An Interview with Kathryn James, author of Gypsy Girl (Countdown to 7th May)

Hello! Today I am thrilled to share with you an interview with Kathryn James, as part of the Countdown to 7th May multi-author multi-blog tour, which celebrates the great new books that will be released on 7th May 2015.

I think Kathryn gave some really interesting answers, so without any further ado...

When I began reading Gypsy Girl, I was drawn immediately into Sammy-Jo's world. It was very easy to imagine her life - there's a lot of detail about her family and their history. Even the wedding planning parts were fascinating - and they led to some great group scenes. Your bio says that you have worked with Gypsy and Traveller children. How much of this experience fed into the book? Did you have to do any additional research before you wrote it?

Yes, I worked for eighteen years with Gypsies and travellers here in Leicester, firstly organising play schemes on the sites and then later doing classes in photography, video, literacy and Driving Theory for the teenagers and adults, and nursery classes for the little ones. We also had a mobile classroom in the shape of an old Leicester City Bus which had been repainted with a rainbow painted on the side. We loved this work, and the days spent with the traveller girls were always filled with lots of excitement and laughter. We didn’t only teach them, we also joined in with their celebrations – they are very big on Weddings and Christenings and first communions – in fact they celebrate most things!

I didn’t do any additional research for Gypsy Girl, because we’d worked alongside girls like Sammy-Jo and her family. Of course Sammy-Jo isn’t based on any one girl, but I met many like her, with the same spirit and strength and love of family. I also saw the prejudices on both sides when a Gypsy falls for a non-Gypsy and wanted to illustrate these problems through Sammy-Jo’s relationship with Gregory.

The video classes led on to us videoing some of the weddings. Features from all of them went into Sammy-Jo’s sister’s wedding in the book. But the last wedding we videoed a couple of summers ago was probably the biggest influence. It was a really big, full-on Gypsy wedding.

Here’s the bridesmaid that inspired Sammy-Jo’s dress!

I loved the Smith family - there are a lot of them but you have given the members distinct personalities. My favourites were probably Sammy-Jo's aunts, Beryl and Queenie. Which of the secondary/background characters is your favourite? (I'm a bit obsessed with this question - I've made two Bookish Brits videos about secondary characters!)

I loved Beryl and Queenie, they were such fun to write! They were based on women we met whilst working with the travellers, but also I think there’s a bit of me and my best friend in there as well! Like Beryl and Queenie, Mandy and I like to know everything that’s going on, and we’re always in the middle of things plotting and planning and giving our opinions. Mandy hasn’t read the book yet, but when she does she’ll really enjoy Beryl and Queenie. I do have a soft spot for bride-to-be Sabrina as well, I think she knows she’s being spoilt and demanding but she can’t seem to stop. I put it down to wedding nerves :)

Like you, I also have a fascination with secondary characters. In some books I’m almost more interested in them than the main heroes. When I was at school we read Jane Eyre and I always remember wondering and worrying about the mad woman in the attic and wanting to know how she got there. Years later I found out that another author had exactly the same thought and had written a book all about her – Wide Sargasso Sea.

Are you going to write any more stories about Gypsies/Travellers? I have to admit that when I first saw the title, I didn’t like it, because I thought 'It sounds a bit like this is The Book about characters with this lifestyle, and I think there should be loads'! As I read the book, I changed my mind - it makes sense as 'Gypsy Girl' is Sammy-Jo's fight-club name, and because it is an identity that she is proud of, but that can lead to problems for her and her family, because of the assumptions other people make about them. It's central to the book.

I’d love to write more about Gypsies and travellers. The girls and boys in our classes very rarely see themselves in fiction. When we were doing the nursery classes we made photo books for the children, showing them leaving caravans rather than houses when going to school, and playing around a site rather than in a garden. They loved them, I think it was the first time they’d seen their surroundings and way of life in a book.

I’ve just finished writing Gypsy Girl 2, which carries on with Sammy-Jo’s story and her fight to make her family safe again. Before Gypsy Girl I wrote a couple of books called Mist and Frost, about the Elven that live secretly amongst us. Although the Elven were a fantasy based on the Scandinavian tales of elvish people, I actually based some of their characteristics on the gypsy children I worked with – their toughness and liveliness, the fact that they live secretly amongst us and that people fear and mistrust them, even thought they don’t mean any harm. But after writing those two books I wanted to write a book that was based in the real world, about some of the girls we’d worked with. I wanted a feisty heroine who would fight for her life and her family against great odds – and there’s no girl better equipped to do that than a Gypsy girl, even if she’s wearing her heels. And by showing Sammy-Jo’s life I hope my readers will enjoy learning about these secretive people and their lives, loves, hopes and families.

The word 'Gypsy' and derivatives are sometimes used as insults, yet 'Gypsy' is a word used in law and by community organisations to describe themselves, for example, the Gypsy Council. Sammy-Jo describes herself as a Traveller and as a Gypsy, and as I said above, she is very proud of who she is, but is very concerned about how other people see her and her family and friends, because of the stereotypes and myths about Gypsies. Could you explain a little about the history of the term 'Gypsy', and how it is used today?

The term Gypsy apparently comes from the word ‘Egyptian’ because people used to think they came from Egypt but that’s incorrect. Most historians believe they are a lost and wandering tribe from India, who left that country after persecution hundreds of years ago, and gradually wandered right across Asia and Europe. Imagine how exotic and foreign they must have seemed all those centuries ago, when most people didn’t move far from where they were born, to suddenly see the Gypsy wagons pulling into their village!

Nowadays Gypsies and Travellers often live on council or private sites, or own their own land. Most still travel but some stay put and live in houses.  But even those who live in houses now would still consider themselves Gypsies or travellers.

The girls and boys we worked with were a mix of Gypsies and Travellers. The Gypsies were mainly English, and proudly call themselves Gypsies. If I asked a girl to describe herself, she would say, ‘I’m a Gypsy Girl’, so the title of my book reflects this love of their lifestyle. They name they hate being called is gypo, this is the insulting term for them and is considered offensive.  The travellers we worked with were mainly Irish, (but there are Welsh and Scottish travellers as well) and they didn’t refer to themselves as Gypsies, only travellers. If you’ve every watched the programme My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, then the families normally shown on it are actually travellers not Gypsies, so people still get it wrong. Perhaps the programme makers thought Gypsy had a bigger impact than travellers!

Finally, how are you going to celebrate on 7 May?

Well it’s the day of the election so I will go and vote. But after that there will be champagne I’m sure!

Thanks for some very interesting questions!

Thank you for taking the time to answer them, Kathryn!

Kathryn also sent us some photos taken when she used to work with Gypsies and Travellers:

If you enjoyed this post, please do go to CountdownYA.com to find out more. You can also follow @CountdownYA and #CountdownYA on Twitter.

Book Review: The Princess Diaries, by Meg Cabot

Mia Thermapolis thinks she's just an ordinary girl with a couple of big problems - her mum is dating one of her teachers, and she can't get the boy she likes to notice her. Then her dad reveals that he's the Crown Prince of Genovia and everything gets a lot more complicated. Mia falls out with her friends, starts getting followed by paparazzi, and perhaps worst of all, has to endure princess lessons with her grandmother...

