Bone Quill (Hollow Earth #2) by John & Carole E. Barrowman ~ A Review

Bone Quill (Hollow Earth #2) by John & Carole E. Barrowman

Published: Buster Books, 7th February 2013

Length: 329 pages (paperback edition)

Where Did I Get It? Borrowed a copy from Liberty

Summary (from Goodreads):

12-year-old twins Matt and Emily Calder are Animare: they can bring art to life and enter paintings at will. They must do everything in their power to prevent a breach in Hollow Earth: a supernatural place that holds all the demons, devils and creatures ever imagined. The Hollow Earth Society are getting closer to finding the key that will release the beasts: an ancient bone quill whose powers can be only be used by a powerful Animare. The quill has been lost for centuries, but important clues to its whereabouts lie somewhere on the island of Era Mina – as does the entrance to Hollow Earth itself. Matt and Em must find the quill and protect it through their drawings, through certain famous paintings and, ultimately, deep into the mists of time itself. But their lives in the relative safety of Auchinmurn Abbey are thrown into confusion with the arrival of a newcomer who threatens to ruin everything they have worked for. All too soon, the twins are forced to make a terrible choice: save their father, or save the world.

Opening Line:

The battle for control of the Calder twins’ imaginations began on the afternoon of their third birthday.

~

My Review:

I confess that I only bought the first book in this series to fuel my John Barrowman obsession and didn’t really have very high expectations of it. Then I read it and loved every second and desperately wanted book two already.

Luckily for me, Liberty recieved Bone Quill for review (having borrowed my copy of Hollow Earth and loving it, too) so I didn’t have to wait long before I could borrow it.

I raced through Bone Quill because it was fast-paced and gripping, the story carying on from where it left off at an unrelenting speed.

There was the all the previous excitement of the Animare with added time-travel and the complications that brings to any story.

The two storylines of past and present, previously not directly connected, suddenly become intertwined and the peril notches up several levels. Matt and Emily suddenly find themselves having to choose between their family and the world – a choice no 12 year olds should have to make – and they hit all of the obstacles you would expect, plus a couple of extras (such as flaming Hellhounds).

The world of the Hollow Earth series is beautifully crafted, rich and well-thought out and so carefully described that it is very easy to lose yourself in it and really feel like you are there with the characters. Everything is covered, not just the sights but the smells and sensations – the world-building is one of my favourite things about this series because it is so thorough.

If you liked Hollow Earth then you will love Bone Quill, no second book syndrome here!

My Rating: 5/5*

Revenge Of A Band Geek Gone Bad by Naomi Rabinowitz – A Review

Revenge Of A Band Geek Gone Bad by Naomi Rabinowitz 

Published: Naomi Rabinowitz, 8th October 2012

Length: 278 pages (Kindle edition)

Where Did I Get It?: Purchased on Amazon for 77p

Summary (from Goodreads):

Shy, overweight Melinda Rhodes’ sophomore year of high school isn’t going so well. Her own mother mocks her weight. Her pants split in the middle of school, earning her the nickname, “Moolinda.” She then loses first chair flute in band to Kathy Meadows, her pretty and popular nemesis.

Her luck changes when she catches the eye of Josh Kowalski, a rebellious trumpet prodigy and class clown. Josh has also been hurt by Kathy and asks Melinda to help take Kathy down. Mel figures that she has nothing to lose … and Josh is adorable with gorgeous blue eyes and a winning smile. She agrees to team up with him and looks forward to finally getting back at her rival.

At first, the pair’s pranks are silly, and as they work together, Mel comes out of her shell. Even better, she finds herself falling for Josh and it appears as if he might feel the same way about her.

However, their schemes become more and more dangerous and Mel is surprised to discover her dark side. Just how far will she go to get what she wants — and is Josh really worth the risk?

Opening Line:

A light September breeze swept through Sequoia High, filling the quiet hallways with the scent of cut grass and falling leaves.

~

My Review:

I’m not going to lie, I purchased this book purely on the artistic merit of the cover. I LOVE it and had high hopes for the story itself. I should have listened to the old ‘don’t judge’ chestnut in this case though.

I didn’t come away from Revenge Of A Band Geek Gone Bad feeling inspired or overwhelmed and I’m fairly sure that in three weeks time the only thing I’m going to remember about it is the pretty cover. In fact, I felt like I had read it (and seen it) all before because it contained every element required for a YA High School Romance novel/Teen Romance Movie and not a lot else.

There was the insecure female lead, Melinda, who had issues with her weight and self-confidence, the bouncy popular best friend, Lana, the drop-dead gorgeous but slightly bad love interest, Josh, and the beautiful arch-enemy, Kathy.  She fancies him, they have a mutual enemy, they team up to get revenge, it turns into something more, there’s a teenage drama, they break up, they make up. The End.

