Five More Contemporary YA Books to Read Before YALC

YALC is in ELEVEN DAYS TIME! But don't worry, there's still time to get some reading done...maybe just a little if you've got to work! If you want some moral support, the YALC Readathon Challenge is still open, and if my first recommendations post wasn't enough, I am here for you:

1. Counting Stars, by Keris Stainton

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Counting Stars is at the older end of YA, it could be called NA (New Adult), and it is my favourite of Keris' books that I've read so far. It follows Anna who moves to Liverpool after she finishes school to move into a shared house and work at a theatre, keeping her YouTube channel going all the while. Anna and her housemates deal with adulthood in very different ways, and it was really interesting and entertaining to see them work their way through grown-up problems for the first time. I wrote a draft of a NA novel last year and Counting Stars, although quite different from what I'm working on, confirmed my belief that it's important that we have more books featuring characters of this age. Keris will be leading a workshop on Writing YA on the Saturday at YALC.

2. Hacker, by Malorie Blackman


This is a really quick read so ideal if you haven't got much reading time in the next couple of weeks! Vicky's father, a programmer at a bank, is wrongfully accused of stealing a million pounds. To clear his name, she logs into the bank's system and tries to work out what has been going on. It was first published in 1992, so it is a bit dated - for a more detailed explanation, watch the video above - but it's still a quick read, ideal for younger teens.

3. Remix, by Non Pratt

Non will be joining Sophia Bennett on the 'Teenage Soundtrack: Music in YA' panel, and rightly so, as Remix is all about the power of music to bring friends together. I made it sound totally cheesy then, didn't I? It's not, I promise! Remix is about best friends, Kaz and Ruby, who are going to a music festival together. Their favourite band in the world is playing, and a bunch of their friends are going. In theory, this should be the perfect break from normality, but both of them have secrets they're trying not to let slip out... I did a full review of Remix here.

4. Lobsters, by Tom Ellen and Lucy Ivison

Another book featuring a music festival is Lobsters, but it's quite different in tone - Remix is more serious, full of friendship and romantic dramas, whereas Lobsters is very much a heartwarming romantic comedy. The tag line is 'A socially awkward love story' and that is exactly what you get, as Sam and Hannah try and fail and try again to get together. It's very funny. In fact, I don't think I've stopped laughing at it and I read it months ago - lines from the book pop into my head sometimes and I start cracking up all over again. I would share my favourite line, the one I laugh at the most, but I don't want to spoil it for you. Just read it for yourself! The authors are leading a workshop on co-writing.

5. Nobody's Girl, by Sarra Manning

If festivals aren't your thing, why not take a trip to Paris with Bea, who has been obsessed with France ever since her mum first told her that her absent father was a Parisien. When she gets the chance to explore Paris for real, she can't resist - even though she was meant to be in Spain with her school's Mean Girl clique. She finds romance and adventure and gets into a lot of trouble with her mum. My full review is here.

Have you read any of these? If you haven't, get on it! While we're having this heatwave, why not roll with it and take copies of Remix and or Lobsters to the park? Go on! Join the Readathon!

Many thanks to Hot Key Books for sending me a copy of Counting Stars and to Walker Books for sending me Remix.

Five Contemporary YA Books to Read before YALC

As host of the 2016 YALC Readathon Challenge I've been thinking a lot about what books I would recommend by authors attending YALC. Hopefully I'll do several posts in this series, but I thought I'd start with five contemporary YA books, as that is my favourite genre!

1. Girl Out of Water, by Nat Luurtsema

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This is the first book I read for the YALC Readathon Challenge (go on, join me!) and it was a great way to *PUN ALERT* dive in - Girl Out of Water follows Lou Brown's attempts to find new friends and a new place in the world following her failure to get into Olympic swimming school.
It's funny (Nat is on the Funny YA panel), heartwarming, and deals with an issue I think is underexplored in fiction - coping with failure. Not everyone is going to succeed against all the odds. Sometimes the odds are never in your favour - and you keep going, like Lou learns to do.