I'd say that the film of The Princess Diaries is one of my guilty pleasures, except that I don't feel guilty at all. I just love it. I'd always intended to read the book series at some point, but didn't get around to starting it until it was chosen as one of the Bookish Brits book club reads.

It's quite different from the film - Mia's dad is still alive, and her grandmother is a lot less likeable as person, but a lot funnier as a character! Although Grand-mère is one of my favourite characters in the book, she annoys Mia almost constantly. The plot develops at a slower pace so I think that the film must contain material from other books.

It's a sweet and funny book and Mia is a great narrator. I think this is regarded as a teenage classic and with good reason -  many little girls dream of becoming a princess, but as teenagers most of us come to realise that it wouldn't be such a good thing! The whole cast of characters is fab, from Mia's best friend Lilly to her driver/bodyguard Lars. I liked the romantic elements, but most of all I loved the different friendships and how they develop.

I'm really looking forward to reading the rest of the series and finding out more about Mia, her family and friends. Have you read this series? What did you think?

We read The Princess Diaries for the very first Bookish Brits Book Club! You can watch the results below:

What Makes A Book YA? Plus Bookish Brits Vlog 16: Teenage Characters Outside YA

There is a lot of debate about what makes a book YA or teen fiction. I have been deliberately reading 'adult' or 'literary' fiction about teenaged characters in a bid to work it out for myself.

I think a lot of the time the difference is just marketing, but in other cases, the book has been written in a way that doesn't fit the conventions of YA. Below, I will go through each of the books mentioned in the above video and explain whether I think it could have been published as YA or not.

I insist very passionately that YA is an age category, not a genre, but nonetheless, books that are sold as YA tend to follow certain conventions. The main one is that the protagonist(s) must be teenagers. If there are shifts in point of view, at no point will we experience the point of view of an adult. I think another convention is that the story must feel grounded in teenage reality. The teenage experience is not a metaphor for something else or a flashback from an adult's point of view. If you replace 'teenagers' with 'children' and 'teenage' with 'childhood', you'll be describing children's fiction.

People often say that plot is critical to YA. Teenagers like a clear plot that grabs them and keeps them turning the pages. But so does everyone else. Plot is critical to the successful reception of almost every genre of literature, whether it's written for children, teenagers, or adults. One notable exception is literary fiction...

Swallowing Grandma, by Kate Long - Could have been YA

This is written in first person - the narrator is a teenager. It is a coming of age novel set in the time that it was written. This could definitely have been marketed as YA, however, none of the author's other books are YA. Her first novel The Bad Mother's Handbook was a number-one bestseller, so obviously her publishers wanted to market Swallowing Grandma as adult fiction in order to appeal to previous readers.

The Magic Toyshop, by Angela Carter - Couldn't have been YA

This deals with many of the same themes as a lot of YA books - coming of age, sexuality, relationships - but it's by an author whose entire output is classified as literary fiction. It's full of poetic language and literary allusions and metaphor. It's magical realism so it's set in a world that is a bit dreamlike and fantastic, the plot isn't clear, and the point of view shifts from character to character. In short, it doesn't really have anything in common with most YA except for the age of the protagonist. I'm not saying that YA fiction can't contain poetic language and evoke a dreamlike atmosphere but it's not very common - an example is Ash, by Malinda Lo. I loved Ash but a lot of other readers disliked it, and I think this is because when someone picks up a book that is marketed as YA they expect something that is quite down to earth. Even if it's set in a fantasy world, it will usually feel very grounded. The reader will be able to relate to the situations that the protagonist(s) gets into and the decisions they have to make. The Magic Toyshop is not realistic and only vaguely relatable!

Five Miles From Outer Hope, by Nicola Barker - Couldn't have been YA without major editing

First person, narrator is a teenager, very weird. Not quite as weird as Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory but heading along those lines for a while. Tangent: people I know keep wondering aloud about whether The Wasp Factory could have been marketed as YA - I would say yes, it could have been, it's got a teenage narrator - but much like with Swallowing Grandma it wouldn't have fitted the author's career trajectory. It's the same with Five Miles From Outer Hope - the author is a literary fiction writer. Also, there's a time jump at the end, so we see the narrator as an adult, and the whole thing makes more sense from the point of view of an adult. Without that chapter from the adult's point of view the book isn't as good. It pulls the whole thing together because there isn't really much of a plot. It gets away without a clear plot as is because it is literary fiction.

Bonjour Tristesse, by Françoise Sagan - Could have been YA

Bonjour Tristesse was published in 1954, long before the term "Young Adult" was coined. The narrator is a teenager, but at times she seems to be looking back from an older perspective, although the author was only 18 herself when the book was published. I actually read Bonjour Tristesse because Sarra Manning recommended it years ago. I think that if it was being published for the first time today, it could have been YA, if it weren't for the author's career path.

The New Girl, by Emily Perkins - Couldn't have been YA

This is a book with an ensemble cast and only one of them is a teenager. It is a coming of age story but it is also a story about older people and the choices they have made throughout their lives, so it could not be YA.

Let me know what you think - how would you define Young Adult literature? Which adult or literary novels do you think could be published as YA, today? If you're a writer who writes what might be considered Young Adult fiction, how do you feel about it?

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Book Review: She Is Not Invisible, by Marcus Sedgwick

Last time Laureth Peak spoke to her father, he was researching his book in Amsterdam. But he hasn't called or texted her in several days. And then she gets an email from a stranger, saying that he's found her father's notebook in New York. Laureth is alarmed - he's not supposed to be in New York. She's even more concerned by the fact that her mother doesn't seem to care about the notebook turning up in the wrong place. So she decides to go to New York and find her father - or discover what has happened to him.

The only problem is, she can't go alone. Laureth is blind, so she has to take someone with her, to help her navigate the new city and the only person she can trust is her seven year old brother, Benjamin...

(Note on Laureth's blindness - at my book club, we discussed whether we thought that the blindness was supposed to be a surprise. It is written like it is, but if you're reading this review you've probably read a synopsis which mentions it somewhere - I saw the one on Goodreads before reading the book!)

She Is Not Invisible is a book that grabbed me right from the start. I loved the characters. It was amazing to read a book told from the point of view of a blind character, something I've never done before. I loved Laureth's relationship with her little brother Benjamin. I loved Stan, and the stories behind their names. I loved Mr Walker. I was really intrigued by Laureth's parents and their relationship.

I didn't love the plot so much, or more precisely, the ending. Most of the book feels like set up time. We are told about various coincidences and given philosophical background information but it all just kind of fizzles out and I was left wondering what exactly the point was meant to be. Maybe the point is that there is no pointt, or maybe the point is supposed to be the feelings we feel when the book ends. I don't know, but in either case, it wasn't quite enough for me.

I really enjoyed meeting Laureth and the other characters, and I would still recommend this book. It's really interesting and clever and even funny in places. But I didn't feel like it all got the ending that it deserved.

Book Review: Jessie Hearts NYC, by Keris Stainton

Yes, this maple syrup is super-Canadian, but maple syrup features in the book. So nyah.

Jessie desperately wants to get over her ex-boyfriend, and can't think of any way better than spending her summer in her mother's New York City apartment with her best friend Emma. There's even a potential new love interest on the horizon for her, Ben, one of the actors in her mum's play. The only thing that seems to stand in the way of her happiness is her relationship with her mother, which has always been difficult.

