Changes

From TheBookbag
Jump to navigationJump to search
no edit summary
__NOTOC__
=='''4 FEBRUARYJULY'''==
{{Frontpage
|isbnauthor=1787477800Max Boucherat|title=The Night Hawks (Dr Ruth Galloway)|author=Elly GriffithsLast Life of Lori Mills
|rating=4.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=The night hawks are metal detectorists and they're out on Blakeney Point where they suspect that there's treasure to be found. Unfortunately, the youngest of the group, twenty-one-year-old Troy Evans, finds the body of a man floating on the incoming tide. After pulling it ashore, they call the police. DCI Nelson thinks that it's probably the body of an asylum seeker but there's no evidence of any activity to be had from the coastguard. The dead man turns out to be Jem Taylor, a North Norfolk man recently released from prison.
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=1529378648
|title=Slough House (Jackson Lamb 7)
|author=Mick Herron
|rating=4.5
|genre=Thrillers
|summary=Someone is killing secret service agents, past and present, from the Slough House team. Jackson Lamb can't understand it. Well, what he actually can't understand is why, having seen them, anyone would bother. But the deaths are mounting up and something needs to be done. After all ''when things went awry on Spook Street, they generally went the full Chris Grayling.'' Over at Regent's Park, Diana Taverner is quietly jubilant about an operation which saw the perpetrator of a Novichok poisoning in the UK (three people seriously injured and one dead) dispatched. It isn't just the message that was sent: she's also delighted that she managed to fund the operation off the books. Some private money was brought in. She won't always be so jubilant about this.
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Helen Fisher
|title=Space Hopper
|rating=3.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Faye lost her mum when she was very young. She was raised by some elderly neighbours after her mum died from a cold that got worse, and although they were kind and very good to her she of course missed her mum enormously. So when, unexpectedly, she discovers a time travel conduit (via an old space hopper box in her attic) that takes her back to the 70's and her mum, she revels in the chance to create some memories and get to know the woman who meant so much to her. The time travelling, however, is neither easy nor safe, and Faye fears that her husband won't believe what's happening and so lies to him instead. The lies grow more tangled, and Faye begins to wonder if it's safe for her to return one last time to the past. Should she try to see her mum one last time before her mum's death, or will it change her own future forever to attempt it?
|isbn=1471188663
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Francesca Simon and Steve May
|title=Two Terrible Vikings
|rating=4
|genre=Emerging Readers
|summary=In a small Viking village there live two twins, Hack and Whack, who are eager to be the very worst Vikings ever! Nothing can stop their mad marauding, as they cause havoc at a birthday party, chaos whilst tracking a troll, and undertake a grand journey to raid Bad Island with their friends! They get up to all kinds of mischief and naughty behaviour, along with their wolf-cub Bitey-Bitey, and their crazy cast of friends.
|isbn=0571349498
}}
=='''18 FEBRUARY'''==
{{Frontpage
|isbn=1471187179
|title=A Beautiful Spy
|author=Rachel Hore
|rating=4
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=Minnie is an 'ordinary' girl living an unexciting life in a leafy provincial suburb. The book is set in the 1930s and Minnie is expected to live up to her mother's expectations and find a nice young man to marry, produce children and spend the rest of her days looking after her husband and their home. Unfortunately, this isn't what she wants to do at all and neither does she want to continue working as a secretary. As a result of a chance meeting, she finds herself drawn into espionage, working for the secret service and effectively living a double life - attempting to infiltrate the Communist Party of Great Britain. Minnie finds herself torn between what she perceives as her duty and the friends she has made - and likes - whilst working for the Communist Party.
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Hannah Gold
|title=The Last Bear
|rating=4.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=April's father, a scientist, has been given a job on a remote island called Bear Island, and he accepts the job deciding to take his daughter April with him. They live alone anyway, since April's mother died some time before, and he feels it will be educational for her to experience the island and all its natural beauty. April already has an affinity with nature, and she's excited to travel with her father, thinking of all the fun things they will be able to experience together on the island. But when they get there, her father finds that his work monitoring and recording the temperatures just takes up too much of his time, and so April is left to explore by herself. Her father had reassured her that there were no longer any bears living on Bear Island, but one day April thinks she catches a glimpse of one, and so she sets out to find the Bear, and then when she sees he is injured, to befriend and help him.
|isbn=000841128X
}}
 