2. Love Song, by Sophia Bennett

I have read some amazing books so far this year and plan to read many more - but I'm sure whatever happens this will be in my top five. I was not expecting to fall in love with a story about a girl who goes on tour with a boyband, but reader, I fell HARD.

I am finding @sophiabennett's Love Song so unputdownable I am literally reading it while I #ukyachat. Not even kidding I'm on page 156

— Julianne Benford (@ladyjulianne) April 8, 2016

@SnugglingonSofa @sophiabennett I basically had to abandon my own writing to finish it because it was so addictive! I even ignored Two Dots!

— Julianne Benford (@ladyjulianne) April 11, 2016

I am really looking forward to the Music in YA panel!

3. London Belongs to Us, by Sarra Manning

Both Sarra Manning's 2016 releases. View on Instagram

If you've never read any books by Sarra before this is a great place to start - though if you're spoiler-averse you may want to read Guitar Girl and Adorkable first. An enormously entertaining love letter to London filled with snappy one-liners, it follows Sunny's pursuit of her wayward boyfriend (or is he ex-boyfriend?) over one night and features pastries, parties, perilous road journeys, dramatic confrontations and hairspray. There are also several girls you'll wish you could be friends with - highly appropriate as Sarra is on the #SquadGoals panel.

4. Boy Meets Boy, by David Levithan
Look at my beautiful hardback. Just look at it.

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If just gazing at the cover isn't enough to make you pick it up, this is an LGBT classic. It's a pretty straightfoward romance story with the usual tropes but it's set at a school where there isn't really any homophobia - it's a utopian vision of what school should be like, and although it's not realistic, it's lovely to disappear into a world where things are a little more as they should be.

5. My Secret Rockstar Boyfriend, by Eleanor Wood

From my 'Music March'. View on Instagram

This is a funny and surprisingly realistic story about Tuesday Cooper, a music blogger who starts getting comments from her favourite rockstar. One thing leads to another and he becomes the secret boyfriend of the title, getting her into trouble with friends and family alike. It's really interesting seeing how she deals with the mess she's in and moves towards adulthood.
What books by YALC authors do you recommend? Would you choose different books by these authors? Let me know! And don't forget to vote for your favourites!

Book Review: The Worst Girlfriend in the World, by Sarra Manning

Franny and Alice are two teenage girls stuck in Merrycliffe-on-Sea, a seaside town so boring that it doesn't even have real hipsters. So far, they've survived the interminable dullness by sticking together. Nothing has ever threatened their friendship, even though Alice has an unfortunate habit of pulling other girls' boyfriends and an romantic-attention-span so short that she's been dubbed "The Worst Girlfriend In The World". But now, Franny is going off to college to do a BTEC and pursue her dreams of being a fashion designer, while Alice stays at their old school, all by herself.

At least they still have the weekends, and can keep up their tradition of sneaking their own drinks into Merrycliffe's dingy, terrible little bar, The Wow, to watch Thee Desperadoes, a band that sounds so bad the girls carry earplugs, but has a gorgeous frontman, Louis. He's been the object of Franny's lust for years and she believes that if he got to know her, he would quickly realise that they're soulmates, and forget all the other girls he's surrounded with.

And then Alice decides to set her sights on Louis...

I have always loved the little glimpses of friendships that we've seen in Sarra Manning's books - Edie and Shona, Edie and Poppy, Molly and Jane, Isobel and her clique, the Fashionistas girls, etc. They've played an important role in character development and fuelled the drama, especially in Nobody's Girl and Pretty Things. But they've never been the focus of the story in this way before.

I was expecting the friendship to be a side plot, while the romance was in the spotlight, because let's be honest, it usually is, but it was actually the other way around. I was surprised and delighted to find that The Worst Girlfriend in the World is all about Franny and Alice, even when they've fallen out. 

