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{{newreview
|author=Liane Moriarty
|title=What Alice Forgot
|rating=5
|genre=Women's fiction
|summary='This wasn't the worst thing that had ever happened to her…it was just the most ridiculous' laments thirty nine year old mother of three, Alice, who has had the last ten years of her life struck from her memory by a blow to the head in her step aerobics class. Alice now thinks she's twenty nine, newly pregnant with her first child and happily married to Nick and furthermore she hasn't a clue what she's doing at an aerobics class in the first place.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141043768</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Jonathan Coe
|summary=Subtitled ''rhymes for the very young'', you know what you're getting with ''Whizz Bang Orang-Utan''. It's a poetry anthology, with sweet poems about kids, what they get up to, and of course whizzing and banging orang-utans.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0192729934</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Jess Walter
|title=The Financial Lives of the Poets
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=There is a certain type of modern fiction I just cannot get along with. It's a narrative that features a concentration on a main character that goes through his plot with unhappiness, making wrong decisions perhaps, getting crapped on by life, and discussing his woes with the reader. I get to the end and think nothing of it, until I read the blurb, where I find the book was supposed to be hilariously funny, the character an insincere cypher for our lives and times, and the whole thing an ironic masterpiece - I should have been disbelieving, disagreeing and dis-everything else with the hapless hero. I hate such books - I always only see the sincerity in the narrative, and never the comedy. Thankfully, such is never the case with this book.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141049138</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Carlos Ruiz Zafon
|title=The Prince of Mist
|rating=5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=During World War Two, Max's father decides to move the whole family to a seaside retreat he knows of - a wooden house far away from the city he's grown his family up in. Nobody seems too keen on the idea, neither of Max's sisters, his mother, nor he - and Max is gifted a pocket watch by his loving, talented mechanic cum engineer cum watchmaker of a father, enscribed as "Max's Time Machine". But the house they move to, and its surroundings, are full of more successful time machines - a stash of early home videos, a public clock that runs backwards, a sunken shipwreck, a yard full of statues of a stone circus... And let's not forget the mysterious, spider-eating cat that joins in with proceedings.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0297856421</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Jim Butcher
|title=Changes: The Dresden Files
|rating=5
|genre=Fantasy
|summary=It's always wonderful to see a series going from strength to strength and getting better as it goes along. However, when this happens, there inevitably comes a point where it gets so good, you can't help but think that the next one can't possibly be any better as it feels like the series has peaked. ''Changes'', the twelfth in Jim Butcher's ''Dresden Files'' series, is such a book.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1841497134</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Jane Feaver
|title=Love Me Tender
|rating=4.5
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=A woman remembers her dead husband playing Love Me Tender (the song made famous by Elvis Presley) on his tenor horn. She is in a daze, feeling the grief of the bereaved widow she is, the betrayal of the deceived wife, and the guilt of having murdered him. The title story of this collection is all the more moving and startling because of its understated style, and what is not said as well as what is.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099521288</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=James Rollins
|title=Jake Ransom and the Skull King's Shadow
|rating=5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=The prologue to this splendid book recounts a terrifying chase, the discovery of fabulous Mayan artifacts, and a shadowy enemy. And that gripping scene sets the tone for the rest of the book. After the strange disappearance of their parents, who were on an archeological dig on the Mountain of Bones, Jake Ransom and his sister Kady are sent a parcel containing two halves of a Mayan coin, their mother's sketchbook and their father's notebook. There is no indication what these things mean or what to do with them.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444000616</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Alison Maloney
|title=St George: Let's Hear it for England!
|rating=3.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=I was a bit of a patriot, even when it wasn't as fashionable as it is now becoming. Perhaps this is due to my once having played St. George in a Cub Scout celebration and getting the chance to personally slay the dragon in knitted chain mail with a plastic sword. In a world where being English has become synonymous with football violence and the flag of St. George is being used by a political party condemned as racist, it's perhaps unsurprising that more people celebrate St. Patrick's Day than St. George's Day.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848092628</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Andy Stanton
|title=Mr Gum and the Cherry Tree
|rating=5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary="Woe, woe, woe, and a bottle of glum" declares a character in this story, and you would to if you shared the sensibilities of Polly, her friend Alan Taylor (the ridiculously named gingerbread man who serves as electrified schoolmaster to some ex-goblins), or any right minded person. The problem is that all the right minded people have switched to being wrong minded. For the old granny they call Old Granny has declared the Old Times back, and taken the entire village population (except for a magician who vanishes from the story) to a sacred glade in a nearby wood, where a tree spirit of Old is trying to enslave them.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1405252189</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Lucy Jago
|title=Montacute House
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=Cess is the poultry girl at Montacute House. She and her mother live alone - Cess has never met her father. In fact, she doesn't even know who he is. Shunned by the other villagers because of her illegitimacy, Cess has only two friends, both also social outcasts. There's William, who has a club foot - thought of as a curse in Elizabethan England, and Edith, who's been chased out of the village for witchery by the woman-hating local priest.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408803763</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Gregory Hughes
|title=Unhooking the Moon
|rating=4.5
|genre=Teens
|summary=The Rat and Bob are prairie children. Winnipeg is a land ''so flat you can watch your dog run away for three days''. When their father dies and they're orphaned, they are determined to avoid a children's home at all costs and embark upon a road trip to New York City, in search of their long-lost uncle. Bob is pretty much the hanger-on - he knows that the Rat is a special kid who would never make it in an institution and so he puts his fears aside to follow his singular sister.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849162956</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Mark Millar and John Romita Jr
|title=Kick-Ass
|rating=4.5
|genre=Graphic Novels
|summary=Meet Dave. The average Joe personified, he sits at home with his internet connection, his comics collection, his dad, and very little contact with anyone else. He is a typical loner teenager, nearly friendless, wears glasses at school - especially around the hot, mature biology teacher who for some reason seems to have maths sums on her blackboard... Until one day he decides to emulate the comics in his collection. The only superheroes in his world are those whose colourful adventures he follows on the page - why not get his own costume mucked up, and go and fight crime?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848565356</amazonuk>
}}