The Neighbours - Nicola Gill

Meet Ginny, 34, and Cassie, 55. Neighbours, and (very) unlikely friends.

Some women have it all. Others are thirty-four, renting a tiny flat alone because they recently found their long-term boyfriend in bed with their boss. Unfortunately, the latter applies to Ginny Taylor. Single and jobless, Ginny is certain her life can’t get any worse. But then she encounters her downstairs neighbour for the very first time...

Cassie Frost is a woman who had it all – she was a once-loved actress, but a recent stint on reality TV has rocketed her to online infamy. She’s suddenly become a national hate figure – and she desperately needs a new publicist. And Ginny is a publicist who desperately needs a job... but can she be persuaded to work for the uber-difficult, excessively prickly woman that lives below her floorboards?

Because sometimes – just sometimes – bad neighbours become good friends...

A bit like family, you can't choose your neighbours. When you move somewhere new it's because you like the area, or because you love the house. Unfortunately, you don't get to interview prospective neighbours, which I think is a really big travesty, and this can be a recipe for disaster! 

Left reeling after a traumatic break-up with ex-boyfriend Jack, which left our heroine Ginny without a boyfriend and a job, she is reaching for the Twirl Bites like a madwoman in an effort to find herself again. The neighbour in question is Cassie Frost, actress and Jungle contestant, and who's recent antics mean she's found herself at rock bottom.

One is in her thirties and the other is in her fifties, you wouldn't think that they would have anything in common but Cassie and Ginny become the most unlikely of friends. Struggling to cope with being unemployed and the two French lovebirds who have replaced her former flat-mate, Ginny sees something in Cassie that most people don't - that she's human and just like any other person on the planet. The two women learn to accept each other through depression, job hunting, trouble with overwhelmed sisters and are two of the best aunts you could ask for.

There's no sugarcoating the problems each of the women has in their lives but we get to see it, warts and all, especially in Cassie's case. As an actress/celebrity, she's quite contemptuous of everyday life, especially where her sister is concerned, and her two out-of-control nephews. The best thing about The Neighbours is watching Ginny and Cassie both learning to accept themselves, learning to understand their sisters and families, and developing the most unlikely but most supportive friendship.

The Neighbours is a perfect weekend read if you're looking for something contemporary about women supporting each other, friendship, and romance. Any author who makes good use of Twirl Bites is a genius as far as I'm concerned, curled up with the bag Avon Books very kindly sent me with a copy of the book made for a perfect reading experience.

The Neighbours - Nicola Gill

ISBN - 9780008355395

Publisher - Avon Books

Release Date - February 6th, 2020

Find - Goodreads | Book Depository | Kindle UK

The Incendiaries - R.O. Kwon

Phoebe Lin and Will Kendall meet their first month at prestigious Edwards University. Phoebe is a glamorous girl who doesn't tell anyone she blames herself for her mother's recent death. Will is a misfit scholarship boy who transfers to Edwards from Bible college, waiting tables to get by. What he knows for sure is that he loves Phoebe. 

Grieving and guilt-ridden, Phoebe is increasingly drawn into a religious group - a secretive extremist cult - founded by a charismatic former student, John Leal. He has an enigmatic past that involves North Korea and Phoebe's Korean American family. Meanwhile, Will struggles to confront the fundamentalism he's tried to escape, and the obsession consuming the one he loves. When the group bombs several buildings in the name of faith, killing five people, Phoebe disappears. Will devotes himself to finding her, tilting into obsession himself, seeking answers to what happened to Phoebe and if she could have been responsible for this violent act.

The Incendiaries is a fractured love story and a brilliant examination of the minds of extremist terrorists, and of what can happen to people who lose what they love most. who lose what they love most.

I'd heard lots of good things about The Incendiaries so when the request to take part in the blog tour popped up I had to accept. Virago publish some of my favorite books so I'm so glad I did because, although books like The Incendiaries aren't necessarily my typical read I'm very glad I sometimes take a chance.

