'''Read [[Features|new features]].'''
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{{newreview
|author=Patricia Duncker
|title=The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=It's rural France, and 2000 is barely begun, when hunters come across a spread of human corpses in the mountains. Several families, all in the same cult, seem to have killed themselves on their path to wherever. If so, this is a problem, for the last time it happened, in Switzerland a few years previous, nobody could work out why – and who was there to dispose of some of the evidence. This isn't a problem for the policeman involved, as he fell desperately in love with the investigative judge in collaborating on the initial case. Combining again, they see a link with everybody involved in both cases, a famous conductor /composer.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408807041</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
Oh dear! Josh Stephenson is just thirteen. His father is separated from his mother and works away on a ship and so he's a much-missed presence in Josh's life (the shoe box). Money is tight with only one parent at home, so his mother works multiple jobs, some of them at home (the sewing machine). Josh occupies a middle position at school: neither clever nor stupid; neither jock nor geek. He and his best friend Peter are natural history fanatics and they spend a great deal of time watching documentaries on television, or planning their own.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1845393422</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Melissa de la Cruz
|title=Blue Bloods
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=''Blue Bloods'' is the first book in a series aimed at teenagers and it's about vampires, currently a popular theme in young adult novels. However Melissa De La Cruz offers an original twist on this topic: the Vampires are known as 'Blue Bloods' and they're part of the New York elite. They're rich, young, beautiful and popular. Thought to be immortal, their world is shattered as one of them is found murdered.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>190565474X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alexandra Horowitz
|title=Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know
|rating=5
|genre=Pets
|summary=I've long been aware that our two dogs have methods of communication which are far more subtle than anything a mere human can muster. They sense exactly how we are feeling – a slight change in the atmosphere and they will be alert. The reactions to a frown or a smile, laughter or tears are all different and they're capable of communicating with us in ways which have no need of words. For a while I thought it was our dogs who were special (well, ''obviously'' they are…) but I've noticed other dogs communicating with each other and with humans and the more that I see the more that I wonder why they are referred to as 'dumb animals'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184737347X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Eva Montanari
|title=The Alphabet Family
|rating=3.5
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=Mummy A wants to write a story, but she can't think what to write. She sees what her children (b, c, d and so on) are up to. Some are playing musical instruments, some are running races, and some are playing in the garden. With plenty of ideas to hand, Mummy A writes her story, and then tells it to all her children and Daddy Z.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1845394054</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Louise Douglas
|title=Missing You
|rating=4.5
|genre=Women's Fiction
|summary=Sean seemed to have the perfect life. He has a successful career, a beautiful wife to whom he is devoted, a daughter whom he adores and he lives in a dream home. But then one day it all falls apart when Belle announces that she has met someone else and wants Sean to move out.
Fen, on the other hand, doesn't have a perfect life. She works in a bookshop and is devoted to her young son, Connor who has cerebral palsy. That's not the least of her problems though as she hides a dreadful secret and fearful that it will be brought out into the open she lives a life drawn in on itself, far from her home and family and reluctant to become close to anyone.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330454412</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Frances Stonor Saunders
|title=The Woman Who Shot Mussolini
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=Most British titled families of the 19th and 20th centuries have produced their fair share of rebels. Yet few came as close to changing the course of European history as the Honourable Violet Gibson, one of eight children of Baron Ashbourne, a Protestant Anglo-Irish peer and MP in Disraeli's government during the 1870s.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571239773</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Scott Westerfeld
|title=Specials
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=In the un-named city of the future, all the adults are living in the delusion that their city is right. After a teenage life as an ugly, they all undergo a welter of medical procedures, to make their minds and bodies conform to the bland, but gorgeous, society norm. But one young woman is not like that. She is going to a party, looking ugly, and she knows it is not what we look like, but how special we feel inside, that is of most importance. The good news is that this woman is our returning heroine, Tally. The bad news is that her ugliness is a temporary disguise, and worse than that - she knows how to feel special inside, because she IS A Special.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847389082</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Poly Bernatene
|title=When Night Didn't Come
|rating=4.5
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=One night, after the sun has gone to bed, the night doesn't come. There's no darkness, no moon and no stars. Someone's going to have to do something about it, so the man in charge rouses a group of children and they do what they can to bring the night.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1845394925</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kathryn Stockett
|title=The Help
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Jackson, Mississippi: 1960. The talk at the bridge club and the tennis club is of what Jackie Kennedy is wearing. They're white women, of course and they're free to play because a coloured woman will be looking after the children, doing the shopping and cleaning the house. They're trusted to bring the children up, but they're not trusted to be honest about the silver. Aibileen is raising her seventeenth white child but something hardened in her heart when her son died whilst the white bosses looked the other way. They took his body to the coloureds' hospital and rolled it off the back of the truck and left.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141039280</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Katie Fforde (Editor) and Sue Moorcroft (Editor)
|title=Loves Me, Loves Me Not
|rating=4.5
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=What a feast is presented in these forty stories from well-loved and prolific romantic authors, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Romantic Novelists' Association. In a Who's Who of the genre, there are writers from every age group, including one or two who might even have been founder members of the RNA, back in 1960. My advice is to sip through the stories slowly, rather than gobbling them up quickly and suffering from indigestion.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0778303373</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Lauren Oliver
|title=Before I Fall
|rating=5
|genre=Women's Fiction
|summary=Samantha 'Sam' Kingston is, in many ways, your typical American high schooler whose concerns are pretty predictable: boys, friends, fashion, weird parents, annoying little sisters. Today it's Cupid Day, a chance to show off just how ''In'' you are at school, as measured by the number of roses you're sent, but Sam's not too worried about that. She knows she's part of a group who, by most definitions, would be called popular, and though sometimes inside she might feel on the inside a little like an imposter, on the outside, well, she's the definition of ''in''.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0340980893</amazonuk>
}}