Finn has two major problems. One, he is in love with Sam, his best friend's girlfriend, and two, he doesn't know how to tell his dad that he finds the idea of working in insurance utterly boring.

Coincidence after coincidence has Jessie and Finn sharing scenes - but it seems like they will never properly meet!

It took me a while to get into Jessie Hearts NYC, because it's quite succintly written and I prefer a bit more detail to draw me in, but after I got to know all the characters I was hooked. I loved that Jessie and Finn keep bumping into each other. It might be a tad unrealistic, but it's so much fun (in a frustrating kind of way) to keep seeing them come so close to talking only to go their separate ways!

I was also really interested in Jessie's complicated relationship with her mum. They don't relate to each other very well and this has caused problems throughout Jessie's life. Emma, Jessie's best friend, was a bit of an enigma, but I'm not too bothered because she has her own book!

I finished reading Jessie Hearts NYC over a month ago and it's really stuck with me, partly because of the relationship between Jessie and her mum, but also because it's full of vividly memorable scenes, like a good film (which it could be). New York plays a really important role in the story, providing a vibrant backdrop for all of the emotional drama, and even though I've never been there, it was easy for me to imagine the locations.

I would recommend Jessie Hearts NYC to those who would like a quick, romantic read, but also to those who love reading about difficult mother/daughter relationships. I loved Della Says: OMG! so I will definitely be reading Keris' other books, and to be honest, I'm ashamed it took me so long to read this one!

Book Review: The Sweet Far Thing, by Libba Bray

This book is the third in a trilogy and therefore this review will inevitably contain spoilers for the first book, A Great and Terrible Beauty, and the second, Rebel Angels.

Circe defeated, all should be at peace, but the events of Rebel Angels have left Gemma unable to create the door of light and enter the realms. Try as she might, nothing works until she is drawn to a strange stone, uncovered during the rebuilding of the East Wing of Spence Academy. It turns out to be another way in, and she enters the realms once more to find all is not as it was. All too soon, Gemma, who now holds all of the power, is being threatened by the Order, the Rakshana, and the forest folk of the realms. They all want control - or at least a share - of the magic.

Gemma is desperate to delay her decision and hold on to the power for long enough to sort her life out and help her friends. While Gemma and Felicity go back and forth between Spence and London, preparing to finish school and make their debuts as young society women, worrying about getting their curtseys right when they are presented to Queen Victoria, Ann dreads her future life as governess to her cousin's horrible children.

The Sweet Far Thing is a long book. Eight hundred pages. It took me weeks to finish it, and I have to admit that I think that it's a little bit too long. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it a lot, but there was a lot of going back and forth and long scenes where very little happened, and as much as I loved the world it was set in I got a bit frustrated waiting for something to happen as Gemma spent day after day being indecisive.

Once everything does start to happen, it became a real page turner. I read most of the last half of the book in a day, but getting to that point took ages. I think the previous two books, both of which are shorter, have much tighter plots, although Gemma is always torn between different paths of action.

Gemma has always been an interesting narrator, a character who stands apart from all the world both because of her power and because she's a upper-class English girl who was largely brought up in India. She doesn't fit in anywhere and can't quite understand the rules of any society. She becomes even more interesting in The Sweet Far Thing as the most powerful being in both our world and the realms. She doesn't want to abuse her power but she gets carried away by it on several occasions and uses it to get what she wants.

I think the characterisation of Felicity and Ann is great. I loved seeing them reveal tough truths and plan their  lives. Miss McCleethy, my favourite Spence Academy character, with her sharp tongue and mysterious past, is underused, but I loved all the minor characters, old and new, especially Ann's heroine, Lily Trimble. Even Fowlson, the mean thug from the previous books, gets some backstory, which is refreshing.

The ending is controversial, and I don't want to spoil it. I'll say that I hoped for a different ending when I started reading the book, but that at the end, it seemed appropriate and like it was inevitable. The series as a whole won't be to everyone's taste, but it ticked a lot of my boxes.

I would recommend the Gemma Doyle trilogy to fans of fantasy-tinged historical fiction - but be warned, it is long! I'd actually suggest getting ebooks of the second and third books, because even the paperbacks are massive and difficult to tote around.

Book Review: Red, by Alison Cherry

Scarletville, the USA's only redhead sanctuary, is a place where the redder your hair the better. Redheads get special treatment everywhere and brunettes and blondes are second-class citizens. No-one knows this as well as Felicity St John, whose stunning, deep red hair is entirely responsible for her place in life. Her beautiful hair, the envy of many of her peers, has gotten her one of the highly coveted places in the Miss Scarlet pageant. All Felicity's life, her mother, Ginger, has been training her to win the pageant and make them the first mother-daughter Miss Scarlets in history. But one day, Felicity recieves a terrifying message - someone at her school knows her deepest, darkest secret - Felicity's hair is dyed!

As you might assume from the description, Red is a book with quite a silly sounding premise. I thought it would be campy and fun and it was, but not to the extent that I was expecting. There are also some more serious elements to the story. When one group of people has privileges because of the way they look, you can’t help but draw parallels with real life race issues, especially as most redheads are white. Over the course of the novel we get to find out more and more about how hard life in Scarletville is for non-redheads, and Felicity slowly begins to have more sympathy for them as she worries about being outed. One of her best friends, Haylie, is quite nasty about non-redheads and doesn't change her tune during the novel, but is still someone Felicity loves and wants to keep being friends with. I really wanted some sort of comeuppance for the snootiest redheads, but there isn't any. I'm naturally opposed to any sort of injustice, but on the other hand, maybe it's not important, as Scarletville is just a small town, and the world outside of Scarletville is supposed to be just like the real world, so maybe the price the queen bee redheads pay for their status is being stuck in Scarletville! I'm not sure how I feel.

It took me a few chapters to get into the story, but once I did, I enjoyed it a lot, thanks to the fabulous characters. Felicity's little brothers are adorable and her mother is...difficult, to say the least. The best friends, Ivy and Haylie are lots of fun. I thought the character that was blackmailing Felicity was very interesting and I really wanted to know more about her - I would love to hear the story from her point of view! The drama is mostly fuelled by personality clashes and by Felicity's increasing desperation as she feels like the person who is ordering her around wants to destroy her life.

I wasn't entirely convinced that Felicity would be as oblivious to the world outside Scarletville as she is at the start, but then if Scarletville had offered her everything she wanted during her life so far, maybe she would never have bothered to look outside it.

I did enjoy Red, although it wasn't quite what I was expecting and I felt like some elements could have been fleshed out more fully. I'm looking forward to reading whatever the author does next.

Many thanks to the publisher, Quercus, for giving me the chance to read Red via NetGalley.

Book Review: Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

Nick, teenage boy and bassist in an average queercore band, looks down from the stage one night and sees his newly-ex-girlfriend, Tris in the crowd. He can't bear the thought of having to exchange greetings with her and the guy she is standing with, so he turns to the girl next to him, and asks her to pretend to be his girlfriend for the next five minutes.

Norah has a lot on her own mind - her future, music, her own Evil Ex - and if it were just her she had to look after, she'd tell Nick where to go, but he might have a van or a car, and she needs to get her drunken friend Caroline home in one piece...

