First off, apologies for the lack of any sort of activity here. My degree has pretty much sapped all of my reading time – I study American and English Literature, which means I spent a significant part of my week reading stuff – and haven’t really found a way to balance pleasure with work. So Continue reading
The greatest human achievement is fiction, and here’s why: With fiction we escape worlds, we fall in love, we become part of families, of communities, of stories. We meet people like us or different, those who are more moral, those who hurt like we do, those that think those dark thoughts that we sometimes do Continue reading
To celebrate the launch of the UK’s first official astronaut Tim Peake to the International Space Station, I’ve got four excellent young adult novels that will blast you off into new worlds! Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff Illuminae is the story of refugees being pursued from an illegal mining colony in deep space. Continue reading
When I first read The Hunger Games trilogy, back in 2011, the Arab Springs were in full force. All over the middle east, a revolutionary wave of protests and demonstrations were lead against many dictatorships and cruel regimes. We’re still seeing the after effects of these clashes; Syria is overrun in a civil war between Continue reading
Here’s a confession: I never, ever read chapter extracts or samples when I receive them. Often, publishers will release these extracts in the run up to publication to get people excited. Unfortunately, I don’t get excited by them: the very idea of reading just one chapter, or a chunk of book, and then having to Continue reading
Because I’m currently in Australia, I was able to see Paper Towns on Tuesday 21st July, about 3 days before it gets released in most other places. Yay for Australia! I wasn’t actually anticipating seeing this film in cinemas at all; apart from the fact that I am out and about backpacking in the Southern Continue reading
(This post was actually written a long time before the USA gay marriage ruling – but I couldn’t let such a golden opportunity pass without posting something relevant!) #WeNeedDiverseBooks has been going for a while, which is great – but here are some things I’d LOVE to see in YA fiction, because I feel like Continue reading
I walked into the Jarvits center and was staggered by its size. Here was a convention center, its atria clad in glass, that took a couple of minutes to walk from end to end. It was huge (but also probably just normal convention center size; I’d never been to one before). And all of it Continue reading