March 2021 Reading Round-Up

 A larger pile this month! I found my mojo! Not necessarily a great mojo though since the three stood at the side will be donated. I just didn't get on with them that well.

Queen of Air and Darkness - Cassandra Clare

5/5 stars

The Red Scrolls of Magic - Cassandra Clare and Wesley Chu

5/5 stars

The Shadowhunter's Codex - Cassandra Clare and Joshua Lewis

3/5 stars

The Prison Doctor - Dr Amanda Brown

3/5 stars

The Outrage - William Hussey (not pictured due to ebook)

4/5 stars review here

An Abundance of Katherines - John Green

2/5 stars review here

The Wizards of Once - Cressida Cowell

3/5 stars

A Dog's Purpose - W. Bruce Cameron

5/5 stars

A Dog's Journey - W. Bruce Cameron

5/5 stars

The End of Everything - Megan Abbot

2/5 stars

Next month will have a couple more W. Bruce Cameron books. They've been ordered, they just need to arrive. Otherwise next up on my list is Pet Sematary, after that a few more ebooks probably so I guess I'll need to start figuring out how to compile covers into one image LOL!

Stef Out x

The Outrage by William Hussey

Ebook provided by NetGalley for review. Thank you.

Read March 2021

This was a powerful book. Set in a dystopian future England - unknown year but a 2038 car is mentioned as vintage - where anything to do with being LGBT+ or having free will is completely outlawed and many books including 'The Wizard of Oz' (the man behind the curtain) are banned.

Gabe is gay and he begins an illicit relationship with Eric, son of the chief inspector at Degenerate (gay) Investigations, and a very troubled young man. The pair stumble upon an old destroyed library by chance and find a hidden cache of old DVDs - that miraculously still work? A scratch tends to kill them - such as 'Star Wars', 'Love, Simon' and 'Indiana Jones' that inspire Gabe in particular. He then fosters an ambition to become a movie director.

A chance encounter means that their relationship is discovered and the pair are arrested. Eric's father forces him to lie that it was non-consensual in exchange for a role on the force and "freedom". Gabe meanwhile is tortured and worries about his future. Forced to work the degrading and dirty jobs marked as 'degenerate' by a pink cross, or an unknown alternative...

It soon comes to pass that there is an underground resistance that Gabe's parents were part of when they met. Gabe is given help to escape but is soon given information that may help...

I loved the characters and thought that they were well-developed, I especially loved Gabe and his childhood best friend Albert's friendship, and their heart to heart later was beautiful! However the explanation for the initial "Outrage" was a little too brief and I thought the ending was very abrupt. Did anything change? How did their life go?

4/5 Stars

Stef Out x

P.S. Why did Blogger change again? Alignment used to work perfectly.

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

 

I was hovering between 2 and 3 stars for this book. At one point I wasn't even sure whether I was going to continue at all. This whole only "dating" Katherines thing was just too weird and unbelievable. And I put "dating" in quotes because when he went through the story of all of them I'd hardly count several as dating. In my mind a few hours hanging out is not dating.

Then the maths. I can't do maths to save my life. That is probably a literal thing. I can imagine being in a life-threatening situation and even struggling with 1+1=2. It took me three attempts to pass my maths GCSE at school. I am 30 years old and I still don't know my times tables - a problem quoted on my school report pretty much every single year, that and my shoddy attendance. Anyway the maths. Colin kept on yanking me out of the story just to drone on about some kind of dumping related theory. Just shut up.

As for the story... There wasn't a lot of it. Half-Jewish boy goes on a road trip to nowhere with his Muslim best friend (who seemed... Not the best written) using cash he won on a TV show for smart kids yet he's definitely not a genius. They meet a girl (who is the only half-decent character) and get hired by her mum to record old people's stories about the town. We also have some other kids who are mostly only referred to as initials e.g. TOC is The Other Colin. The others I forgot a page after they were explained. There's also a random bit of pig-hunting and not long after it just ends. There's no defined resolution.

2/5 Stars

Stef Out x

A Danger to Herself and Others by Alyssa B. Sheinmel

Ebook provided by NetGalley for review. Thank you.

Read November/December 2020

Following an accident at summer school Hannah's best friend Agnes is in hospital with brain damage and Hannah herself has been institutionalised as "a danger to herself and others".

Hannah believes that there's been a mistake and she'll be out soon, after all school starts in a couple of weeks and she prides herself on being a star student, and an all round mature person. But days turn into weeks and then months and nothing seems to change,  except the arrival of a roommate, Lucy, a talented dancer struggling with eating disorders. Can Lucy help Hannah figure out why they're keeping her locked up?

This was a twisty, intriguing novel that I wasn't even sure how to review for ages. It drew me in and I really enjoyed how everything knit together so seamlessly. Hannah isn't necessarily a likeable person but I still felt sympathetic towards her. Overall a very well-written novel.

4/5 stars

Stef Out x