My first ebook! I really liked this, it was just the kind of YA book I'd have loved as a teenager - people, cooler than me, having relationship issues and new romances, swearing a lot, and participating in makeout scenes that give those in Diary of a Crush a real run for their money! Phew!

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, as you might expect, is told from the alternating perspectives of Nick and Norah. I preferred Nick's narration, as I expected. I've read solo books by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan before and I like David Levithan's writing more. But even though I didn't like her narration quite as much, Norah was still an interesting character with an enjoyable voice.

Both Nick and Norah tell their stories in a style that is very stream-of-consciousness, and at times I found this hard to follow, especially as the whole story takes place over the course of one night/day and the pace varies a lot. Every now and then I'd have to stop, go back a few pages and re-read to remind myself what was physically going on.

I really liked the secondary characters. There's a whole cast of weird and wonderful individuals who show up, disappear, and re-appear throughout the novel. I loved that although Tris seems pretty horrible at first, nicer sides to her personality are revealed later on.

I saw the film adapation of Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, with Michael Cera and Kat Dennings (object of much girlcrushing) a few years ago and really liked it. The book is quite different - the film has more of a plot beside the romance - but they are both enjoyable in their own right.

Book Review: Witch Finder, by Ruth Warburton

Luke Lexton is pleased to be finally old enough to become a member of the Malleus Maleficorum, a secret brotherhood of men sworn to rid the earth of witches. His initiation ceremony involves three trials, the first two take place that evening, but he is given a month to complete the third and final task: kill the witch selected at the ceremony, or his own life will be forfeit. He is nervous, but determined - the witch is only a teenage girl, though she comes from what is known to be one of the most powerful families.

The girl is Rosa Greenwood, whose formerly wealthy family of witches are now depending on her to make a good match and secure their social and financial standing. Although she doesn't feel ready for marriage, they have chosen the man they want her to persue, and she wants to save her family's country house and hold onto the happy memories of the place from when her father was still alive.

In order to get close enough to Rosa to kill her, Luke becomes a groom in the Greenwood household. But when he meets her, he discovers that she is not heartless and cruel, like the witches that he has been brought up to hate, and his resolve begins to weaken...

Witch Finder is a prequel to the Winter trilogy, which I haven't read yet, so I was a bit concerned that I would be diving into a world that I wouldn't understand. Happily, this wasn't the case at all.

The story is told with alternating points of view. Rosa and Luke, the two narrators, come from very different backgrounds and contrast nicely. I preferred Luke and thought he was the stronger of the two characters. Rosa is kind and sweet and therefore most interesting when she is angry! I'm looking forward to seeing her develop. Hopefully we'll get to see a lot more of her magic.

I really liked the way in which fantasy is blended with historical realism. Rosa, as a young woman in the Victorian era, does not have a particularly pleasant life. Her family are upper-class witches with very little money, so Rosa has many rules to obey and social pressures to conform to, and must dedicate a lot of time and energy to hiding the fact that she is on the verge of poverty. Marriage will mean giving up any independence as once married, her husband will own her and all her property. Her mother and her brother, Alexis, want to marry her off to stabilise their own financial and social positions and don't care about her future happiness. There are quite a few scenes that I found difficult to read, when characters act particularly cruelly towards each other, but they gave the story a lot more gravitas than it otherwise would have had and I'm glad they were included. I also liked the details about servants and factory work.

My main criticism is that there was not much explanation of how magic works in this world. At one point Rosa mentions childhood spells, but doesn't explain how witches learn to use magic, or where it comes from. Rosa is more powerful than her mother and brother, and I wondered why. However, I expect that the Winter trilogy covers this, so many readers probably already know all about the rules of magic and don't need a second explanation here.

I wasn't a massive fan of the romance, but it is more of  a slow-burner than an instalove, and I'll be interested to see what turns the story takes next in the sequel, Witch Hunt, out later this year.

Many thanks to the publisher for allowing me to read Witch Finder through NetGalley.

Witch Finder was the Bookish Brits Book Club choice for February 2014! Find out what we all thought of it by watching the video below:

Book Review: Kiki Strike: Inside the Shadow City, by Kirsten Miller

One day, Ananka Fishbein looks out of her book-filled apartment and notices two weird things. One is a strange creature, covered in dirt. The second is a large hole in the ground that appears to contain a room. The creature disappears quickly, but she investigates the hole and discovers a passageway that leads deep underground. Ananka is interrupted by two city workers, and although she gets away, the hole is filled in, and the passage buried. She can't get her new discovery out of her head, nor can she ignore the tiny, blonde and  dangerous Kiki Strike, a girl she's only just noticed at school. Kiki may have always been there, or may have just arrived. Ananka struggles to understand what's going on as she is recruited into The Irregulars, a group of former Girl Scouts about to embark on the biggest adventure of their young lives.

Kiki Strike: Inside the Shadow City has a great concept. I first read about it at Leaving Shangri-La, and fell in love immediately with the idea of renegade Girl Scouts exploring an underground city beneath New York. However, I did find it a little slow going for at least the first half of the book. Ananka has to do a lot of waiting, and I longed for it to be pacier. Ultimately, the pay-off is a lot of fun but I feel that I will enjoy future books in this series more, having already gotten through all the build-up.

Ananka, Kiki, DeeDee, Oona, Betty, and Luz, are almost your stock girl-gang stereotypes. There's a bookish narrator, an enigmatic ringleader and martial artist, a chemist, a forger, a costumier, and an inventor. Still, I loved the dynamics and drama in their friendships. A lot of the tension comes from Kiki's mysterious nature, which the other girls find both fascinating and aggravating. Oona and Luz are probably the most developed of the other characters, in terms of home life and backstory, and I'm looking forward to seeing more of them and to discovering the details of DeeDee and Betty's lives.

One of the quirks of this book is that every chapter ends with an unconventionally educational little section about such things as hidden cities, lying and self-defence. I absolutely loved these lists, especially the hidden cities one, and spent hours looking them up on the internet!

The Shadow City itself doesn't get that much page time in the end, and I was a little sad about that, but the scenes set there were fantastic. I loved all the action, with rats and explosions and maps! The blurb for the second book, Kiki Strike: The Empress's Tomb, suggests that it will be revisited, so I will have to track down a copy soon!

All in all, I thought that although Kiki Strike: Inside the Shadow City takes a while to get going, it was still an intriguing and enormously fun start to a series, and I will definitely read the second book to see where it goes. I think it would make a great film, though you'd need a pretty big budget for the Shadow City!

Monday Amusements 12

Today's library selections and renewals, Instagrammed.

Hello all! I'm afraid this Monday's amusements list is a short one, as I've been ill and unable to use my computer as much as usual for the past couple of weeks. On the bright side, I have managed to do a fair bit of reading, and finished five books in June, so expect more reviews soon! Hurrah, that rhymes.

Why are we here? Who is this for? What are we going to do?, is an excellent post by Day Al-Mohamed at Disability in Kidlit (via @susieday)

Jim at YA Yeah Yeah is celebrating his favourite books so far this year AND his 500th post, with a giveaway! 

We all should know this, but I think it bears repeating: Why Book Bloggers are Important, at A Day Dreamer's World.

I've heard of a few of the books on this list from The Guardian, In translation: nine authors pick their favourite children's fiction, but others are new to me and really intriguing.

