Category: Young Adult

‘The Unexpected Everything’ – Morgan Matson

Our main character, Andie, is used to being organised. With a father involved in politics she’s used to watching what she says and does, and having things planned keeps her in control when she’s not really. Her close group of friends do pretty much everything together and she’s looking forward to her summer on her organised program.

Unfortunately, when we see Andie her father is having to step away from his job because of some issues with his team. As a result of this her letter of recommendation is withdrawn, she loses her summer program place and is set up for a summer where she is not in control of anything.

Of course, this is the summer that Andie gets to work a lot of stuff out. She gets a job walking dogs, and one of those on her round is Bertie…who happens to be linked to a young man called Clark that Andie finds very interesting.

No surprises, it’s a contemporary romance so we know we’re going to see Clark and Andie get together. What we’re not told initially is that Clark is actually a famous fantasy writer and his presence here is to allow him the summer to get over his writer’s block and sort out his final book of the trilogy. Andie finds herself trusting him, and learning to dial back on the organisation thing. She learns a lot about herself, her family and her friends.

There’s the inevitable bumps along the way – some of which we can see coming very early on – but everything works out okay in the end. At times it felt the story could have been cut a little, but for anyone who loves this kind of thing you won’t be disappointed.

 

‘Chelsea High’ – Jenny Oliver

 

The first thing I have to do is apologise for starting this in the expectation that I was going to get a fluffy cute read that would entertain me for a while and that I would probably then forget about. The cover and blurb had me begin it thinking one thing, when what we got was more than that.

The basic story is straightforward. Our main character, Norah, has a somewhat bohemian lifestyle living with her parents on a houseboat and living in a very close-knit community. She helps her mum run a vintage clothes stall and is, generally, pretty happy with her lot. Her big dilemma here is that her father has got caught up in a money-making scam that has resulted in many people losing their savings. He is about to face trial, and the family are being uprooted. That would be unsettling…but we learn that her father’s family are very wealthy and come from a background of privilege. They are paying for lawyers and are paying for Norah to attend the exclusive Chelsea High.

Our story is about Norah coming to terms with her father’s actions and the impact it will have on their family and friends, but it’s also a ‘fish-out-of-water’ story as Norah has to navigate this new environment and the people within it. There’s the stereotypical mean girl queen, Coco, who is just as insecure as any teenage girl could be but is better able to hide it with her money and influence. There’s the hangers-on in Coco’s group who have to decide whether to follow what they’ve always done or to act for themselves. Of course there’s a love interest, and there’s the expected dramatic scenes so beloved of this kind of story to help people grow and develop.

While there’s a lot in this book that can be found in other books/films, the development of Norah was more subtle than I expected. She made mistakes, but she wasn’t too stubborn to admit them. The adult characters were also more intriguing than I expected, and I definitely think there’s more stories to come.
I was excited to see there’s a second part to come for this, and I look forward to catching up with Norah and cast in the not too distant future. Thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for letting me read this prior to publication.

‘Little Creeping Things’ – Chelsea Ichaso

 

In spite of one of the creepiest covers I’ve seen in a while, Little Creeping Things was a pleasure to read.

Our story is that of Cassidy who, when she was little, was rescued from a fire in which her best friend died. Since that time, people in her small town have seen her as something to fear…her nickname Fire Girl ensures she’s not seen as a survivor of an awful event, but the perpetrator of a callous crime. She doesn’t recall many details of this accident, but it has shaped her life in the years since.

Cassidy’s elder brother, Asher, does his best to look out for her, and her best friend Gideon sees beyond the rumours. Unfortunately, when one of the girls who has tormented her most goes missing Cassidy knows things could get difficult…particularly since she was in the woods on the night Melody disappeared, and someone had taken her notebook in which she jokingly made comments about how she could carry out Melody’s murder. She wants to do the right thing, but can she bear the personal cost involved?

Our story focuses on the aftermath of the discovery of Melody’s body and the hunt for who did it. We watch Cassidy under extreme duress, and though we have a number of twists/deceptions we do, eventually, get answers.
Huge thanks to the publishers, Sourcebooks Fire, and NetGalley for letting me read this prior to publication.

‘Lies Like Poison’ – Chelsea Pitcher

What a tangled web of lies and deceit these pages revealed…thank you to the publishers, Simon Schuster, and NetGalley for letting me read this prior to its October publication.

