|summary=As summer begins, Iris is finding that life can be quite tricky. Her mother has packed up and left to go travelling. Her father isn't coping too well with having been abandoned by his wife. Her brother, Sam, is in trouble at school and in danger of going off the rails generally. And Iris herself is feeling overtaken by her best friend, who is obsessed with boys and fashion while Iris prefers to run wild in the woods as she's always done.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>085707802X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Karen Russell
|title=Vampires in the Lemon Grove
|rating=5
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=I know you shouldn't judge a book by the cover, but when the cover has a title like ''Vampires in the Lemon Grove'', I can't help but be a little intrigued, especially when the author has a recent history like Karen Russell's. This history includes a Guardian award nomination for a previous collection with another great title; ''St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves'' and a Pulitzer Prize shortlisting for her novel, [[Swamplandia! by Karen Russell|Swamplandia!]]
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701187883</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Catherine Wilkins
|title=My Best Friend And Other Enemies
|rating=3
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Jessica and Natalie have been best friends for ages. But in the last year of primary school, when new girl Amelia moves to their school, she starts to come between them, forming a secret society with Natalie - and not letting Jessica join. Can Jessica repair her friendship with Natalie, or find some new friends? Armed with only her ability to draw great cartoons, she sets out to find out.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857630954</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=I J Kay
|title=Mountains of the Moon
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The story starts harshly, with a release from prison, a bail hostel, a refuge for people with mental health problems as a better-than-nothing-lied-to-be-obtained kind of a sanctuary and a slow easing back into society. If you can call a housing association flat, with a decorating voucher and no furniture, only occasional power and annoying neighbours ''society''.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099554739</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Andrew Taylor
|title=The Scent of Death
|rating=4.5
|genre=Crime (Historical)
|summary=It’s hard to explain why Andrew Taylor’s novels are so chilling. They’re ghost stories that often lack ghosts, crime novels in which the crime itself feels at a remove from the rest of the action. But that’s really the secret of their power: while in most thrillers, the bogeyman is a single entity, easy to pinpoint and therefore easy to excise from the rest of the healthy fictional world, things are never so simple in the universes Taylor creates. What is frightening in an Andrew Taylor novel? Everything.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007213514</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jennie Rooney
|title=Red Joan
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=It is very obvious where Jennie Rooney has taken the idea for her novel ''Red Joan'' from. As she acknowledges fully, it has its origin in the 1999 story of Melita Norwood whose espionage for the Russians wasn't discovered until she was in her late 80s, but while Norwood was a dyed in the wool communist, Rooney offers a more complex back story to her character, Joan. The result is a very different type of spy novel than normal. Joan, a widowed grandmother, is going about her day to day life when MI5 come knocking on her door to ask about her past. The narrative switches between their questions to her and her recollections of her time at Cambridge in the late 1930s where communist feelings were, by some, given a more sympathetic ear. When Joan falls for Leo, the cousin of her Russian born friend Sonya, she gets dragged into a world that is dangerous and morally complex.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701187573</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Eleanor Moran
|title=The Last Time I Saw You
|rating=4
|genre=Women's Fiction
|summary=As a woman in her mid thirties, Livvy feels that her life is OK. She has a good job even though she is slightly intimidated by her boss and is often in danger of being overlooked for new projects. Her love life might be non-existent but at least she shares her home with James, the one time love of her life which only works if she can settle for being good mates. However, when she hears that Sally, her best friend from many years ago, has been killed in a car accident, her world is turned upside down.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780876327</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Gail Carriger
|title=Etiquette and Espionage
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=Fourteen-year-old Sophronia is being sent to a finishing school. She's none too happy about it, until she gets there and finds there's rather more to Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality than meets the eye. Because while her mother thought she was there to be finished, she's also going to learn just '''how''' to finish - 'anything or anyone who needs finishing.'
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1907411585</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Terry Deary
|title=Measly Middle Ages (Horrible Histories)
|rating=5
|genre=Children's Non-Fiction
|summary=The Horrible Histories series is a favourite with both schools and Home Educators, but Terry Deary never intended his books to be used in education. He originally set out to write a joke book, based on a historical subject, but freed from the constraints of school - he discovered what so many of us have also found - history really is fun. Instead of a joke book with a bit of history, Deary ended up with a history book - with quite a lot of jokes. But these books were never intended as educational texts, they were written to entertain, and his Horrible Histories - Measly Middle Ages does just that, it entertains both children and adults. It is difficult to read any of Deary's books without learning something, but learning is incidental - the fun comes first.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1407135767</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Antony Wootten
|title=Grown-ups Can't be Friends with Dragons
|rating=3.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Brian finds home a bit of a trial these days. Since Mum went, Dad seem to have spent as much time as he could down at the pub. Big sister Emily does her best to keep them all fed and the washing done, but she's not that old herself and her only support is her boyfriend Mark. School's not going too well for Brian either. Whatever he does he seems to land in trouble, even when he doesn't mean to and his teacher sometimes despairs of him. What that boy needs is a good listening to. Brian does have a secret though - his cave.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0953712338</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Erin Lange
|title=Butter
|rating=4.5
|genre=Teens
|summary=Bullied by his classmates at school, harassed by his parents at home, and weighing over 400 lbs, Butter really has very little to keep living for. And so he decides to stop. Living, that is. But he’s not going to throw his not unsubstantial frame under a bus, or jump off a cliff. He’s going to do what he does best – eat.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571294405</amazonuk>
}}