Finally, the Once Upon a Bookcase LGBTQ YA Month schedule has been posted, and it looks AMAZING.

Book Review: Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins

Warning: this book is the third in a trilogy and therefore will inevitably contain spoilers for the first two books, The Hunger Games and Catching Fire.

District 12 is no more and Katniss and her family are now living underground in District 13, which is preparing for war with the Capitol. Everyone is expecting her to live up to the name she was given, and act as the figurehead for the revolution, the Mockingjay. But Katniss is as distrustful as ever, and with everything she's been through, it is a role she reluctantly accepts...

I'd been avoiding spoilers ever since Mockingjay came out but I managed, nonetheless, to get the impression that it was a controversial ending to the trilogy. Some people love it, others hate it, and still more think that it was okay, but would have preferred things to go differently. I wasn't sure what to expect. I knew what I wanted to see more of, and prepared myself to be disappointed.

I wasn't. I really liked it. I thought that it made sense, and stayed true to what the author wanted to get out of the story. I don't think that the Hunger Games are reality television taken to its most drastic extreme. I think that they are a more honest and direct version of what happens in real life. The Hunger Games are war in miniature. In our world, politicians, kings, and whatever else we call them, entertain themselves and gain glory by waging wars on each others' territories, largely by making other people's children fight each other. In my opinion, The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay tell a story that is essentially anti-war, and the most effective way to persuade people of the horrors of war is to show us the havoc that it wreaks upon the minds and lives of those that fight it. Therefore, what I wanted and expected was to see more of the victors. I wanted to find out in more detail how being in the Hunger Games had affected them, and I did. I wasn't that concerned about the 'love triangle' or even what happens at the end of the war, but as it turns out I approved of those endings completely.

Some readers think that Katniss isn't as 'strong' in Mockingjay, but I never saw her as weak. She has been changed by everything she's been through, but that's realistic! If she just continuously kicked butt all the time it wouldn't be as exciting and interesting, and I think she became a more rounded character in this book. She thinks more carefully before she acts, and gets better at listening to other people. However, I don't think that she has essentially changed all that much.

I really liked that we got to see a lot of political intrigue. Seeing how District 13 produced their propaganda went some way towards explaining how the Capitol kept control for so long.

My most major criticism would have to be that, as with the other two books, the pacing isn't very even. I hink that this is even more obvious in Mockingjay, where it speeds up so much towards the end that I found it a bit difficult to remember everything that was going on. and to keep track of the passage of time. I also found the earlier chapters a bit disjointed, thanks to the lengthy mental tangents Katniss went off on. I could see the purpose of these sections, but they (especially the one about 'The Hanging Tree') could have been shorter and more neatly written.

There are two things that I'm not sure about. The first is the speed of the final events. I felt that everything whizzed by, some action scenes were missing, and I wanted to know more about the political mechanics, but on the other hand, I don't think that the book was ever going to go into great detail on that, because it's narrated by Katniss, whose interest in politics is minimal. The other is the epilogue. I feel like the chapter before would have made a good ending on its own, but the epilogue does revisit an imporant issue from book one, although I'm not quite happy with the way it turned out.

What did you think?

Monday Amusements 11

Tour my bookshelves!  

This is a bit of a short one as I've been really busy lately, and my last Monday Amusements post here was massive! I thought I'd post my bookshelf tour video above, just in case some of you have missed it, and while we're on the subject of self-promotion, I was interviewed by Michelle of Fluttering Butterflies for her Celebrating British Bloggers series! Please do go read and leave a comment, I'd love to know what you think of my answers! Now, onto other people's posts!

On Friday, Publishing Perspectives posted a very silly piece bemoaning an imaginary lack of 'regular kid lit' (via half a dozen tweeters, I think the first I saw was @elockhart's). I mean. SERIOUSLY. It's called contemporary YA, and anyone who goes into a library or a bookstore or even just spends half an hour looking at book blogs is sure to stumble across it. Jim at YA Contemporary has even made a quite long list of recommendations.

I love seeing desk setups, so 'Our Writing Spaces' at Author Allsorts was right up my street. I am jealous of those with desks by windows. My desk is in the corner of my room, surrounded by wall.

I really enjoyed this interview with Marilyn Kaye at Chicklish, about her new book Gloss. I'm all for more historical fiction set in the latter half of the 20th Century!

If only I could have read 'Things I learnt at university' at So Many Books, So Little Time, before I finished my degrees! I completely agree with the point about making the most of all that time! I also liked Sophie's list of underrated reads. I would also nominate Holly Black's Modern Faerie Tale series!

Onto my favourite reviews, as I have quite a few! Readaraptor's review of Stray by Monica Hesse, went straight into my wishlist folder. It's a really unique sounding book, and I haven't seen any other reviews. I also loved Magan at Rather Be Reading's enthusiasm for When You Were Here by Daisy Whitney and Jo at weartheoldcoat's love for The Vast Fields of Ordinary, by Nick Burd. Ultraviolet by R. J. Anderson has been on my wishlist for years and Jo of Once Upon a Bookcase's review has encouraged me to hurry up and read it!

Are there any posts you've really enjoyed that I've missed? Or have you written something recently that you're really proud of and would like to share? Please do comment and check out the archives!

Monday Amusements 10

My first video post, from the Top Ten Tuesday of the week before last. I'll be posting my second video this week!

Wow, I'm up to ten of these already! I felt ill yesterday evening after a busy day eating cyclindrical sandwiches, scones, and cakes, and drinking tea, so had to do all the work today, but hopefully this is still a readable and enjoyable list!

Once Upon a Bookcase will be having yet another (excellent, I'm sure) theme month! July will be LGBTQ YA Month, and I'm looking forward to reading the posts.

Malinda Lo, who wrote the wonderful fairy tale retelling Ash, posted this thoughtful and inspiring piece about Sex and YA Fiction. It's full of Very Good Points.

I don't think that I will ever choose to get a tattoo but nevertheless, I enjoyed this list of 50 Incredible Tattoos Inspired By Books. Also on Buzzfeed, 25 Signs You're Addicted to Books.

Ink, by Amanda Sun, is currently on my TBR and has one of the most gorgeous covers I've ever seen. Right now you can download the eBook prequel for free!

I've wanted to read Zoe Marriott's books for ages, but her post for SisterSpooky's Geek Week, How Do I Love Geeks, Let me Count the Ways, made me want to run to the library, right now. Too bad it's closed...

I loved Quinn's choice of Top Ten Tuesday topic last week - Top Ten Ridiculous Character Names. I don't mind Echo, as it's a name from mythology and I love those, but the rest are pretty silly. Especially Patch. I know the Hush, Hush series is really popular (though I don't think it's my thing) but Patch? Like Quinn said, it's a dog's name! The allure is lost on me, but then I also couldn't imagine Edward Cullen as attractive when he wore pale blue sweaters and beige leather jackets. I do love giving characters unusual names though!

Mur Lafferty wrote a quick, important post about Helping Authors. And not helping them. I'm pretty sure that most book bloggers do all of the good and none of the bad!

I absolutely adored the latest in Michelle at Fluttering Butterflies' Bookshelf Requirements series, in which Hannah (@AitchLove) shares her love of Arthurian literature. I definitely need to investigate her recommendations, when I was a kid I was obsessed with the King Arthur legend.