For a beach read or an easy read, it is perfect, and if I were fifteen it would probably have been even better because I wouldn’t have read it 400 times before and I’d have still been in that High School world myself which would have made it a thing of daydreams.

There were a few issues though. First, there were the chapter headings – all was going well until chapter ten and then they went all pear-shaped. There were two chapter tens and then the titles suddenly stopped being numbers for a couple of chapters and turned into Roman numerals – this didn’t remove from the reading experience particularly, but seemed very unprofessional, even for a self-published eBook.

Then there were the typos. All the typos. There were speech marks missing all over the place (she’d open them and not close them again, or not open them but close them – that kind of thing), frequent cases of ‘I’ instead of ‘if’ or ‘it’ and the odd ‘urn’ instead of ‘um’. One or two could be forgiven but they were all over the place and all the way through -  it was like it had never been proof read by anything other than Word. I know it’s expensive to get someone professional to look through your work, but most people can find five friends or randoms on-line to read it through and spot things that you miss on all your own read-throughs.

The writing was mostly good, typos aside, although there were a few examples of things that made it read like something written by a fifteen year old instead of something about a fifteen year old. Such as when the characters were drinking – instead of implying that their speech was slurred and they were stuttering and so on, it was all written out phonetically throughout the entire scene. This made it a bit hard to read and pulled you out of the scene a bit because it was, quite frankly, irritating.

Overall, Revenge Of A Band Geek Gone Bad wasn’t a bad book, it was a stereotypically charming YA novel about coming of age and finding your first High School love. There wasn’t much wrong with it but nor was there anything particularly new and exciting about it. I enjoyed it but would have been disappointed if I had spent more than 77p on it.

My rating: 3/5*

Back To Blackbrick by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald – A Review

Back To Blackbrick by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

Published: Orion Children’s Books, 7 February 2013

Length: 228 pages (paperback)

Where Did I Get It?: Borrowed Liberty‘s ARC for review, pre-publication

Summary (from Goodreads):

Cosmo’s brother Brian died when he was ten years old. His mum hides her grief by working all the hours God sends and Cosmo lives with his grandparents. They’ve been carefree days as Granddad buys him a horse called John and teaches him all he knows about horses. But the good times have to come to an end and although he doesn’t want to admit it, Cosmo knows his Granddad is losing his mind. So on one of the rare occasions when Granddad seems to recognise him, Cosmo is bemused that he gives him a key to Blackbrick Abbey and urges him to go there. Cosmo shrugs it off, but gradually Blackbrick draws him in…

Cosmo arrives there, scared and lonely, and is dropped off at the crumbling gates of a huge house. As he goes in, the gates close, and when he turns to look, they’re rusty and padlocked as if they haven’t been opened in years. Cosmo finds himself face to face with his grandfather as a young man, and questions begin to form in his mind: can Cosmo change the course of his family’s future?

Opening Line:

My graddad was pretty much the cleverest person I ever met so it was strange in the end to see the way people treated him – as if he was a complete moron.

~

My Review:

Back to Blackbrick is a magnificently clever book that was both heart warming and heart breaking in the same breath, and the cover is beautiful.

Alzheimer’s disease is something that affects an awful lot of people and is difficult for the people around them to deal with and Blackbrick handles this with a sensitive touch and a twist of fantasy.

Cosmo, the narrator of the story, hasn’t had the easiest of starts in life – his brother died when he was ten and his mother has vanished to another country to ‘work’, leaving him to live with his grandparents. The development of his Grandfather’s Alzheimer’s is the final straw and Cosmo refuses to accept it. At first he does what any young teenager would do when faced with a problem he doesn’t know how to fix – he asks the internet and believes every word he reads.

It is touchingly funny as Cosmo does his best to follow the instructions on a ‘Memory Cure’ website and you can’t help but chuckle at the outcomes of his endeavours (such as sticking post-it notes to everything so his Grandfather won’t forget what they are called).

Then the book takes an almost fantastical turn as Cosmo follows a bizarre instruction from his Grandfather – to take an old key and visit Blackbrick Abbey, via the South Gates. Doing as he’s told leads Cosmo into a place he’d never dreamed of – his Grandfather’s childhood.

I loved the magic of this story, the relationship between Cosmo and his young Grandfather in Blackbrick was brilliantly funny as Cosmo struggled to try and shape the future without letting on everything he knew and making himself look like a lunatic.

Sensitively handling everything from Alzheimer’s through to death and childbirth, Back to Blackbrick manages to balance comedy and tragedy perfectly and had me crying and laughing in equal measure.