I say delighted because Franny and Alice are delightful. They're funny and quirky and believable. They know each other better than they know themselves. And they're different - Franny dreams of becoming a fashion designer and is obsessed with sixties icons. She is obsessed with being creative and finding ways to stand out from the crowd - but at the same time she's shy and has never kissed a boy. Alice is mouthy and bold, dresses to look good and attract boys, and wants to be a hairdresser though her parents are making her finish her A Levels. It's always good to have contrasting interests and personalities and it made the drama seem organic and inevitable.

I loved the other characters too - Franny's classmates at college are a diverse and interesting bunch, and I thought Thee Desperadoes were hilarious, reminding me of all the terrible bands I saw play as a teenager (luckily I didn't have a crush on any of their members so I could just leave the room while they "performed"). Franny's parents are fascinating too - Franny's mum struggles with mental illness and her dad works as a long-haul lorry driver, so is often absent for weeks and weeks.

Merrycliffe is almost a character in its own right too. I enjoyed the small-town details that made it seem like a place that is both comforting and stifling.

The plot is remarkably unpredictable for a book that's obstensibly about two girls fighting over one boy - I was never sure what Franny was going to get away with and what was going to lead to more drama, which made it realistic. The romance that develops was signposted pretty early on, but I didn't mind as there was so much else that did surprise me!

In short: Sarra Manning does friendship. Yours truly swoons.

It's not often that I finish reading a book and want to start it again straight away, but I wanted to reread The Worst Girlfriend in the World immediately. It was basically perfect.

If you were blessed with a proof copy and you haven't read this yet, what are you waiting for? If you haven't got it already preorder it now, or rush to the shops on May 1st.

Have you ever fancied the same person as one of your friends? I never had any Franny and Alice type drama as a) I didn't really fancy anyone until I was 20, and b) I have really different taste to my friends!

Many thanks to Atom for providing me with a proof.

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!

Today's post for Diary of a Crush Week...

...is about fashion, so I decided to post it on my other blog! Just click below to read it!

Fashionable Fiction 1: Edie, from Diary of a Crush

Previously: I reviewed French Kiss!
Next up: I review Kiss and Make-Up, and wonder why there aren't more teen novels featuring music festivals...

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!

Celebrating Series 1: Diary of a Crush

I decided a month or so ago that I wanted to start a new regular feature, and after a few ideas my mind turned to series. I've always loved reading series. I like falling in love with characters and following them over multiple adventures, seeing where the stories take them and how they grow and change. I'm addicted to the thrill of opening the next book and finding out where the characters have got to.

However, I often neglect them. It's easier to pick up a standalone and review it, especially if you've read it before. Series require upkeep and hours of rereading if you really want to do them justice in a review, and that's where this feature comes in. Celebrating Series posts will be overviews, rather than detailed reviews of each book. This will allow me to share my enthusiasm for series I've read in the past, even when it isn't convenient for me to re-read every book. I can also use them to spotlight series that I've already reviewed, when I think they deserve a bit more praise and attention.

I can even use them to kick off themed weeks, like I am doing here!

 Diary of a Crush, in all the forms I own! From the top: Atom's new edition of French Kiss, free with J-17 books Losing It and American Dream, the first Bite editions of the trilogy, and finally, my J-17s! I still love the puntastic, content-relevant spines. 'Same Old Brand New 'Do' will probably make no sense if you were born after 1989 or not in the UK...

I chose the Diary of a Crush trilogy for my first Celebrating Series week, because a) it will be back in print next Thursday, and b) to force myself to stop procrastinating on my reviews!

The series is about a girl named Edie who moves to Manchester from Brighton and develops a crush on Dylan, a beautiful but moody art student (or artboy, for short). Her feelings are so strong that she can't help feeling painfully awkward whenever she's around him or his friends. While working together on a photography project he kisses her, only to start ignoring her almost immediately afterwards. With Dylan switching from hot to cold all the time, and her new friend Mia tugging her into a whirlwind of drama, Edie quickly starts getting fed up of being a shy pushover. The three books deal with the not always lovely reality of being in a relationship, from difficult beginnings to adult decisions, and each of them involve some kind of travelling. French Kiss, naturally, features a college trip to Paris, Kiss and Make-Up, a music festival, and Sealed with a Kiss, a roadtrip across the USA.

