. There’s romance, adventure, beautiful prose, a sumptuous setting and a cast of brilliantly drawn characters. I ordered another two of Du Maurier’s novels before I even finished this one – I could have a new favourite author on the cards.

Still not convinced?

- They’re not rebranded for a YA audience for nothing! A brilliant place to start for teens who feel a little put off by classics.

- For a book that’s 74 years old, it feels current, relevant and easy to read.

- It has pirates in it!

Sophie 

Suicide Notes from Beautiful Girls, Lynn Weingarten

Pages: 335

Publisher: Egmont

Release Date: 2^nd July 2015

Edition: UK paperback, review copy

June and Delia used to be closer than anything. Best friends that comes in that way before everything else. They had a billion secrets, tying them together like thin silk cords. But one night everything changed. And now, a year later, Delia is dead.

June is certain she was murdered, but the truth is more complicated than she ever could have imagined…

I flew through Lynn Weingarten’s debut. I was so eager to find out what really happened with June and Delia that I couldn’t stop turning the pages!

I really liked the narrative format of Suicide Notes from Beautiful Girls. June is telling us her story in the aftermath of Delia’s suicide, but the novel also flashbacks to different times and places over the history of their friendship and leads up to a time when they weren’t as close as they used to be. Those flashbacks are written in third person which I found really interesting. I liked the feel of the voiceover narrating the background, filling in the blanks that June didn’t want to tell us because either it was too painful or she didn’t want to acknowledge how what she’d learnt had changed those moments into. Really clever.

This was a novel filled with secrets and I loved watching them reveal themselves and paint a picture of Delia’s unravelling into darkness and recklessness. It was leading up to the twist (which I did guess) and I was expecting to be an explosive ending, but it actually occurred halfway through the novel, neatly dividing it into two parts. And I’m still not quite sure how I feel about that, though I do know that for me it took away the punch of the ending and I wound up feel a little dissatisfied with how the novel wrapped up. I can’t quite put my finger on why, but it just didn’t hit the spot for me.

However, Suicide Notes from Beautiful Girls is a fast-paced, intriguing and thoughtful debut that I really enjoyed.

Thanks to Egmont for the review copy.

Sophie 

Letterbox Love #97

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.

For review:

Storm Horse, Nick Garlick (paperback)

With his mother missing and his father dead, twelve-year-old Flip’s new home is a remote Dutch island. Menaced by the local bullies and followed everywhere by a mysterious girl, he wonders how he’ll ever adapt to life on his uncle’s farm.

But everything changes the day a sinking ship leaves a drowning horse floundering in the waves. Risking his life to rescue it, Flip is told the horse may stay with him only if he can teach it how to work for its keep. From that moment on a friendship grows. But can a boy and a horse really save each other? And what other dark storms threaten their hard-won happiness?

I’m not really a fan of horse stories so I’ll be passing this on to someone who is. Thanks though Chicken House!

Dara Palmer’s Major Drama, Emma Shevah (proof)

Dara is a born actress, or so she thinks – but when she doesn’t get any part in the school play, she begins to think it’s because she doesn’t look like the other girls in her class. She was adopted as a baby from Cambodia. So irrepressible Dara comes up with a plan, and is determined to change not just the school, but the whole world too.

This sounds really interesting. Woo, diversity! Thanks again to Chicken House.

Bought:

The Royal We, Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan (e-book)

Rebecca Porter was never one for fairy tales. Her twin sister, Lacey, has always been the romantic who fantasised about glamour and royalty, fame and fortune. Yet it’s Bex who seeks adventure at Oxford and finds herself living down the hall from Prince Nicholas, Britain’s future king. And when Bex can’t resist falling for Nick, it propels her into a world she did not expect to inhabit.

Dating Nick immerses Bex in ritzy society, dazzling ski trips, and dinners at Kensington Palace with him and his charming, troublesome brother, Freddie. But the relationship also comes with unimaginable baggage: hysterical tabloids, Nick’s far more suitable ex-girlfriends, and a royal family whose private life is far more tragic than anyone on the outside knows. The pressures are almost too much to bear, as Bex struggles to reconcile the man she loves with the monarch he’s fated to become.

Now, on the eve of the wedding of the century, Bex is faced with whether everything she’s sacrificed for her love – her career, her home, her family, maybe even herself – will have been for nothing.

This sounds like a lot of fun and it’s had lots of my favourite US authors raving about it on Twitter.

Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee (hardback)

Maycomb, Alabama. Twenty-six-year old Jean Louise Finch – ‘Scout’ – returns home from New York City to visit her ageing father, Atticus. Set against the political backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise’s homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town and the people dearest to her. Memories from her childhood flood back, and her values and assumptions are thrown into doubt. Featuring many of the iconic characters from To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman perfectly captures a young woman, and a world, in painful yet necessary transition out of the illusions of the past – a journey that can be guided only be one’s own conscience.

Written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman imparts a fuller, richer understanding and appreciation of Harper Lee. Here is an unforgettable novel of wisdom, humanity, passion, humour and effortless precision – a profoundly affecting work of art that is both wonderfully evocative of another era and relevant to our own times. It not only confirms the brilliant of To Kill a Mockingbird, but also serves as its essential companion, adding depth, context and new meaning to a classic.

I don’t think this one needs any introduction.

Counting Stars, Keris Stainton (signed paperback)

Anna’s finally ready to be a ‘proper’ grown-up. She couldn’t be more excited about her big move to Liverpool, and she’s determined to bring more of her super-confident online alter-ego, Anna Sparks, with her.

But when her job falls through, following her dreams proves harder than she’d thought…

So instead Anna throws herself into busy city life. Hanging out with her new housemates provides lots of drama and scandal for her vlog – but when a real-life celebrity gets involved, suddenly the consequences of Anna’s online gossiping are all too real.

Yay! My first YALC purchase – and way early. This isn’t out until September!

The Princess Diaries: A Royal Disaster, Meg Cabot (paperback)

‘Seriously, Lilly,’ I said. ‘I have to guard diligently against falling in love with somebody like your brother, because in the end I might have to marry a prince.’

Not that that would be such a great sacrifice.

The Princess Diaries: Princess in the Middle, Meg Cabot (paperback)

Nervous? Me? About going on TV and promising 50,000 people that I won’t let their country down?

Nah. Not me.

I just want to throw up every time I think about it, that’s all.

I recently read book one for the first time so I couldn’t resist picking up the next two reissues at YALC. So gorgeous!

Sophie