Liesel Hill's post about the origins of the Pied Piper story was really interesting, and quite sad too.

Why is it so bad to judge a book by its cover? wonders Natassia at Literary Escapism. I have to admit, I find myself judging books by their covers more and more. Covers indicate what kind of book is likely to be inside, and there are some genres and topics that I have no interest in and want to avoid. A well-chosen, attractive cover also indicates to me that the publisher had high enough hopes for the book to spend time and money making sure that it was properly presented.

I'd been planning to read The Great Gatsby soon anyway, but if I hadn't been convinced that it was time to give this classic a go, this post at So Many Books, So Little Time would have done the job.

Onto my favourite reviews this fortnight! You Look Different in Real Life by Jennifer Castle went straight onto my wishlist, thanks to Magan at Rather Be Reading - "one of the happiest surprises of 2013"? Yes please!

Raimy at Readaraptor's review of Melvin Burgess' The Hit was honest and interesting, as was Cicely's review of The Moon and More by Sarah Dessen, which compared it to her other books. I also enjoyed seeing Michelle at Fabbity Fab Book Reviews' review of How My Summer Went Up in Flames by Jennifer Salvato Doktorski and Sophie at So Many Books, So Little Time's review of The Humans, by Matt Haig.

Finally, tooting my own horn (again) here - last week on this fleeting dream was Diary of a Crush week! Please do check out my posts, I'd love to know what you think.

J-17, Diary of a Crush and my teenage pursuit of cool, or: Edie Wheeler, the world's coolest girl...definitely

It's the final day of Diary of a Crush week. The books are out in shiny new print editions today, and you can also get the trilogy plus the Diary of a Grace novella in e-book form, should you prefer. Yay!

Today I shall be mostly talking about myself, and using the word 'cool' a ridiculous number of times. I hope you enjoy it!

Warning: this post contains massive spoilers for the Diary of a Crush trilogy. I read the ending before the beginning, you don't have to. Stop right now and go read the books, if you want to and haven't already!

 

Diary of a Crush and my J-17 mags, radiating cool. A beautiful image I'm sure you'll agree.

I've always been a magazine fiend. I've still got my hoards of Girl Talk and Art Attack from childhood, though I'll be sorting through them soon. Last year I threw out several editions of Safeway (yes, the freebie from the supermarket that got taken over by Morrisons), and tore out the pages that I wanted to keep from countless other store magazines - though it took me until this year to tackle my piles of Spirit, the Superdrug magazine, because I could hardly bear to dismantle all those beautiful make-up photos. In my teens I read Mizz, and then Sugar, and then Sugar and J-17, and then finally just J-17.

To explain my love, we must rewind to Guide camp in the early Noughties. One of the girls in my tent had a copy of J-17 that we flicked through, and it seemed so much cooler than any other magazine I'd read. It seemed to be aimed at a slightly older audience than Sugar, but without being completely boy-obsessed like Bliss, which I never could stand. The photoshoots were edgier and the articles meatier and I wanted it.
One essential fact about my teenage self: I desperately wanted to be cool. I was lanky and bony, with glasses and flat hair, and one proper friend. All I wanted to do all day was read books, write stories, sing along to music, and occasionally play my keyboard. I liked Guide camp because I didn't go to school with anyone there, so nobody knew that they had to ignore me if they wanted to be cool, and most of them would happily chat to me and even invite me to games.

To be honest, I wasn't even sure what cool was. I caught a whiff of it every now and then, when an interesting song was played on the radio, or a woman walked past with a quirkier outfit than I usually got to see. I muddled my way through popular culture, listening to whatever everybody else was playing, and wearing pedal pushers and karma beads that year everybody else did. But J-17 was cool. I just knew it.

A month or two or three later, after I'd finally plucked up the courage to buy a magazine that I was sure was for girls that were much cooler than me (ie. any degree of cool at all), I was delighted. I've also always loved make-up. And there, in the first copy of J-17 that I bought, was an article about how to do punk-style make-up, with actual intructions and impressive photos. Other magazines' beauty editorials were vague and uninspiring compared with this riot of colour. There was also an article about kissing, and reviews of music by bands that I had never heard of, and fashion pages that were actually interesting, and it was all so incredibly cool.

Finally, on the back page, I read the Diary of a Crush column for the first time. It didn't make much sense, being one entry in an ongoing series, but as the months passed I fell in love, because Edie Wheeler was the coolest of all cool girls. Let's summon my teenage self from the depths of my mind and look at the evidence:

1. She was 18. I was only 13, which meant that Edie was basically the same as God to me.
2. She was named after Edie Sedgwick and Tim Wheeler, of Ash fame
3. She was a WAITRESS (seriously, height of cool)
4. She was in a band (NO WAIT THIS IS THE HEIGHT OF COOL)
5. She was dating an artboy (I only discovered what an artboy was because of J-17, and thank God, I mean Edie, for that)
6. Who was two years older than her! (*swoons from all the cool*)
7. And she didn't live with her parents, in my first issue she'd just moved out! (WARNING: COOL OVERLOAD)

Sadly, after 22 months of excitingly looking forward to J-17 release day each month, the Diary of a Crush column was cancelled without prior warning and J-17 got a new look and editorial direction and started featuring articles about Gareth Gates, so I stopped buying it.

Eventually, I realised that all those things I thought were 'cool' are just things that I really liked, and that's what I missed, still miss, about J-17. The catalogue of discoveries. Finding new things to like each month. Even with the internet, I miss having a reliable guide, and I think that J-17 would have been even better if the internet had been around. I was terrified of record shops, obviously, because they're full of cool people. If I'd been able to Google the bands on their lists of new artists to check out, I might have managed to actually listen to some of them!

But back to the world's coolest girl. Edie. I only started reading J-17 at the tail end of her story, so you can only dream of imagining how thrilled I was when two years later, I was wandering in Waterstone's, and spotted the books on a shelf. I bought them immediately and took them home, where I fell upon my bed and read and read and read, blissfully happy to find out how it all happened at last.

It was comforting to discover that Edie wasn't always as cool as she ended up becoming. At the start of the story, she was 16, which by 2004 was slightly younger than me (and not so cool), and in her first year of college. I was in sixth form myself at the time, and was making new friends, so I could relate to the excitement and anxiety of meeting new people. Edie wasn't a waitress or in a band, she lived with her parents, and of course the artboy was just a crush. She still wore cool clothes and attracted cool friends, but her beginners-cool seemed a lot more attainable.

So I could be cool too, if I was brave enough. It took a few more years, but eventually I started actually speaking to people, going to events that I thought sounded interesting, and buying clothes that I actively enjoyed wearing and then putting them on regularly, even just to go to uni or the shops. I'm not sure if anyone would consider me cool, but I'm happy, and have been for several years now. I hope that would impress my teenage self, but honestly? She'd probably be more impressed with the fact that I own copies of all the Diary of a Crush columns in book form, to refer to for knowledge of 'cool' at any time. 

Comments will be much appreciated. I can't have been the only one that was in love with the idea of being cool...

Previously: I reviewed the final book in the trilogy, Sealed with a Kiss.

Book Review: Diary of a Crush: Sealed with a Kiss, by Sarra Manning

Warning: this book is the third in a series, and will inevitably contain spoilers for the first book, French Kiss and the second, Kiss and Make Up.