The Incendiaries may appear to be a short novel but it packs a powerful punch in those pages. It's a tale of jealousy, religion, fanaticism, and love. The story of Will, Phoebe, and a man called John Leal, Kwon explores a man's loss of faith which has led to some life-changing decisions and his dismay as he watches the woman he loves being drawn deeper and deeper into a religious group named Jejah, by a charismatic man who may or may not be telling the complete truth about his past. As Will falls deeper in love with Phoebe, she, in turn, starts abandoning her friends, her studies, and Will.

The Incendiaries focuses on the character of Will, with Phoebe and John appearing as what feels like support characters. We get to know Will extremely well, about his life before Edwards, his mother's illness and get to explore the reasoning behind his loss of faith. Phoebe remains an enigmatic figure, and although we learn about significant events in her childhood, we don't know much about her as an adult and especially why she is so drawn to John Leal and his cult-like group. John himself remains a shadowy figure throughout the story, looming in the background and appearing at times when Will is feeling at his most vulnerable in his relationship with Phoebe. He claims to be a former prisoner of North Korea, goes barefoot all the time (Kwon's quite graphic description of the state of his feet turned my stomach! But I have a bit of a phobia about going barefoot...) and is charismatic to the point that people flock to him, take part in his group's initiation rites and become distraught if they're cast aside by him.

It becomes clear that the void left by his lack of faith and the absence of God in his life, Will is using Phoebe to fill that hole and his love becomes an obsession rather quickly. It was interesting to this happen as Will himself doesn't really realize this until the end but it's clear to Phoebe's friends, especially the colorful Julian who tells Phoebe to stay away from him.

Ultimately, R.O. Kwon has written a compelling and engrossing story that plays on the tropes of an obsessed man, whose memory is unreliable - at his own admission, and the sections featuring Phoebe could be either her actual memories or Will trying to fill in the blanks, trying to make sense of everything that happens, and the group's descent into extreme violence. Her ability to play with perspective is partially what makes this book so readable, and I think the most important thing for me was being able to read it in one go. It allowed me to immerse myself fully in Will's story, to try and understand exactly what was going on with Will. I liked that Phoebe was never fully fleshed out and that we never got to know her side of the story if we see her sections of the book as being Will's memories rather than her own thoughts. Kwon's writing is wonderful, her ability to draw the reader in from the first page is remarkable for a debut author and such a short novel. Some of her descriptions were so powerful that you can feel yourself in the actual presence of these characters, rather than just picturing them, and I think The Incendiaries fully deserves all the praise that has been heaped upon it. 

Please be aware though that The Incendiaries contains mentions of rape, possible suicide and quite a bit of violence.

The Incendiaries - R.O. Kwon

ISBN - 9780349011875 

Publisher - Virago

Release date - September 6th, 2018

Find - Goodreads | Book Depository

About The Author

R.O. Kwon’s first novel, The Incendiaries, was published by Riverhead in the U.S. earlier this year and in September by Virago in the U.K. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Vice, BuzzFeed, Time, Noon, Electric Literature, Playboy, San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. She has received awards and fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Omi International, and the Norman Mailer Writers’ Colony. Born in South Korea, she’s mostly lived in the United States.

Goodreads | Twitter | Website

Huge thanks to Grace Vincent and Virago for inviting me to take part in the blog tour, and for the advance copy I received in exchange for an honest review.

Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng

Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down.

In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned – from the layout of the winding roads to the colours of the houses to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principal is playing by the rules.

Enter Mia Warren – an enigmatic artist and single mother- who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than just tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the alluring mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past and a disregard for the rules that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.

When the Richardsons’ friends attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town and puts Mia and Mrs. Richardson on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Mrs. Richardson becomes determined to uncover the secrets in Mia’s past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs to her own family – and Mia’s.

I picked up Celeste Ng's debut novel, 'Everything I Never Told You',  and absolutely adored it so when I started seeing all the buzz for Little Fires Everywhere I knew I had to read it. It's contemporary fiction which is not normally my everyday read but there's something so delightful about Ng's writing that I seem to be consumed by her work.