Poppy, Lily and Belladonna are our focus for this story and everything hinges on their relationship to Raven, their best friend. It isn’t immediately clear how this group formed or the reason for the dynamics between them – but we know they have a shared history, and would do anything to protect each other.

Our story opens with a body, that of Raven’s stepmother, being found. She has been poisoned with leaves of belladonna placed in her tea. There’s a recipe, written in fourteen year old Bella’s handwriting, on the table next to her that outlines the perfect poison. It would seem that Bella came good on her vow to protect her best friend Raven from his abusive stepmother.

It all seems clear-cut, but then things start unravelling. Poppy – who now calls herself Jack – claims Bella was with her on the night of the murder. The police don’t believe her as Poppy was the one who first went to the police years ago with claims that Raven’s stepmother was hurting him. She is told to go away and think about her story…and determines to work out what happened.

We have our story split into three distinct parts – the truth according to Bella, Jack and then Lily. As we read each story we unpick the various deceits these characters (and those around them) have told, and learn more about the complex background of each.

There was a fairytale quality to this story, and while it focuses on murder it also charts the journey each character has towards acceptance of themselves and their situation. Mercurial in tone, constantly shifting and leaving us with a sense of uncertainty, this was a story that delivered a lot more than it promised. I can’t wait to see what others make of it.

 

‘Deadly Little Scandals’ – Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Picking up after book one Sawyer is still reeling from certain revelations…and struggling to work out how she fits into her new family unit.

We begin this book with the girls being invited to become part of a secret society – the White Gloves. They are forced to go through a rather bizarre initiation process, and all while trying to unearth yet more secrets.

As one of the characters says later on – they could become a porn star and still not be the most scandalous thing in their family. Whatever we think of the craziness here, there’s no denying that these families have a lot of secrets. I wasn’t quite prepared for just how far back these secrets go, or just how wide-reaching their influence was.

While not everything comes out as we might like, there’s plenty of action, we get answers to most of our questions and there’s hints of more exciting things to come.

 

‘Made You Up’ – Francesca Zappia

Our first encounter with Alex is her recollection of trying to free the lobsters from a supermarket tank. I admit to being unsure what to make of the start, but then she tells us that this event never happened and I was thrown. How could someone have a memory that wasn’t of a real event?

It’s at this point that we learn Alex has schizophrenia, and that her obsessive photo-taking is a way of trying to keep a grip on reality – looking at the pictures later helps her work out what she’s hallucinated and what was really there. When she first starts at her new school she is determined to do whatever she can to stay under the radar…only she finds herself drawn to loner Miles who scares everyone else. This might seem nothing, until we learn that she believes Miles to be the boy who helped her to free the lobsters (which she thinks didn’t happen).

The book seemed a sensitive attempt to show how something like schizophrenia can affect a person. Most of the time I felt real sympathy for how exhausting life must be for Alex, though there were some laugh-out-loud moments which really kept us on our toes.

While the main focus is Alex and how she finds herself living with her condition, there was also the focus on the mystery surrounding Miles and his family and the downright odd things happening in the school.
Quirky, but very interesting read.

 

‘Cut Off’ – Adrianne Finlay

Mind-bending stuff, that really forces you to consider the possibilities for some of the technology that surrounds us everyday – but which also makes me more than a little paranoid about what kinds of things could be researched without us being aware of it.

From the moment I read about Cut Off I was excited to read it – and it more than lived up to my expectations. Its main focus is, we’re told, a new kind of reality TV show. Our contestants – all desperate to win the prize of a million dollars -are abandoned on an island and the aim is to survive. At any point they can ‘tap out’ and leave, but the winner will have to prove themselves first. While this might seem fairly standard fare, for this show there is immersive technology that means viewers can feel like they’re experiencing the same things as the contestants.

The book opens in fairly typical territory. We’re introduced to River, Trip, Cam and Liza who appear to be the only four contestants around. Strange things have been happening – and there appears to be no power. There’s a growing sense of unease as the contestants start to realise that the technology to rescue them is no longer working, and there’s a very real chance that nobody is coming to save them. All too soon it’s clear that this survival game could be more important than anything they thought they were signing up for.

