Tag: Review

Book Review: Keep Your Friends Close – Paula Daly

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You’d trust your best friend with your life…right?

Natty has the perfect life, a successful business, two daughters she adores and her teenage sweetheart as a doting husband. While the stresses of work build there is nothing Natty can’t handle…apart from maybe her mother in law. That is until she receives a phone call that her daughter is desperately ill, her oldest friend steps in to help out but what Netty doesn’t know is that this could be the start of her world beginning to unravel.

I will start out by saying that Daly’s novel is delicious and addictive.I give you fair warning, this book will keep you up until the early hours desperate to know what’s going to happen next. There was no part of me that wanted to put this novel down at any point of the day. Daly has an incredible talent for creating a world in which anything can happen and anyone can have secrets you’d never even consider. If there was anything I’d change about this novel it’s that I’d want it to continue. I want to know what happens after it ends because it was just so damn good.

The protagonist, Natty, is a determined woman, she’s worked hard for all she has and has never had a reason not to trust her best friend, until now. There are twists, turns and ‘oh my god’ moments throughout the whole book. I also particularly liked her daughters, they grow as the book goes on and become incredible characters, in fact I would have liked to have known more about them. I was also pleased to see the return of Joanne, the policewoman (those of you who have read Just What Kind of Mother Are You? will remember her).I also found the character of Eve to be written in a breaktaking way. I hated her, but at the same time I couldn’t get enough. I’ll leave it there in fear of spoilers.

It’s hard to write a review for a novel such as this because I could easily drop in some spoilers without realising. Each twist and turn has been carefully thought out and although there are some clues throughout, there is still the ability to shock, especially in relation to Natty’s past…Daly’s one of those writers that once you’ve read one of her books you’re hooked and I can’t wait to get my hands on her latest novel this summer. I only have a few weeks to wait but I can assure you Keep Your Friends Close has wetted my appetite and I’m sure it will do the same for all of you. 

It should not come as surprise that I’m giving this novel five stars *****. It is written with a sharp mind and pure talent on Daly’s part. I read this book in less than a day, with other things to do. The thought will always be at the back of your mind too, who do I really know? This novel really is a must read, I promise you wont regret it.

Daly’s new novel The Mistakes I Made is out on the 27th August.

This is not a sponsored post.

Review by Chloe Metzger

Book Review: The Baby- Lisa Drakeford

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1 party, 5 friends, 1 unexpected guest.

Imagine you’re in the middle of your 17th birthday party, drinks are flowing and your having a great time when you realise you haven’t seen your best friend in a while. You’re not ready for what you find. Your friend is on your bathroom floor about to give birth to a baby you know nothing about, and apparently neither did she. Olivia’s head is spinning as she has to help her best friend Nicola deliver the baby. Little does she know this baby will blow their friendship group apart. This is the start of Lisa Drakeford’s novel The Baby. The book is divided into five sections, one for each of the main characters Olivia,  her best friend Nicola, her controlling boyfriend Jonty, her gay friend Ben and her little sister Alice. We see the aftermath through each of their eyes, but all isn’t as it seems.

I’m always interested in books that focus on teenage parents and have been for as long as I can remember. As someone who stood by their best friend as they had a child at the age of 17, I was intrigued to see what Drakeford would do with her characters. It’s easy to assume that a child changes things, but I feel like there was almost too many issues with the characters and not enough novel. There are complex relationships within the group, Olivia is struggling in a controlling relationship with Jonty, Jonty hates Ben for his closeness to Olivia. The only character that isn’t involved with the group, but in my opinion has the best chapter, is Olivia’s sister Alice. Alice has no friends of her own but observes everything around her and loves helping out with Nicola’s baby at any given moment. She’s just the strange little sister but through her eyes you see more than through any other, she was my favourite character by far. As for Olivia, I felt like she was a kind of punch bag throughout the whole story and I really struggled to like her. I would have like to have seen more of Nicola and how she copes with her daughter and more of Jonty’s backstory, that was something I really enjoyed and made him a much more relatable character.

There is a big twist towards the end of the novel, which I couldn’t stand. It kind of derails the entire plot up to that point and then adds a real question mark to the end of the novel. After reading 200 pages I was beyond angry and frustrated at the twist, I’m pretty sure it’s a love or hate scenario, there will definitely be people who recommend the book to their friend on the basis of the ending, although I’m not a fan.

I’m giving this book two stars **. I really wanted to enjoy it but there really are too many issues in one short book for me to enjoy. I think that the biggest reason for my low rating is the twist at the end, it kind of ruined it for me. It isn’t that I completely loved the book throughout, but I did struggle with having positive feelings about it at the end.