This is one of my favourite series of all time, and I have read the books so many times I have lost count. I spent most of my teen years wanting to be Edie, and wanting to date Dylan. When I started reading YA again as an adult, with my newly developed critical eyes, I read lighthearted books and serious books, books about families and books about boyfriends. Quickly, I worked out what I enjoyed the most, and what spoke to the part of me that is stuck forever in her teens. The books I loved had something special about them, the same thing that made me obsess over Diary of a Crush. Eventually I worked out what it was, and why I loved it so much more than almost any other teen book I'd read. It's aspirational.

To my mind, aspiration means something more than wanting the hot boyfriend, though of course Diary of a Crush made me want to snog an artboy - I defy anyone to read it and not want to start hanging around the Tate Modern to check out the eye candy (greatly recommended as a post-Diary of a Crush adventure, have done it multiple times). I coveted Edie's life. I was jealous of her job and band and friendship with Shona and Poppy. It made me want to have more friends and to go places and do creative things.

Honestly, the nostalgic love I have for these books means that I struggle to say anything negative about them. I think that objectively, Let's Get Lost, Nobody's Girl and Adorkable are better written, and it does slightly bug me that some of Edie's friends from the first book disappear or almost disappear later on, but these are the books that gave us Dylan and that started Sarra Manning off on the glorious path of writing books about people who kiss first and engage the brain cell later, and more importantly, girls who grow in confidence as they grow in experience. I will always have a crush on Diary of a Crush.

Next up: I review the new edition of French Kiss and ruminate upon the fact that artboys were actually better dressed in the mid-noughties...

Book Review: Adorkable, by Sarra Manning

Photo by 20after4 (runner up: puck90)

Our heroine, Jeane Smith, is a seventeen-year-old borderline-professional blogger. Jeane has a fair bit in common with real-live fashion bloggers Tavi and Gala Darling, especially when it comes to the activities she gets paid for, but she's older than Tavi and younger than Gala and she's British. Really British. She loves all things dorky, writing very opinionated posts, eating Haribo, and watching cute videos of dogs on YouTube. Although Jeane's career star is on the rise, her parents fund the flat she lives in and she still goes to school, where although it seems everyone follows her blog, they don't spend any time with her outside of class. Her only friend at school is her boyfriend, Barney, though their relationship isn't the most romantic - to say the least.

Our hero is Michael Lee, eighteen and toeing the line of conformity with his faux-hawk and Converse shoes. He's popular and conventionally successful for a teenage boy - good at school and at sports. He lives with his parents and two little sisters and dates the popular and beautiful Scarlett. Everything changes when he starts to suspect that Barney and Scarlett might be having an affair, and decides to tell Jeane.She doesn't believe him until Barney and Scarlett make their affections obvious and several dramas later, somehow, Jeane and Michael end up kissing. And they just can't stay away from each other after that...

I'd been excited about this book ever since Sarra first described it, years ago, and as soon as it was announced that it would be published this year, my excitement went into overdrive. Every time I opened a jiffy bag and didn't find my copy of Adorkable within, I was a little bit disappointed. And then, on the glorious day when it actually arrived, I squealed and did a victory dance. I'm not sure how getting a book you were expecting anyway is a victory, but yeah. It was not much like this. But it was joyful.

I had no idea until I recieved my copy that there would be two narrators. At first I was a bit disappointed, because I often find books written from alternating perspectives to be missing some magic. Either one narrator is a lot more convincing than the other, or the alternating perspective means that I can't really get into the head of either character properly. However, neither of these issues plagued Adorkable. I liked both Jeane and Michael's voices and I felt that it switched between them at just the right moments. I also thought that they both developed equally over the course of the novel, so it was well balanced.