As it stood, there were a range of possibilities for what was going on with the contestants. It didn’t stray too far from what I expected at first. Their journey across the island, as they try to work out what to do next, made it increasingly obvious that we were in a far stranger world than any we might have conjured for ourselves. Once we started to unpick what was happening and we were given some ideas about the background to their situation, I was getting definite ‘we’re not in Kansas, anymore’ vibes.

It’s important not to give too many details away, as this is a journey you need to live with the characters. Each character had their own motivation for being on the show, and as we learn about them we come to understand a little more of the world around them. The characters were, in their own way, flawed but each of them was able to offer something to keep the reader engaged with them.

‘Breathless’ – Jennifer Niven

Thank you, Jennifer Niven, for writing the book that I needed as a teenager, and showing that, even though the results may not be exactly what you want, you have to be open to the possibilities life offers.

Breathless starts slowly, and while I was enjoying it I didn’t think it was going to cause the emotional gut-punch it did. It’s a book about love, learning to accept yourself and to have the confidence to take risks as they hurt but can bring wonderful things.

The main character in this, Claude, is a curious character, who definitely grew on me. She starts the book in a fairly safe place with certain expectations, then learns that things don’t always go to plan…but it can be okay. She is definitely feeling uncertain as she’s about to head to college, her best friend has started a relationship she didn’t know about and things are changing/she’s losing control of the things happening around her. Her summer begins in an unsettling way, with her parents announcing they are going to split up and she is expected to spend the summer on an island with her mother.

Cut off from everything she knows, this actually opens Claude to the possibility of new experiences. She takes solace in the immediacy of the wonderful natural environment around her, she learns to ride a bike and she starts a relationship with someone who changes her in ways she couldn’t imagine.

It would be so easy to reduce this to a summer romance category and make what we watch between Claude and Miah seem trite. That would, I think, be missing the point. It might not be exactly what we’d wish for either, but in its own way it’s beautiful.

I will be urging everyone to read this upon its September 2020 release, and would like to thank the publishers, Penguin, and NetGalley for letting me read it early.

 

‘Charlie, Presumed Dead’ – Anne Hetzel

The book opens with Aubrey in Paris about to attend the funeral of her boyfriend, Charlie, who is missing, presumed dead, after a plane crash. She is upset…but more so when a young woman called Lena stands at the funeral to talk about Charlie, her boyfriend.

People in this situation may well run a mile. But Aubrey and Lena are curious, and they start talking. They discover that each of them was dating Charlie, and yet they are suspicious that things are not quite as they seem.

What follows is quite absurd. The girls embark on a quite preposterous trip around places of significance. They try to meet people who knew Charlie as they work out what happened. Travelling around the world and putting themselves in increasingly dangerous situations was entertaining to read about, though only if you completely suspend your disbelief.

Where the book became less successful was in the third narrator’s voice, that of Charlie. This is a young man who seemed to be in the grips of some mental breakdown, and definitely not in full control of his faculties. Not quite the victim we think, Charlie knows details about a number of people he knows and is quite happy to torment them as part of a bigger plan. Unfortunately we never quite get to work out the point of it as the focus at the end shifts rather abruptly and we’re left in a dilemma. It seems this should have more to come, but there’s no sign that this is the case, which is more than a little dissatisfying.

 

‘Moment of Truth’ – Kasie West

I’m struggling to see how this formed a series as each of the books stands on their own. Yes, there’s some crossover characters, but the relevance to the story is really not important. That aside, this was another cute romance though it took a while to get going.

The story centres around sixteen year old Hadley, a dedicated swimmer, and her growing relationship with Jackson, who infuriated her but we can see it’s because he challenges her in a way others don’t and sees her for what she is. So, the relationship between these two is important and there plenty of ups and downs along the way but we can see just how compatible they are and watch to see how long until they realise it.

Hadley is focused, almost scarily so, and while I liked seeing her developing relationship with Jackson I felt that West was trying to do too many things by making her primary focus the relationship Hadley has with her parents. From the outset we can see that her relationship with mum and dad is skewed by the fact that they are still mourning her brother. She does so much but doesn’t seem to realise most of it is about trying to get the attention of her parents. If it’s so obvious to us and her friends then I wonder why it wasn’t the aspect of the book that West focused on more.

I completely get that behind the whole fake Heath Hall quest is the need for Hadley to recognise what’s holding her back. She knows it, but boy does it take her a long time to get round to working out how to face it!