Review by Chloe Metzger

Paper Towns Advanced Screening!

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Tonight Summer and I were lucky enough to go to an advanced screening of Paper Towns at my local cinema. I’m a huge fan of John Green, he’s one of my all time favourite writers and last year’s film The Fault in Our Stars is possibly my all time favourite film as well as a book that left me speechless. To say that I was excited for tonight was an understatement.

I have to say that the film doesn’t disappoint. When I heard that Cara Delevinge was playing Margo I have to admit I was a little sceptical, it was wasn’t how I saw Margo in my head. I was completely wrong because Cara just acts so well as Margo, there are moments here and there where her British accent slips up but I think that’s only because we got to see the Q&A footage before seeing the movie (where she sounds very British). I don’t know, now I’ve seen it she’s won me over and will forever be the most amazing Margo. As for Quentin, or Q, John Green was right when he said that he Nat Wolff was born to play him. He expresses the good guy/ awkward/ hopelessly in love guy that we all know and love from the book.

The film made me and the rest of the audience laugh, a lot. It also had a much more diverse audience than TFIOS did when it came out. There were such a mix of people, I was really surprised! Also, my sister has never read Paper Towns and she didn’t feel like she didn’t understand it or missed anything out, so don’t feel like you need to have read the book to enjoy. Oh and if you did enjoy TFIOS look out for an awesome cameo!

The best thing is that although I knew what was going to happen, I still had shivers up my spine, I still wanted to know about the mystery of Margo. It takes a very special film to make you forget what you’ve already read and get lost all over again. I was disappointed that the Seaworld scene wasn’t in the movie, it was my favourite part of the book so I was a little let down and there was one change towards the end that I wished was the same as the book. It wasn’t bad at all, just different. That said I fully accept that it can’t be exactly the same as the book.

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Summer and I waiting to go in, with giant slushies of course

There’s something about Green’s books when they are turned into films that sparks this feeling inside me. With TFIOS it was the feeling of wanting and needing to love, love no matter what because you never know how long you’re going to get. Paper Towns just reminded me to keep doing what I want to do, not to slip into that life of doing what you’re supposed to do when you’re supposed to do it, to embrace and crave some extraordinary things.

Would I recommend seeing Paper Towns?  Yes. It’s not overtaken TFIOS as my favourite movie, but it has made me want to go back and read the novel and in fact appreciate the novel more. It’s so funny and just takes you along for the ride, oh and Radar and Ben are PERFECT. The chemistry between the trio was amazing, sometimes you forgot that you weren’t watching three best friends. As with the relationship between Cara and Natt, it was in a word, perfect. As soon as it hits general release, go and watch, if you’re a John Green fan, you won’t be disappointed. Similarly if you want to have a girl crush over Cara’s eyebrows this is also a film for you!

Book Review: The Accident Season – Moïra Fowley-Doyle

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‘It’s the accident season,

the same time every year.

Bones break, skin tears, bruises bloom.’

The Accident Season has been hailed by many, as an incredible book, my local Waterstone’s had a particular fondness for it, so I thought I might as well pick it up. The novel focuses on the ‘Accident Season’ a time of cuts, bruises and at times even deaths. Moïra Fowley-Doyle takes suspicion and fear and sets it right in the middle of modern day Ireland. Our protagonist, 17 year old Cara, is an ok narrator, at times I got frustrated with her simplicity and would much rather have followed her older sister Alice, who seems a lot more interesting to me. Added to this is Cara’s ‘ex stepbrother’ Sam and her best friend the witchy Bea’ The Accident Season is a tale of secrets and makes you, at times, question what is real.

I think my biggest gripe with this is that for about ¾ of the novel it moves very slowly. There are twists in the book but the problem is that some of the biggest ones I managed to work out fairly early on, which was a shame. It sits in this strange thriller, horror world but at the same time tries to follow the normal lives of four teenagers. I really struggled to believe in the season itself and all the terrible things that are meant to have happened. To me it just seemed like they all had a bit of a terrified mother (which later makes much more sense than for most of the book) who wanted to wrap her kids up in cotton wool.

As well as the kids dealing with their mother’s fears, there is also a mystery to be solved, in the form of Cara’s classmate, Elsie. While looking through photos Cara soon realises that Elsie is in each and every one of her photos, even though it’s impossible. While Cara enlists the help of Bea and Sam to work out if Elsie is following her they make a starting discovery, Elsie has disappeared and no one seems to know who she is. I can say with absolute certainty that the Elsie part of the plot is definitely the most interesting and I wish there had been even more of it in the book. At times it feels a little like there are other issues that are just there to pad out the novel rather than to add to it.