Little Fires Everywhere is a masterpiece about families, ones with fathers, ones without, adoption, and the relationships between the members of these families. The Richardson family are long established in Shaker Heights so when Mia Warren, an artist, and her daughter Pearl roll into town, Elena Richardson is only too pleased to be seen to be doing something for a poor, starving artist and rents them her upstairs apartment. Elena has four children, Trip, Lexie, Moody, and Izzy, and has an easygoing relationship with all of them except Izzy. Izzy is her problem child, the one she spends her time being completely exasperated with. But is this because Izzy is the problem child? Or is it because Mrs. Richardson fears she will lose Izzy and finds it easier to push her away?

When Moody strikes up a friendship with Pearl, Elena is secretly pleased that Izzy then seems to take a shine to Mia and in that way that happens with intense friendships, Pearl starts spending most of her time with the Richardsons, and Izzy starts spending time with Mia, wishing that Mia were her mother.

It's these intense relationships that make Celeste Ng's novels. The pace is slow and delicious, an impressive example of a character-driven novel. Nothing much may happen in Little Fires Everywhere but it doesn't need to, you lose yourself entirely in all the character's stories. Both principal and secondary characters have their stories told, all perfectly interwoven, telling the tale of what happened to each and every one of them to get them where they are today. The driving point of the start of the breakdown of these relationships is a court case over custody of a baby, adopted by friends of the Richardson but whose birth mother is a friend of Mia's.

These characters are not perfect, they all have their flaws but they are perfection to read about. By the end of the story they have all been through something and some, if not all, take a long look at both their lives and their behaviour. Apparently, Reece Witherspoon has bought the rights to Little Fires Everywhere and I can see why. I'm not normally a fan of books-to-tv/movie adaptations but I'm looking forward to seeing these characters on the small screen. This is one book that will stay with me for a long time as I loved it even more than Everything I Never Told You, and I am now eagerly waiting to see what comes next for Celeste Ng.

Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng

ISBN - 9781408709719

Publisher - Little Brown

Release Date - November 9th, 2017

Find - Goodreads | Book Depository

About The Author

Celeste Ng is the author of the novel Everything I Never Told You, which was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, and named a 'best book of the year' by over a dozen publications. Everything I Never Told You was also the winner of the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, the ALA’s Alex Award, and the Medici Book Club Prize, and was a finalist for numerous awards, including the Ohioana Award, the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award.

Celeste grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio, in a family of scientists. Celeste attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan), where she won the Hopwood Award. Her fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere, and she is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize.

Currently, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Website | Twitter | Goodreads

Huge thanks to both Grace Vincent and Little, Brown for inviting me to take part in this blog tour and a copy of one of the best books I've read this year. Please do check out all the other bloggers taking part on the tour which runs until November 14th. Links can be found on the LB Twitter account, @LittleBrownUK.

Let Her Go - Dawn Barker

Could you share your child with someone else?
 
Zoe wanted a baby more than anything. But her dreams will come at a price…

After years of struggling to conceive, Zoe and her husband face the prospect of never having a family. When Zoe’s stepsister, Nadia, offers to be a surrogate it presents the perfect solution. A healthy girl, Louise, is born.

But no one imagined just how hard it would be to know someone else was also mother to your child. As the pressure on Zoe and Nadia mounts, they make choices that there is no going back from.
Years later, Louise is in desperate need of her family’s help. Can they put their painful history aside to save the child they love so much?

This was a tough read for me, knowing it was about infertility and surrogacy but I wanted to know just how Nadia and Zoe cope with this momentous decision they've both made and how both sides of the story were portrayed.

Zoe has Lupus, a disease that means that a lot of sufferers cannot have children. Step forward Nadia, Zoe's step-sister who already has 3 children of her own but is willing to be a surrogate for Zoe so she can have the child she so desperately wants. At first, things to go to plan but Nadia soon realizes that giving up Louise is not what she wants and starts trying to find ways to get her back. Zoe is fully aware of how Nadia feels but she's dealing with a disintegrating marriage and her husband Lachlan won't talk to her. When things come to a head Nadia decides that the baby is no longer safe with Zoe and Lachlan and takes them to court to try and get custody.