=='''4 MARCH'''==
{{Frontpage
|author=Saima Mir
|title=The Khan
|rating=5
|genre=Crime
|summary=Jia Khan has alway lived by the motto be twice as good as men and four times as good as white men. This has served her well in her rise through the criminal justice system and by the time she is called home for her sister's wedding after fifteen years in self-imposed exile, she is at the top of her game. Returning to the city of her birth, to old scars and fresh wounds, Jia must confront her past and reconcile her visions for the future with her sense of honour and duty.
|isbn=1786079097
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Andrea Bajani and Elizabeth Harris (translator)
|title=If You Kept a Record of Sins
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=This was an incredibly readable novella, but one that left me a little conflicted. We start as our hero arrives at Bucharest airport, and before we even know his gender or the nature of the person he's addressing in his second person monologue of a narration, we see him picked up by his mother's chauffeur, and carted off to do all the necessary introductions before said mother is buried the following day. The mother was a businesswoman, who clearly left northern Italy and settled in Romania with her (night-time and business) partner, and feelings of abandonment are still strong. And so we flit from current (well, this came out in the original Italian in 2007, so moderately current) Bucharest, to the lad's childhood, and see just what he has to tell her as a private farewell address.
|isbn=1939810965
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Mary H.K. Choi
|title=Yolk
|rating=5
|genre=Teens
|summary= Jayne Baek is a fashion student that's barely getting by. She drinks. She smokes. She makes bad decisions about the men she sleeps with. She's an all-round messy character; and that's her charm. June, on the other hand, is a complete contrast to Jayne. She's a typical older sister: she's smart, thinks she knows it all, and has a successful job. She constantly criticises Jayne for her life choices, and the two have barely kept in contact despite living in the same city for the past two years. This is until June finds out she's sick, and Jayne is the only person she can turn to. The two sisters have to come together and decide how far they'll go to save each other's lives – even if it means swapping identities.
|isbn= 0349003696
}}
 
=='''18 MARCH'''==
{{Frontpage
|author=Danny Wallace and Gemma Correll
|title=The Day the Screens Went Blank
|rating=5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Meet Stella and her family. TheyWe meet Lori on the first evening she're just innocently trying s got the house to have a Sunday evening in together, watching a film herself using three different screens no neighbour to watch three different thingspop in, mind – when ''poof'' everything goes blank. And it's not just their homebabysitter poorly, but the entire south-western village of Mouseholemother at work, and not just thatan avidly rule-breaking eleven year old, either, but the whole country, if not worldon her lonesome. Suddenly people are constantly on their phones – hoping they're first to get What could possibly go wrong? Snuggled in a screen backblanket fort, she has one main intention, and not what they were constantly doing that is to log on them before. Toasters can toastto Voxminer, but TVs cannot do the V part of their jobworld-building, and no computer can show its computations. You might think this critter-collecting game that is going to be a social comedy about people stuck hit in such Lori's world. But first Lori has a Luddite experience against their willtiny inkling that this stormy night doesn't find herself entirely on her own, but noand then she finds something even more spooky. For the family finally remember Stella's grandma, server she and see if they can get across country to her. Hence this has bestie and nobody else should be able to go down as a road-trip bookenter shows signs of tampering. But not just thatWhen malevolent eyes spark up on her phone screen, a slapstick road-trip comedy. And more than thatand her safe place in the game has been doctored – well, too – for it's where is a slapstick, high-drama, high-octane road-trip comedy with oodles of cuddly heart that kids of all ages will love.girl to turn?|isbn=14711968870008666482
}}
 
=='''23 MARCH'''==
{{Frontpage
|author=Dean KoontzJenny Lecoat|title=The Other EmilyBeyond Summerland
|rating=4
|genre=Thrillers
|summary=Our hero David Thorne is an author, who shares his life between the two US coasts. It's the western coast we're concerned with, a place he has to return to, and a place he has to be able to leave. David lost contact with his partner there ten years ago, when she vanished from a remote road late at night. He's paying for contact with the man he thinks the only suspect, a lifer now, who went a bit Hannibal Lecter, and has a dozen and more unfound Jane Does on his record. David is trying to pry the connection between the murderer and his girl from the man's mind, but to no avail. He's also having a recharge ready for his next hit novel when into the restaurant walks the sheer spitting image, the very embodiment, the virtual resurrection, of his love. What is a man to do?
|isbn=1542019958
}}
 