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There is a big element of fantasy and folk tales throughout, which is something I really liked. I wish it had been bought into the plot earlier as the first few chapters just seem a bit strange without it, you don’t really understand why a sane person could come up with the idea of an ‘accident season’. There are a lot of accidents, but I think I sided more with Alice’s rational thinking too much to really enjoy the novel. It is not in any way that this novel is badly written, Fowley-Doyle does have a knack for story telling, but I couldn’t help but feel throughout that this would be better suited to a film script. I’m saying it now before it happens, this would make a kick ass film and I expect it to be picked up sooner rather than later.

I’m giving The Accident Season three stars ***, like I said before it wasn’t badly written, I just lost the excitement at quite a few points throughout. I need a book that is impossible to put down and for most of The Accident Season, it was easy to walk away from. That said I think if you are into a bit of mystery and horror this is worth a read.

Review by Chloe Metzger

Book Review: Go Set a Watchman – Harper Lee

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Five minutes ago I put down my copy of Go Set a Watchman in a state of, well, loss but also amazement. To Kill a Mockingbird is without a doubt one of my favourite books ever. I fell in love with it as a sixteen year old and it sparked a love that not many other books have. I’ve been worried about reading it because of all the controversy in the news but I had to read it anyway, it’s a sequel to a novel I’ve treasured for years.

While there have been numerous bad reviews of the novel, this will not be one. Is this novel as polished as To Kill a Mockingbird? No, I don’t think so. I also think that the negativity is because of what people wanted to read. They wanted the world to be free from racism and for Scout to still be the lovable kid we first read about. The difference is that Scout, now called by her real name Jean Louise, has grown up. She’s twenty-six years old and a lot has changed for her. She no longer had older brother Jem and her best friend Dill to rely on (something which initially upset me but made sense at the end of the novel) and has to make her own sense of the world.

Before long and reader familiar with Lee’s work falls into Maycomb again. While 20 years have passed, it seems to Jean Louise Maycomb has stayed frozen in time. She’s still told off by Aunt Alexandra for not being as feminine as she should be, which made me laugh. While the sleepy town is the same, the reader is introduced to Henry, a Maycomb County boy, Atticus’s law partner and Jean Louise’s on, off love interest. The relationship between the two characters is vital to the plot and to Jean Louise becoming who she is at the end of the novel.

There has been a lot of controversy about Atticus, people have screamed about him being racist and letting go of everything he stood for in To Kill a Mockingbird. I don’t want to spoil the novel, but I do want to say wait. Read the book before you get mad and start ranting. If you start reading and want to throw it at all wall, carry on because I promise you there is a reason for this, a reason that is vital for Scout to grow into JEan Louise.

I could not put this book down for the life of me. I needed to read it, even when I was frustrated or didn’t understand (there is a lot of historical knowledge that I wasn’t too sharp on) I needed to get to the end. I found that I really connected with Jean Louise, she will always be Scout to me though. I just felt what she was feeling, when you go back to your hometown and you just feel like you stick out. When you need to realise that ultimately, everyone is human, even if it hurts.

Aside from the heavy parts of this novel, some of which had me on the edge of sobbing my heart out, there is laughter. The novel gives us glimpses of our favourite trio growing up. It felt almost like a comfort blanket reading about Scout, Jem and Dill and the things they got up to after that eventful summer, as well as who they grew up to be.

I thought long and hard while reading about how I was going to rate this and what I thought of it. While reading the majority of it I had a solid 3 star review in my head, and then I got to part seven, which changed everything. It explained what I needed explaining and made me think about my own life. I have to give it to Harper Lee if she can take credit for anything it’s making people think.

I want to give the novel four stars ****. Before people question it, let me just say there was something in this novel that caught me. Jean Louise is only six years older than me and I felt a connection with what she see’s and how she tries to make sense of the world around her. Lee has taken To Kill a Mockingbird and shown us again that life isn’t clearly divided into good and bad, black and white. I think for anyone who loved To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman is a must read, especially for those of us at a confusing time in our lives.

Review by Chloe Metzger

Book Review: Where Love Lies – Julie Cohen

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To the outside world Felicity has the perfect life, a job as a children’s author and illustrator, a lovely home in a small village and a doting husband most women would dream of. Underneath all of this though, Felicity is struggling. After the loss of her mother something hasn’t felt right but one day she catches a scent she hasn’t smelt in years…could it be her mother? Following her senses has never been more risky as it all comes down to following her head or her heart.