The story of Zoe, Lachlan, Louise, and Nadia jumps back and forth between two different time periods, with Lou as a baby and then as a struggling teenager. While I was drawn to Louise and felt such sorrow at what she was going through I found it hard to like either Zoe or Nadia. They were quite unlikeable characters a lot of the time, unable to have an adult conversation about the situation and instead choosing to run away from what had to be the most difficult thing in their lives.

Let Her Go is just that, the story of letting someone go. Whether it's the right thing to do or not and what the effect of that decision can have on a family for the rest of their lives. It's powerfully written, at times heartbreaking and an incredibly emotional story but what I liked best was the depiction of Zoe's illness. It wasn't just mentioned once, at the start of the story as a plot device and forgotten about. It was mentioned consistently throughout the story and how it affected Zoe and her way of thinking, the desperation she felt of becoming seriously ill again and the possibility of Louise being taken away from her.

If you enjoy stories about family, how major choices can affect family members and people trying to find their way back to each other then do read Let Her Go.

Let Her Go - Dawn Barker

Publisher - Canelo

Release date - May 22nd, 2017

Find - Goodreads | Amazon UK

The Mayfly - James Hazel

It's happening again.

A mutilated body discovered in the woods.
A murderous plan conceived in the past.
A reckoning seventy years in the making . . .

Charlie Priest, ex-detective inspector turned London lawyer, is hired by influential entrepreneur Kenneth Ellinder to investigate the murder of his son. But Priest is no ordinary lawyer. Brilliant, yet flawed, this case will push him, and those closest to him, to the edge.

Priest traces the evidence back to the desperate last days of the Second World War. Buried in the ashes of the Holocaust is a secret so deadly its poison threatens to destroy the very heart of the establishment. 

With more victims going missing, Priest realises that not everyone should be trusted.As he races to uncover the truth, can he prevent history from repeating itself?

Meet Charlie Priest, the new kid on the block. Formerly in the police force and now head of a successful solicitor's practise Charlie is dropped in at the deep end in a mystery that means absolutely nothing to him. Priest isn't your usual solicitor either, having a family background that's unorthodox, to say the least.

Surrounded by the best people he can employ, Georgie Someday, Vincent Okoro and a whizzkid accountant called Solly, Priest is going to need all the help he can get to make it out alive at the end. A man who viciously attacks him in his own apartment is later found brutally murdered, with Priest's business card in his pocket, and a former police colleague of Priest's wastes no time in accusing him of being involved. When the murdered man's family arrive and beg Priest to find out what happened to the man there's no escaping his involvement.

Shifting back and forth between the present and just after WWII has finished it becomes apparent that whatever is going on has far-reaching consequences and involves some pretty nasty ideas that you'd think by today would have lost their appeal.

The Mayfly rockets along at a cracking pace, from the first page to the last it's impossible to put it down and the fact that you become so involved with all the characters draws you in even further. For a debut novel, James Hazel has produced something pretty spectacular and one that will stay with me for some time. The author doesn't hold back and there are some vivid and gory details involved but the mystery at the heart of the book will keep you turning the pages because you will, quite simply, need to know the significance of The Mayfly.

A tip if you want to get a good night's sleep? I highly recommend you don't pick up The Mayfly to read in bed... I ended up having to put the book down on page 373 as I could not stay awake any longer even though I was sure there was something big coming! Priest and his cohorts kept my attention and I can't wait to get my hands on the next Charlie Priest adventure. I only hope that the interlude between The Mayfly and book two isn't too long.

The Mayfly - James Hazel

ISBN - 9781785762970

Publisher - Bonnier Zaffre

Release date - June 15th, 2017

Find - Goodreads | Book Depository

Many thanks to Bonnier Zaffre for a review copy in exchange for an honest review! 

Writing A Passive Protagonist - Faye Bird

Please welcome Faye Bird to the Outsider today. Author of the stunning What I Couldn't Tell You, the story of two sisters one of whom has Selective Mutism.