=='''1 APRIL'''==
{{Frontpage
|isbn=B08R7LXQ9S
|title=Remy: A book about believing in yourself
|author=Mayuri Naidoo and Caroline Siegal
|rating=4
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=Remy is feeling miserable. He's let himself down ''again''. The school bully Jayden, together with his sidekicks Ryan and Brandon, have been laughing at Remy, calling him names because he is short and has small eyes. They are mean but they are not stupid. They are careful to wind up Remy when nobody can see and then push him just that little bit further when the other kids are around. So, when Remy reacts, it looks as though he was the instigator. And then he gets into trouble at school and the teachers don't believe him when he tries to explain what happened.
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Ruth Hogan
|title=Madame Burova
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=This book lets us discover several people in different stages Jean lives on Jersey with her mother where they are celebrating the end of life in the early 1970s, all vaguely connectedoccupation. So we have a bullied half-cast boy (as he would have been called then)During the war, a girl in a humdrum job wanting Jean's father was arrested for listening to become a singer, banned radio and chiefly, Imelda, the third generation of Madame Burova, ''Tarot-Readersoldiers took him away one night, Palmist leaving Jean and Clairvoyant'', to use her family's sea-front booth. The singer, the scryer and the sufferer's mother will all become staff at a revamped holiday camp, but just before then we see Imelda fly solo waiting for the first time in the family stall. We also see her on her last day, fifty years later, in possession for news of a pair of letters that will change everything for a woman called Billiehim. Just who is she, and who delivered As the British finally free the secrets about her to Imelda, and why did it have to remain a secret all this time?|isbn=152937331X}} =='''15 APRIL'''=={{Frontpage|author=Lucy Holland|title=Sistersong|rating=5|genre=Literary Fiction|summary=Sistersong is part of a genre I particularly enjoy, Channel islands from the modern retelling of folk and fairy tales. These stories, for most of usNazis, are a cornerstone of childhood and I relish seeing them retold with fresh eyes and a fresh perspective. If handled well these retellings give new life and new meaning to stories that are now becoming increasingly narrow and outdated, fleshing out characters, examining relationships and re-evaluating the role of women. Sistersong war is a perfect example of a modern retelling done wellfinally over, the plot is handled with care, keeping its archaic historical feel but allowing the characters to come to life, to feel real and human, most importantly their hopes rise that they feel relatable in a modern world whilst still feeling appropriate for the pre-Saxon age they live in. This is a masterpiece will finally learn what became of storytelling and I was captivated from beginning to endhim.|isbn=1529039037}}{{Frontpage|author=Goldy Moldavsky|title=The Last Girl|rating=5|genre=teens|summary= Rachel Chavez is But will the new girl at Manchester Prep. A school filled to the brim with the richest children in the city – and Rachel doesn't belong. She's not rich, she has no ties to some royal family in Serbia, and most of all, she spends the majority of her spare time watching horror movies truth come as a source of comfort. She struggles to find anyone to connect withrelief, until one day she stumbles upon or will it raise further questions around what else happened during the Mary Shelley Club. A secret society with one aim: pull off war? Who was the best prank in true horror movie style, and unless someone screams, you have failed. Rachel becomes immediately engrossed in informer who told the competition. But as Nazis about the pranks escalate, and Rachel finally feels like she has found her place in this school, things start to go wrong; a masked figure keeps showing up to radio? And what other secrets have been kept throughout the pranks, and people begin to get hurt. When the competition then takes a deadly turn, Rachel must figure out who this masked figure is before it's too late.|isbn=0755501527}}{{Frontpage|author=Sarah Sultoon|title=The Source|rating=2.5|genre=Thrillers|summary=1996. Essex. Thirteen-year-old schoolgirl Carly lives in a disenfranchised town dominated by a military base, struggling to care for her baby sister while her mum sleeps off another binge. When her squaddie brother brings food and treats, and offers an exclusive invitation to army parties, things start to look a little less bleak...occupation?|isbn=19131935941846976537
}}
 
=='''27 APRIL'''==
{{Frontpage
|author=Kristen O'Neal
|title=Lycanthropy and Other Chronic Illnesses
|rating=5
|genre=Teens
|summary= Having recently been diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease, Priya has to come to terms with the fact that she may be in constant pain for the rest of her life. She joins ''Oof Ouch My Bones'', an online support group where she talks to a bunch of other teens living with chronic illnesses. They talk about their troubles and help each other out, while also providing an escape to just joke and mess around. When Brigid—one of her closest friends—doesn't respond to the chat for a while, Priya becomes concerned. She decides to steal her parents' car and drive to Brigid's house to check up on her. But what she doesn't expect to find there is a werewolf in the basement – and for that werewolf to be the girl she has been talking to online for the past few months.
|isbn=1683692349
}}
 
=='''29 APRIL'''==
{{Frontpage
|author= Jennifer Saint
|title= Ariadne
|rating= 4.5
|genre= Women's Fiction
|summary= This re-telling of the myth of Ariadne and the Minotaur is interesting and unusual. Jennifer Saint presents the story in a way that is sympathetic to its origins but also appealing to a modern audience. Saint's narrative is told predominantly through the viewpoint of Ariadne, spanning from her childhood to her death, allowing the reader to really connect with Ariadne as a character in her own right rather than just a prop in the heroics of Theseus.
|isbn=1472273869
}}
 
<!-- DO NOT REMOVE ANYTHING BELOW THIS LINE -->
You can work your way through the newest review, category by category, starting [[Newest Animals and Wildlife Reviews|here]].

Navigation menu