I loved Jeane and Michael's characters - neither of them are immediately nice but I thought that was realistic. Teenagers are not very nice! I was fairly nice and thoughtful for a teenager and I was still a bit of a knobhead 70% of the time. There's no instalove in Adorkable, as they bicker and fight and bicker some more. I really liked that they were both quite arrogant characters. Jeane is a breath of fresh air in a genre filled with girls in with faltering self-esteem. Both Jeane and Michael's families feature in the story but their influence is not overdramaticised, which I really liked. Jeane's family history is sad but she's not traumatised, it's just something she has to deal with.

I also adored the secondary characters - especially Barney and Scarlett. I liked that the story was kind to Scarlett - it would have been easy for it to be mean and it wasn't. There is also a cameo appearance from a couple of Guitar Girl characters. Complete tangent - Guitar Girl characters have cameoed in at least three other books now. When are we going to get some Diary of a Crush cameos? I know Edie or Dylan is extremely unlikely, but how about Poppy? Mellowstar are mentioned in Guitar Girl but she never appears. Or her boyfriend from Sealed With A Kiss, Jesse, because he's hilarious. Or maybe Darby and/or Atsuko, boy-chasing? ANYWAY...

Twitter plays a pretty important role in Adorkable and I was really pleased with the way it's presented. It's not used in a gimmicky way at all, it's completely realistic in my opinion, and that's quite refreshing. There were quite a few novelty books published in the early '00s using text messaging and/or e-mail to tell the stories and happily Adorkable is nothing like those. 

Other things I loved in Adorkable include: the dialogue (I heart Sarra Manning's dialogue, forever and ever and ever), the feminism (particularly in relation to matters of the physical nature, ahem), the descriptions of Jeane's outfits, and Michael Lee! Although I have enjoyed every book Sarra Manning has had published, no love interest has ever matched the standards of the first. Dylan is still the original and the best fictional boyfriend, but Michael Lee isn't a bad number two (on the Sarra Manning only list of course, on the All Books list he's number three, behind Noel DuBoise, obviously). He's funny and a bit conceited but also down to earth and he's not afraid to take action. Cue girlish sigh.

It took me about six days to read Adorkable and I have to admit that at times I was trying not to read it so fast as I didn't want it to be over! Adorkable surpassed my hopeful expectations and is a book I'm sure I'll read over and over again. I've run out of other things to say so I'll just finish by saying: if you have the vaguest notion that you might enjoy Adorkable, buy it or borrow it, and read it ASAP!

Many thanks to Atom for sending me a review copy.




Other enthusiastic reviews for your perusal:
Readaraptor (in letter form! I love it!)
SisterSpooky
Fluttering Butterflies
So Many Books, So Little Time
Cicely Loves Books
weartheoldcoat (features some hilarious fangirling I can totally relate to)
Young Adult Anonymous

Book Review: Nobody’s Girl, by Sarra Manning

Bea is tired of being boring. Her life revolves around school and her dull Saturday job, and she longs for everything to be more interesting. When her ex-best friend Ayesha wants to hang out again, and introduces her to the school’s queen bee, Ruby, and her group of cool party-girls, Bea goes along with it, reluctantly, because what else does she have to do? She believes it’s all a joke until she’s invited along on their trip to Malaga – but things go rapidly downhill once they arrive in Spain.

Bea leaves the other girls behind and joins a group of American tourists heading for France – where she believes the father she’s never met is waiting. But when she tells her Mum about her plans, she’s furious. Will Bea ever find out why? Will gorgeous American Toph ever explain why he acts so weird around her? Will Ruby murder her when she gets back to London?

Of course I loved Nobody's Girl. It was pretty much inevitable, because I've enjoyed all of Sarra Manning's other books, and her writing just keeps on getting better and better. Every book seems to have more description and wit in it than before, and the characterisation becomes more detailed each time as well. Nobody’s Girl is really well paced. Some readers will find the last section back in London a bit rushed, but I think it’s meant to feel that way. And in Nobody’s Girl there is a heroine who is actually honestly like me.