The novel revolves around love, loss and questioning yourself. As Felicity struggles with what she knows is right and what she feels it leads us as a reader to question our own lives. It is also very important to recognise that Felicity is on her own, the mother she adored has gone, she’s never known her father and feels suffocated by the expectations that life in a small village have put on her.  After the whole village seems to know that her and husband Quinn have even considered having a baby (something which she hasn’t even decided on yet) her feelings of not belonging come to the surface again.

The fact that Cohen has also used multiple POV’s makes this go further than the chick lit title that some have given it (you are WRONG this novel goes further than that!) seeing both Quinn and Felicity’s side opens up a whole new set of questions and feelings towards the characters. I fell in love with both of the characters and it spurred me to read constantly, Cohen has an incredible knack of making you know something isn’t quite right but giving you no clue as to the real answer!

After reading Dear Thing, I was hooked by Cohen’s talent and eagerly waited for Where Love Lies, as I suspected Cohen didn’t disappoint. The novel focuses on the fine lines of love that we sometimes forget, the hazy days of a first love and the realities of settling down. While Felicities’ feelings are confusing and at times hard to understand you live through them with her and are just as desperate as she is to work out what is going on.

Although I can’t spoil it for you, the ending of this novel is absolutely spectacular and so well researched. To top it all off it’s something that you would never suspect and if anything can be slightly chilling as well as an interesting perspective. There is a worry of mine that when a novel builds steadily throughout the reveal will disappoint but I can assure you Where Love Lies is completely worth the wait and the suspense.

I’m giving this novel 5 stars *****. Although initially I wondered how this would work and worried it could be just a romance Cohen has crafted something inspiring with Where Love Lies, the novel makes you think, question and follows you for a long time after you have finished. I think quirky Felicity and loveable Quinn will live in my memory for a long time, and so will the ending but you’ll find out why once you read it yourself!

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak – Book Review

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I wanted to try something a little different to make my blog more interesting! I’m not sure on which day but I will now be posting weekly book reviews, yaaaay! I used to have a whole blog dedicated to this but now I want to share them with you! For my first review, an incredible novel, The Book Thief.

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Liesel Memminger is only a child when she first meets death, but it will not be the last time 

The Book Thief contains a few things you need to know about. A young girl, an old couple, a Jewish fist fighter, Hitler and Death. Sounds simple, right? After finding herself in a new town with new parents, a doting foster father and a sharp tongued foster mother. But Liesel Memminger is haunted,  haunted by the ghost of her younger brother whom she watched die. Another thing you should know she is a thief, but the novel is about more than that.

The novel is a about a young girl that we get to watch grow and about a country that will never be the same after war. As Liesel, and her new parents Hanns and Rosa hide a young Jewish man they know they are risking their lives, but what comes out of it is so much more. The problem with novels as good as this is that you don’t want to ruin any part of it because you love it so much. I will say though, the novel is a long one but in a nice way. It’s the kind of book that you can take a break from but as soon as you turn another page you fall straight back into the story.

Another character I have to mention, because I know you will fall in love with him, is Lisle’s neighbour Rudy. A sweet boy who idolises black athlete Jesse Owens in the middle of Nazi Germany. As you can assume, this does not work in his favour. The relationship between him and Liesel is one of my favourite parts of the novel though, without him I doubt the Book Thief would have become who she was.

Although it’s a questionable concept, Death makes an incredible narrator and he was one of the best characters. Who would have thought death could be so kind, caring and thoughtful. Oh and lets not forget funny, there is great humour in the book even if it seems sad. I laughed more than I ever wanted to cry and it wasn’t just little laughs that would escape me, I shook at some points because I was laughing so hard.

At times the book made my heart hurt. I could see the scenes playing out in my head, I wanted to look away but I couldn’t. I wanted to reach out, but I wasn’t really there. What Zusak has done with his magical description should not be taken lightly. I have not read novel like this, that is so vivid you feel like you can reach out to it, in a very long time. I wanted to laugh, I wanted to cry and I wanted to make sure nothing like this could ever happen again. It’s incredible that even though this is fiction, it feels as if it could be real and that is the magic of a good story teller, they made you believe the story is as real as any history book.The novel made me cry, and I’m grateful. It is a stunning piece of literature that I want to read again and again.

I can’t give this book anything less than five stars *****, something I don’t give lightly. I remember not reading this book years ago when I had the chance and I wish someone had shaken me! Zusak is an incredible writer, so much so that if he never wrote again this book would be enough. If you haven’t read it, you should need to, it is beautiful.

Review by Chloe Metzger