Writing A Passive Protagonist

As readers we have a rightful expectation that a story’s protagonist will be active. It’s easier to like an active protagonist. It’s easier to root for someone who is fighting the fight, particularly in the face of adversity. It’s harder to like a protagonist who doesn’t engage or push back, even if you understand why they perhaps can’t. And if we aren’t there rooting for our protagonist from the start of the story, caring enough about what happens to them, then it’s unlikely we’ll be there to find out where they’ve got to by the end.

I know all of this, as both a reader and as a writer, and yet in writing What I Couldn’t Tell You in my main character Tessie’s voice, I found myself writing a story with a passive not an active protagonist. So how did this happen?

Tessie has a condition called Selective or Situational Mutism (SM). SM is an anxiety disorder that prevents children speaking in certain situations such as at school or in public spaces. In public spaces, unable to speak, Tessie in my story is inevitably inescapably passive.

However I knew from the start that I wanted to write a first person narrative for Tessie because I loved the idea that a narrative could give someone with SM a voice that they wouldn’t otherwise have in the outside world. This was the driver, if you like, for me to write the story as I did, despite the challenges I knew a sometimes non-speaking protagonist would present.

I knew straight away that the absence of dialogue in certain key scenes outside of Tessie’s home would have a big impact on plotting, and I knew that overcoming these challenges would be crucial if I was going to write a successful crime thriller story too. I therefore put in the graft to find resolutions to these anticipated challenges early on.

But there were still challenges in the writing that I didn’t anticipate, and looking back now I think this was because I assumed that Tessie’s potential passivity would be remedied in some way by the first person narrative alone.

I assumed that if we read the thoughts inside Tessie’s head on the page, saw how her experience of SM affected her, saw how she wanted to speak in certain situations but couldn’t, and how she thought about what words she would say if she could, then the reader would be able to make sense of her inaction and in story terms it would resolve the potential problems of her passivity.

But it wasn’t as simple as that because without doubt in authentically representing SM through Tessie’s internal voice I actually risked not meeting the needs I had in the telling of my story. And I realized quite early on that getting Tessie’s voice right was really where the success or failure in resolving this problem within the storytelling rested.

In an accurate portrayal of SM Tessie necessarily responds to the drama around her in the story in a way that we as readers would not perhaps expect and at times perhaps she also acts in a way that we might wish she wouldn’t when she is faced with certain situations.

Tessie is a victim to bullying in the story, because this is not an uncommon experience of those with SM, and we see her simply accept the bullying and the pain it causes her in a way that may make us feel uncomfortable. Tessie is also inactive in the face of violence on occasion in the story in a way that readers may well find surprising, even shocking. But all these scenes are written as they are because they are true to the experience of her SM and how it affects the choices she makes.

But of course I didn’t want to write Tessie as a victim to her SM and above all I wanted to make her a whole and rounded character, a person with different quirks and traits just like anyone else. The driver of giving Tessie the voice of the story was made to both demystify the silence around those who suffer with SM, and in doing so, empower her.

As the story continues, and the stakes get higher, Tessie certainly becomes more active in the story. I made sure that this was the case. The way in which Tessie can listen, infer and observe through the distance her non-speaking creates gives her an active inner voice and a power to change things in the story in a way that no one else in the story can and does. I hope in this there is a dynamism that relieves her potential passivity in places and takes the reader closer to her action.

Certainly the first person narrative allows the reader to have the advantage of hearing her thoughts, her wants and her wishes in those places where she cannot make them known otherwise, and this is a valuable thing in storytelling terms. Because of course we want to see our protagonists survive the adversity they face, and if bad stuff happens to them (which it will) we need to see that somehow in some way they’re stronger because of it. This is the stuff of drama and it’s the way we find resolutions, and work towards making happy endings.

I therefore just hope that the balance that I struck in What I Couldn’t Tell You is enough to carry Tessie’s natural passivity so she is still liked, cared about, so she still keeps the story alive, whilst I also staying true to the depiction of SM within it. If you go on to read the book perhaps you will let me know how well or not I have done!