So Edie and Dylan are back together again and seem to have achieved some level of stability. There's no more sneaking around and kissing other people - but there's a dark spot looming on the horizon. Edie is due to head off to London for university in September while Dylan has to finish his own degree in Manchester. To make the most of the summer, they decide to blow their combined savings and go on the road trip across the USA that they've always talked about. Across the ocean, with no friends nearby to help them blow off steam, spending long days with only each other for company, their relationship becomes difficult once again. Will they work past it, or finally break up for real?

The third in the trilogy, Sealed with a Kiss brings another change of tone and atmosphere. Whereas French Kiss featured just-out-of-school Edie playing hard to get with an equally difficult Dylan, and Kiss and Make Up was all about heartbreak, fighting, and lust, Sealed with a Kiss is about adulthood and big decisions. Edie's patience is put to the test as Dylan finally starts to open up and confront his past. I think this is handled really well, and shows how both characters have developed in the last few years.

In Kiss and Make Up we saw a few of Edie and Dylan's e-mails to each other, but in Sealed with a Kiss, Edie regularly e-mails Grace, who has taken over guitarist duties in Mellowstar and has a crush of her own. This was originally the set-up for Grace to become the new diarist in the J-17 column, and you can read her diary entries in the e-novella Diary of a Grace, though I'll warn you that it ends too soon! Sealed with a Kiss also features e-mails between Dylan and Shona, which I loved. I think that their friendship is one of the best in the series, much as I love Poppy and her girl gang.

But it's not all serious business as Poppy acquires an amusingly odd boyfriend in Jesse, the band perform in front of an audience, and D and Eeeds see the sights of America and enjoy being young and in love. There's plenty of fun amongst the angst, though I always find it bittersweet as I know the end is nigh.

The spine of my copy of Sealed with a Kiss is still unbroken, and the pages are only slightly warped, whereas my copies of French Kiss and Kiss and Make Up are worn and battered-looking. I haven't read Sealed with a Kiss that often, compared with the other two books, and I think that my reluctance to reread it comes partly from wanting to avoid the end. Rereading the first two books, there's always more to come, but although Sealed with a Kiss has probably the most perfect ending that this trilogy could have, it's still an ending. There are glimpses of Edie and Dylan in Diary of a Grace (or at least there were in the columns!), but Edie never picks up her diarist's pen again.

However, I know I've also avoided rereading it because I read the road trip section too many times in my mid-teens. It was originally a free-gift book, American Dream, and I adored it, despite having missed both previous books and knowing almost nothing about Edie and Dylan's history. Seriously. I reread it every couple of months and took it on holiday with me a couple of times just so that I wouldn't be without it.

[I know. Wasn't there a library in my town? There is a library in my town! It's great! But back then contemporary teen fiction books were these tiny thin things that you could read six of in an afternoon - not an exaggeration, I did this every third Saturday after my library trip. American Dream was far better than any of them.]

As you might imagine, by the time I got my greedy hands on the Bite edition of the trilogy in 2004, I knew American Dream almost by heart, and despite my love, I was kind of sick of it. So I read Sealed with a Kiss hungrily up until the part where I recognised the entries and then I flicked over the rest! I've read it again since but it was quite hard to make myself do it.

What I'm trying to say is that I hope the teens of today love this series as much as I did and read it over and over until they're nearly sick of it. I then hope they stop and go read something else for a bit before they return, and that they lend their copies to their friends, and buy more copies as presents for their younger cousins! I loved it as a teen, and despite its age and change of format, I think that it stands up well today, as a fun, addictive, fast-paced and romantic trilogy (plus novella). Dylan is still the ultimate book boyfriend, and Edie the coolest fictional girl in the world.


Previously: A Top Ten Tuesday and discussion post about 'toxic' boys like Dylan.
Next up: I wrote about how much I wanted to be cool, and how J-17 was a massive influence on me.

Don't You Know That They're Toxic? - A Guide to Bad Love Interests (and Top Ten Tuesday)

Today's post is going to be a little different, as it's not directly about Diary of a Crush, but is a discussion post about a topic familiar to all DoaC-loving hearts. If you want to skip to the Top Ten, just scroll down until you see the bold and centred heading!

Bad boys and girls! The drama! The suspense! The muscles! The sardonically raised eyebrows! So many of us love them, so many of us hate them. I think that there are, broadly speaking, three types of "bad" love interest in YA literature, though plenty of characters belong to multiple categories.

Type one is the love with a dangerous lifestyle. They may be strong, they may be a good fighter, but they're always getting into fights, and could drag you into them. You are supposed to swoon over their bulging muscles and readiness to defend your honour. Vampires and other supernatural creatures almost always fit this type.

Type two is controlling, and perhaps manipulative and stalkerish, though they claim to love the narrator and have their best interests at heart. If you read popular books or listen to other people talk about them, you know who I'm talking about!

Type three is the one who claims not to be romantic. This is more of an emotional danger. They don't do serious relationships. Until they meet the narrator, who appeals to the softer side that they had all along. Any further drama is caused by their fear that they aren't good enough, due to their history and/or background.

The thing that I think unites all these characters is the danger. Not the danger-in-narrative, that type one could break your heart by getting killed or could get you hurt in the crossfire, but the danger that you'll romanticise the situation when you meet a potential partner who is actually bad for you.

There are people with dangerous lifestyles who won't consider your safety first, or who will lose in fights and get seriously injured, or get you seriously injured. There are people who use love as a method of control, and consciously or not, hope that you will do what they want because you depend on them emotionally.

There are people who are not romantically inclined. While some of them might act as if they have romantic thoughts sometimes, because they think it's a good way to get people to spend time with them, there are others who are completely upfront about their aromanticism and are good people. But even when someone says outright that they don't imagine themselves having a romantic relationship ever, it can be difficult to believe them. We see so many fictional characters who claim these feelings and then change their minds that many of us think it's the natural, inevitable course of events. We assume that everybody has the same definition of love that we do, and that ultimately they will choose to have a long-term romantic relationship, if they meet the right person in the right circumstances (ie. if we love them enough). It's not scientific fact, or destiny. It's just an assumption.

I know that some people reading this will say that everyone with a brain should know the difference between fantasy and reality, but sometimes it's not very easy, when you grow up surrounded by these stories.
I'm not against "bad" boy or girl characters. I don't find violence attractive, so pure type ones often leave me cold, yet I love a coming of age story in which the characters become better people and learn to accept themselves and the love of another (sigh...where was I?). I just prefer books in which either the narrator avoids a genuinely bad love interest and chooses to roll solo or couple up with someone else, or the author shows us both the romance and the danger. This could be by making the bad love interest a narrator, by including another character with similar traits who doesn't redeem themselves, or by giving the story a tragic ending. Cue list -

Top Ten YA Books Featuring 'Bad' and/or Genuinely Bad Love Interests

1. In the Diary of a Crush series, Dylan, a type three, is contrasted with Carter, another boy (or maybe man, as he's 23) who acts caring one minute and callous the next. Unlike Dylan, however, he turns out to be a right nasty piece of work in the end and always appears to be a bit creepy, as he's TWENTY-THREE (Edie is 17).

2. In Let's Get Lost, by the same author, the narrator is a bad girl, who tries to hide the truth (including her age) from her love interest.