I always wanted to be Edie from the Diary of a Crush trilogy but was never cool enough to befriend/romance art boys or own vintage dresses or get a job as a waitress and live above the café. I could relate a lot to Irina from the Fashionistas series but I’ve never been that aggressive or rude. I could totally sympathise with Bea. Even now I still long a little to be more interesting, to read books in cafes and go to the theatre every week and have long intellectual conversations with people in appropriately shabby-glamourous venues. I loved the bits where Bea daydreams about living in Paris and having an eccentric lover to have passionate rows with (it was really great that Sarra chose one of those bits to read aloud at the Chicklish birthday event). I know how easy it is to get swept up in someone else’s whirlwind and find yourself hanging out with people that are exciting but kind of despicable.

The only place where we diverge is…Toph. Still not hotter than Dylan. I suppose he comes second though. (Only out of Sarra Manning love interests. He’s way down the list if you’re talking all books because so many places go to boys from the Ruby Oliver series).

I would recommend Nobody’s Girl to everyone! If you’re already a fan of Sarra Manning, you’ll probably love it, if you’ve never read any of her books, this is a fabulous place to start. It didn’t jump into my favourite spot, but it was a great story with brilliant characters and I enjoyed it enormously. If I didn't have so many other books to read, I'd be re-reading it right now!

P.S. I am ridiculously excited over, of all nerdy things, being able to tag this with 'writers I have met' - a tag I've only used once before!

Don't you just love it when

you have a book by an author you love so you know you'll love the book and then when you read the book you love it and keep stopping to say silly things like 'Oh my god I love this book!' or 'Author-name you are a genius'. I love it. You don't say? Yeah. I say.

Last time I had this experience I was reading The Boy Book by E. Lockhart, which obviously I was going to love as I adored The Boyfriend List. I am having it again with Nobody's Girl by Sarra Manning. I swear she just keeps getting better and better! Every new book is just so much more detailed and powerful than the ones before, although of course those still remain brilliant and stand up to being re-read afterwards. I'm only on chapter five, but I can recognise improvement right from the start.

I always read with my 'writing hat' on. Some writers complain that learning the craft of writing can spoil the pleasure of reading unless you make a deliberate effort not to think like a writer whilst you're reading just for fun. This has not been my experience so far. Some advocate reading each book twice, once as a 'reader', and once as a 'writer', but my critical faculties are always on and usually at maximum power when I'm reading a book. I think this at least partly comes from having studied cultural theory, I always say that beginning to learn theory was like discovering that I live in the Matrix. I look at everything through that lens I developed as an undergraduate.

Yes, it involves thinking a lot. Yes, I can no longer bring myself to watch crap films in which a beautiful woman falls in love with some stupid man after various tedious slapstick things have happened. But I get to experience a added level of pleasure when I read or watch something that has been done right. I also admire nice plot twists, detailed characterisation, great dialogue - oh, how I love dialogue! I see how they did that, and I love it! I get especially excited when one of the things I particularly love to see in teen fiction turns up at the start of a book, because there is almost no way that it can fail to be good with one of these things in it. I first made up this list when talking to one of my postgraduate tutors about why I love teen fiction, and I included it in the commentary for my MA portfolio. I've added to it since, so now along with such things as 'intelligent, critical narrators', and 'teenagers with slightly-more-glamourous-than-mine lives', I have listed 'quirky families' and 'characters with hobbies'. One day I'll have to make a post about this list.

But today I am going to type up some reviews for Body Image and Self Perception Month, and then carry on with Nobody's Girl. I am so excited! When I have read Nobody's Girl I will be well prepared for the Chicklish birthday event having read every book by Sarra Manning and Simmone Howell and one of Luisa Plaja's. Unfortunately my local library does not have Della Says: OMG! by Keris Stainton and I won't have a chance to get it before Monday, but still, this is amazing, as most of the time when I go to see authors speak I haven't actually read any of their books!

I haven't posted anything that wasn't strictly a review on this blog for ages. How did I do?

Book Review: Guitar Girl, by Sarra Manning

Picture by leochi

Molly Montgomery is being sued for 5 million pounds by her former record company, and she's suing them back, despite not being even 20 years old yet. Her lawyer, confident they will win, asks her to write down the whole story of how she went from uncool teenager to front woman of The Hormones, so that he can build a case. This account makes up the bulk of this book.