Blog Tour Review: Crush - Eve Ainsworth

Love hurts ... but should it hurt this much? Reeling from her mum's sudden departure, Anna finds the comfort she needs in her blossoming relationship with Will. He's handsome and loving, everything Anna has always dreamt of. He's also moody and unpredictable, pushing her away from her friends, her music. He wants her to be his and his alone. He wants her to be perfect. Anna's world is closing in. But threatening everything is a dark secret that not even Will can control... 

Eve Ainsworth's gripping second novel is a pitch-perfect exploration of love at its most powerful, addictive and destructive.

I'm the first to admit that YA contemporary is not a genre I read regularly but having loved Eve Ainsworth's debut 7 Days last year I was looking forward to reading Crush, especially after discovering what the book was about. 

I'm not going to go into detail but I know firsthand what a toxic relationship can do to you and like Anna, you don't realize that what you think is love actually isn't, until it's too late. Coming from a broken home, Anna is desperate for attention. Dismissed by her dad and left to care for her younger brother Anna is over the moon when school hunk Will starts showing an interest in here. With not many friends apart from Izzy and the boys in the band she belongs to, Anna latches on to Will and is soon head over heels in love with him.

She becomes one of those girls, the ones who push everyone away and starts sneaking out, often leaving her younger brother alone. Desperate to please Will she ignores the warning signs that maybe everything isn't as it should be. At fourteen though, what does Anna really know about love?

Crush doesn't shy away from the reality of a toxic relationship, confronting head on what is actually a growing problem but still one that many people (and especially teens) don't or won't talk about. It doesn't sensationalize the problem but rather shows how gradually you get involved in a relationship that on the outside may seem perfect but in reality is doing you harm, both physically and mentally. Eve Ainsworth has written an intense but truthful picture of first love, and the pitfalls that come with it if one person in the relationship has too much power over the other. This should be required reading for every teen and I know several that I'll be buying copies of Crush for.

Crush - Eve Ainsworth

ISBN - 9781407146904

Publisher - Scholastic

Release date - March 3 2016

Find - Goodreads | Book Depository | Amazon

About The Author

Eve Ainsworth has worked extensively in Child Protection and pastoral care roles, supporting teenagers with emotional and behavioral issues. Her debut novel Seven Days was released in 2015 and has been nominated for a string of awards including the Carnegie Medal. Her second novel, Crush, is out March 2016. She lives in West Sussex.

Website | Twitter | Goodreads 

Tour Schedule

Monday 7th March

Snuggling on the Sofa

Bookish Outsider

Tuesday 8th March

The Bibliophile Chronicles

Ali the Dragon Slayer

Wednesday 9th March

Tales of Yesterday

Literary-ly Obsessed

Thursday 10th March

Writing from the Tub

Serendipity Reviews

Friday 11th March

Eat Read Glam

Mia in Narnia

Saturday 12th March

The Book Moo

An Awful Lot of Reading

Sunday 13th March

Maia and a Little Moore

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Bookmarked... #3

The return of the weekly post letting you all know what I'm reading and have lined up for the week! It's my own version of Sheila at Book Journey's It's Monday What Are You Reading and I have her permission to rename it for my own nefarious reasons :) If you want to join in check out all the links here!

Thanks to my unplanned holiday I didn't really do much reading over the last couple of weeks! This obviously means that my 'currently reading' still looks pretty much the same as it did two weeks ago. I'm hoping for a lot more reading time this week, especially as it's the read-a-thon on Saturday! I'm trying my new style of read-a-thon reading again and not choosing anything beforehand.

Finished Reading

Hit - Delilah S Dawson

Lies Like Love - Louisa Reid

Currently Reading

Cold Burn of Magic - Jennifer Estep

Cuckoo Song - Frances Hardinge

Jumping Genres In June Giveaway!