3. In Spellbound, Emma and Brandon's (a combo of type one and three), arch-nemesis is another bad boy at school - controlling, egotisical and truly frightening.

4. In The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, Frankie's boyfriend Matthew wants to control what kind of girl she gets to be, and what she is allowed to know about him.

5. Jackson, from the Ruby Oliver series, flits from girl to girl and back again, before and after dating Ruby. She struggles with her feelings for him until book three, when she delivers a withering, straight-to-the-heart-of-the-matter put down that made me punch the air in joy.

6. Cal, from Cate Tiernan's Wicca/Sweep series, is Morgan's first boyfriend. He introduces her to the world of magic and tries to convince her that he loves her, but only succeeds until his ulterior motive begins to show and Morgan meets Hunter, who lacks Cal's easy charisma, but is ultimately a much better boyfriend.

7. Noah is a narrator in Pushing the Limits, so we get to see his thought process and can hypothesise freely about why he's attracted to Echo. The ending is a bit neat and tidy but I loved the characterisation.

8. In Bright Young Things, Cordelia's romance with the boy she's been warned away from has terrible consequences.

9. Surrounded by boys and men who don't respect girls and women, Jack has to decide whether to join in or opt out, in Leader of the Pack.

10. In Night School, Allie thinks that Sylvain is charming and perfect, until an incident that changes her opinion of him. I'm a bit afraid that this series is heading towards redeeming him, though.

How do you feel about 'bad' love interests? What are your favourite books about them?

Further reading/inspiration: Wondrous Reads: Guest Blog: Sarra Manning on Toxic Boys

Writing this post has put this song in my head.

Previously: My review of Kiss and Make Up!
Up next: I review the last book in the Diary of a Crush series, Sealed with a Kiss!

Book Review: Diary of a Crush: Kiss and Make Up, by Sarra Manning

Warning: this book is the second in a series, and will inevitably contain spoilers for the first book, French Kiss

Edie has achieved what she once thought impossible - Dylan is her boyfriend! Unfortunately it's nothing like she anticipated - he's still moody and difficult and sometimes she misses the time when they were just friends.  But when her trust in him is shaken and they break up, she's heartbroken. Just when Edie thinks she's over it all, she meets Dylan's beautiful, controlling new girlfriend Veronique, and becomes determined to get him back again - until Veronique's sly, brother Carter takes an interest in her...

Kiss and Make Up is my favourite of the series to re-read; French Kiss' darker, deeper and naughtier elder sister. The college drama is replaced with personal angst as Edie tries to make up her mind about what she wants from Dylan. Yet again, Edie tries to date somebody else, but she struggles to stop cheating on the standoffish, smug Carter with Dylan, and lets Dylan cheat on Veronique with her. In most stories, I can't stand cheating, but Veronique and Carter are both such fantastically horrible people that I don't mind. There are few bad book boyfriends (although he refuses to let Edie call him her boyfriend) as secretively vicious as Carter, and his sister Veronique is an extraordinarily evil drama queen. They make excellent antagonists, and I just love reading about the havoc they wreak.

I don't think that it's quite as fast-paced as French Kiss, and the relationship drama does spin in circles for a while, eventually reaching an uncomfortable plateau right before the music festival, when of course it all kicks off again. Some of the secondary characters from the previous novel take on a more minor role (Nat, Trent, and to some degree Shona), but Edie finds a new best friend in wannabe-rock-goddess Poppy, whose entourage includes boy-mad bandmates Darby and Atsuko and shy, sidelined little-sister Grace (the girl who has a diary novella of her own).

If you loved French Kiss, you'll probably love Kiss and Make Up - it's got more angst, more lust, nastier villains and some undeniably hilarious moments. What Edie writes after meeting Veronique makes me burst out laughing every time!

There should be more books set at music festivals. I've only read two, ever - this and Festival, but it makes a great setting and a convenient method of getting parents out of the way!

This review is based on the 2004 edition - there may be minor changes in the 2013 release.



Previously: I played dress-up Edie!
Next up: A discussion post and a Top Ten Tuesday all about toxic boys!

Book Review: Diary of a Crush: French Kiss, by Sarra Manning

Edie Wheeler has just moved to Manchester with her parents and cat and is starting college for the first time. Everyone else there seems to know each other and she feels left out of everything. Spotting Dylan, a gorgeous art student, the boy of her dreams, only seems to make things worse as she feels sure she'll never get to know him. Frustrated with her lack of friends, Edie signs up for a photography class, where she is forced to work with Dylan, but she can barely speak in his presence and she doesn't have any good ideas. Dylan and his friend Shona just seem so much cooler than Edie could ever be. Then she starts talking to Mia, who is dating Dylan's friend Paul. It's a relief to finally have a friend, but Mia isn't at all helpful when it comes to her crush and when Dylan kisses Edie, then ignores her afterwards, she doesn't know what to do.

I've read this book so many times before that I've lost count, but when I received a copy of the cute new edition published by Atom Books I decided to read it and see how it holds up. I still found Edie to be a witty and engaging diarist. I like how she doesn't shy away from sharing the embarrassing things she does, and how self aware she is after she does something silly like throw a stereotypical teenage strop. Although she begins the diary as a nervous, self-conscious narrator, she stands up for herself when she needs to, even if it takes a long time for her to build up her resolve sometimes.

Of course I loved Dylan, as usual, but this time around he seemed more awkward, which actually made him more endearing in a strange kind of way. Edie knows what she wants, it's Dylan who is confused and flighty, and both of them act like inconsiderate fools when they're in the mood. I also still loved all the other characters - Shona still seems like a paragon of hipness, Nat and Trent are adorable (I always miss them in the following books, where they fade into the background). Josh, Edie's Dylan-substitute-boyfriend is endearingly deluded - I just wanted to take the poor boy aside and tell him to lavish his affections somewhere else. Villianous Mia's personal delusions are not so sweet, but I do feel sorry for her, and suspect that she wouldn't be playing games for attention if she had any friends.

The story is very fast paced, because Edie only writes when something has happened or to complain when something's on her mind. There are only 205 pages, and there is so much friendship and relationship drama in the first half of the novel that the pages fly by, and before long I was on the ferry with Edie, on the way to Paris for the photography trip!

Having read a previous edition, I was interested to see what changes would be made. Apart from the inclusion of an author's afterword, all of them are quite superficial - cultural references updated, sentences cut to improve the flow of the text - but it was quite weird to me to imagine Edie and Dylan walking around in 2013! Because I've been reading the 2004 edition about once a year since it came out, in my head I had them frozen in that time, wearing clothes that I thought were cool when I was a teenager. Art boys were better dressed back then, I'm afraid to say. Nowadays they all seem to wear the same checked shirts and skinny jeans and beanie hats (as described at one point in the novel) - I kind of preferred them in baggier jeans!

I would recommend French Kiss to fans of books featuring moody boys, friendship drama, and amazing kissing scenes. I've read hundreds of books since I read this for the first time, and I still think that French Kiss has some of the best kissing scenes of all time. The Louvre. The discotheque. The hotel room...



Previously: I introduced the Diary of a Crush trilogy in my first Celebrating Series post!

Next up: I utilise my hard-earned Polyvore skills and play dress-up-Edie!