It's not the most original story - teenage fiction as a genre is filled with fantasies about ordinary teenagers who becomes celebrities - but it is unusually realistic. Molly forms the band with her best friends Jane and Tara, in the hope it would make them a little cooler, writing songs about Hello Kitty and magic markers, but it is soon hijacked by Dean and T, two boys who worm their way into the band by insulting them and promising that they could make the group sound better. Molly hates Dean at first but starts to fall for him as they are signed up by a record company and taken around the world to tour. But their manipulative manager doesn't want them to date, and soon he starts to make other demands too, and things go from bad to worse as Molly's virginity becomes hot gossip and Jane tries to live the rockstar stereotype.

I have enjoyed all of Sarra Manning's books, but Guitar Girl is not one of my favourites - my favourites being Let's Get Lost, and Diary Of A Crush 2: Kiss And Make Up, and Fashionistas: Irina. The plot of Guitar Girl was a bit predictable compared to the other stories, and I don't think Dean makes an alluring enough romantic interest. What can I say? He's not Dylan, and I'll always love Dylan the best, although Noel from the Ruby Oliver series is giving him a run for his money these days. Dylan is all mixed up with nostalgia as I read the Diary of a Crush series in J-17 as an actual teenager, and was thereby hooked on art boys for life. But I think even if I was fourteen right now Dylan would beat Dean in the Sarra Manning Toxic Boy Showdown, although the contest is kind of rigged as Dylan gets three books and is essentially nicer.

Anyway, back to Guitar Girl. I thought it was more down-to-earth, with more details about the music business, than any other book about teenagers becoming pop stars that I have read. The characterisation is strong, although I wanted to know more about the histories of the various members of the band than the book includes, and Molly makes a believable teenage narrator. I loved the fast pace and thought that it captured the feeling of being a teenager really well. Despite my criticisms, I have read and enjoyed Guitar Girl more than once.

If you read and enjoy this book, you will also want to check out two of Sarra's other books - Let's Get Lost, and Irina from the Fashionistas series, because they feature appearances from characters in Guitar Girl, and you can see what happened next...





Here's my review of Pretty Things, also by Sarra Manning.

Book Review: Pretty Things, by Sarra Manning

by tombream07

'Indie-emo hybrid' Charlie has decided that he and his best friend, wannabe-footballer's wife-type Brie - who thinks Charlie should be her boyfriend and doesn't believe that he's gay - will be spending their summer avoiding boredom and trying to get the best roles in the play their drama workshop in Camden will be putting on. Daisy is a lesbian, serious about acting, and learning to express herself through art. Infamous heartbreaker Walker wants to be a film director and wants to find out what it's like to be an actor.

But Walker, having gotten on the bad side of Lavinia, is picked as the male lead. Brie is the female lead, and is terrified. She doesn't understand the play - but she does have an amazing memory. Daisy was hoping to get the lead but instead she has to play a character she hates, and spend time with Walker and Brie, both of whom she cannot stand. Charlie falls for Walker, but Walker likes Daisy, and it's not so much a love triangle as a huge great mess...

This book was a fun read, I did enjoy reading it, but I'm afraid that I didn't like it as much as the other books that I have read by Sarra Manning. It is told in alternating chapters by all of the four main characters - e.g. the first chapter has Charlie as the narrator, the second Daisy, and so on. I thought the characterisation suffered from this - I never really got to know any of the characters deeply, I felt I was learning only superficial things about them - especially in the cases of Charlie and Daisy. The story didn't have so much emotional impact, and I was disappointed as Sarra Manning's other novels have always hooked me emotionally. It also lacked a real twist, I could tell how things were going to work out quite a long way before the end. I don't normally mind this but I was hoping for one with this book for some reason! The characters are appealing and there are a few laughs, so I think it would make a good holiday/beach/plane journey read for anyone all the same.