Welcome to the Jumping Genres in June Giveaway hosted by Valerie of Stuck In Books!  The purpose of this hop is to give away a book that is in a genre you don't typically read, only thing is I'm a pretty eclectic reader and read most genres (even romance occasionally!) so what I decided to do is offer up the chance to win a book from one of two genres I don't read very often, Contemporary and Romance. So, up for grabs is one YA or Adult book of your choice but must be either a Romance or Contemporary novel, up to the value of $15 from the Book Depository providing you live in a country that they ship to - find the list of countries here. The hop runs from now through until midnight on June 14th.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Check out the list below for all the other blogs taking part, thanks for entering and good luck!

Book Haul #79

Stacking the Shelves is a weekly event hosted on Tynga's Reviews where we can share what new books we've picked up this past week be they bought, borrowed or downloaded. There are also lots of other 'book haul' memes out there for you to choose from!

Another good week, just two books in the mail! And only three books for review but one of them? Eeek! I can't believe my WoW choice this week popped up on Edelweiss the next day and of course I was going to download it :) And I got approved for Glimpse! I'm rather obsessed by the story of the Highwayman's Daughter, absolutely love the song version by Loreena McKennitt too, so I'm excited to read Kendra's re-imagining of the tale! Over the next few weeks my book haul posts should be fairly non-existent, I'm saving like mad for YALC in July and LonCon in August so I'm determined to cut down my book buying for at least a couple of months. It's not like I don't have thousands of books to keep me going...

Bought

Blackfin Sky | City of Heavenly Fire

Review

A Thousand Pieces of You | Falling Into Place | Glimpse

Random Reads #8

Random Reads is a monthly meme hosted by Sarah at I’m Loving Books.  This feature is to get us reading a random book within the month that is in our TBR stack.

Random Reads is a meme where we pick a random book from our shelf to read within the month. Feel free to do more than one per month, but since a lot of people have a lot of books to read each month, only one is “required” for the meme.

Want to join in on Random Reads?

It’s easy…

1. If you’re on Goodreads enable sorting to your to-read shelf (you should see numbers next to each book now).
2. Go to Random.org and type in the Min as 1 and the Max as how many ever books are on your to-read shelf.
3. Scroll down to the book matching the number Random.org picks.
4. Link up to your Random Reads post (below). If you choose more than one book per month, be sure to put a number by your name in the list so it doesn’t look like a duplicate.
5. Read and be merry!

This month Random chose number 14 which is

Entangled - Cat Clarke

This was a lucky pick as I actually have it on my 'read soon' pile, hopefully that means I will really read it soon rather than just keep saying so. I'm still reading January's Random Read, Enchanted, but I'm so slow at the moment - a review will appear soon!

Waiting On Wednesday #27

Waiting On Wednesday, where we put the spotlight on upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating, is hosted by Jill at Breaking The Spine.

This week's choice is -

Charm & Strange - Stephanie Kuehn @Twitter
ISBN UK - 9781405267847
          US - 9781250021946
Publisher UK - Electric Monkey (Egmont)
                US - St. Martin's Griffin
Expected release date UK - June 3rd 2013
                                    US - June 11th 2013
Find - Book Depository/Goodreads

'When you’ve been kept caged in the dark, it’s impossible to see the forest for the trees. It’s impossible to see anything, really. Not without bars . . .

Andrew Winston Winters is at war with himself.

He’s part Win, the lonely teenager exiled to a remote Vermont boarding school in the wake of a family tragedy. The guy who shuts all his classmates out, no matter the cost.

He’s part Drew, the angry young boy with violent impulses that control him. The boy who spent a fateful, long-ago summer with his brother and teenage cousins, only to endure a secret so monstrous it led three children to do the unthinkable.

Over the course of one night, while stuck at a party deep in the New England woods, Andrew battles both the pain of his past and the isolation of his present.

Before the sun rises, he’ll either surrender his sanity to the wild darkness inside his mind or make peace with the most elemental of truths—that choosing to live can mean so much more than not dying.' - Goodreads

I've heard lots of good things about this one, it sounds intriguing and I can't wait to get my hands on a copy!

What are you waiting for?