The only problem I had with this book was that for the first few chapters I managed to convince myself that Cosmo was a girl. I’m not sure what triggered this but I was really confused when I realised I was wrong and it threw me for a few pages. By half way through though I had completely forgotten my previous confusion and it didn’t detract from the story at all.

My rating: 5/5*

Writing Workshop: I Was, I Am, I Will Be

It’s time for Josie’s Writing Workshop over at Sleep Is For The Weak again. I really love doing this because it makes me think and I love reading everyone else’s interpretations too because there’s always so many different ways of looking at the same prompt.

This week’s prompt jumped me forward a bit in Lyall and Tahni’s story to a key point in their relationship where Tahni has to face the truth of everything and accept who she is. (If you are new to Lyall and Tahni have a quick peek at the summary here to get the background, it’ll make everything below make more sense! And should you want to read the other short stories about Lyall and Tahni they are all linked under the Fiction and Poetry button at the top of the page.)

I Was, I Am, I Will Be

Revelations -A Tale Of Lyall and Tahni

I shivered and looked up at Lyall who was crouching over me with his head on one side and his eyes on mine.

“Lyall.” My voice was nothing but a broken whisper. “I still don’t understand.”

He whined and touched his nose to my cheek. It was wet but warm and somehow reassuring.

I shivered again and felt cold ripple through me like a wave on a beach, leaving behind it an itch that almost burned, touching every single inch of my body. I wanted to scratch but my arms were aching so fiercely I could barely move them.

I forced myself to move, rolling onto my belly and drawing my knees up under myself. My eyes were squeezed shut in pain and I dropped my head onto my arms breathing heavily to try and ease the hurt.

Then I froze. My arms were warm. In the same way a cat is warm when you rest your face against its fur.

Fur.

I squinted. Swallowed. Closed my eyes again.

I felt Lyall shifting beside me. I could smell something odd, tangy like oranges mixed with something much less sweet. It made me uneasy. It felt like fear.

I could hear a strange whining noise and it was only when I realised it stopped whenever I feverishly gasped in a breath that it was coming from me. I sounded like a dog left out in the rain.

There was a sudden series of crunching and grinding noises and I was aware of Lyall moving away briefly before returning to my side.

“Tahni. It’s going to be okay, just keep breathing deeply.” His voice was rough, as though he really needed a drink or had been crying. “The itching will stop soon. You…your fur is almost through now. Then the ache will fade.”

I wailed involuntarily. He stroked the back of my head.

“It’s okay. Shhh. The first time is always the worst. Next time will be quicker and not so scary. Just try and relax.”

I panicked then. This was not happening. I’m a girl. A normal, fifteen year old girl. Human. All the way through. If you cut me in half it would be written through me like a stick of rock: Homo Sapiens.

I’m not a mythical creature. Mythical creatures are just that. Mythical. Not real.

I forced myself up onto my hands and knees and glared at Lyall. I desperately wanted to shout at him, blame him, ask him why he seemed to know everything. I couldn’t manage anything other than a wonky sort of growling which hurt my throat.

I tried to launch myself at him. Hurt him like I was hurting. I just fell on him instead and he held me. Firmly but gently against his chest, which was naked but still warm despite the cold air. His hands stroked my head slowly and rhythmically and I found myself breathing along with the pattern, letting myself focus on that and nothing else.

“I’m sorry, Tahni. I thought you knew. I didn’t know you never knew your parents and they never told you. I should have told you who you are before…” He paused and stopped stroking. I whimpered until he started again. “At least you aren’t alone.”

I think I blacked out after that. Everything hurt so much the world went white and all I could hear was crackling like fireworks exploding right next to my head.

Then I was quivering on the floor and my entire body felt full of electricity, shivering through me every which way and back again. I opened my eyes and my heart skipped. The world had gone mad. Everything was tinted blue or yellow, as if I were looking through a stained glass window. I whined.

“Weird isn’t it? You’ll get used to it after a while. I think it’s a canine thing, different colour spectrum.” Lyall sounded a bit amused.

I stood, realising as I unfolded myself that it felt strangely normal to have four feet. Concentrating I turned to face Lyall who was sitting cross-legged on the grass totally naked but for his jumper laid across his lap.

“You’re a very beautiful wolf, Tahni. Deep reddish brown, like your hair when you’re human.” He caught my eyes with his and held me with a look so intense I didn’t dare blink. “You’re going to be okay you know? I’ll help you. The pack will let you in. They have to.”

He paused and looked at the floor.

“It’ll all be okay.”

I just stared at him and thought about what he’d said.

I am a wolf.

I will be fine.

I had to believe him. I had no choice.

Review: Linger by Maggie Stiefvater

Linger by Maggie Stiefvater

Published: Scholastic Ltd, 2010 (Paperback)

Length: 416 pages

Summary: Sam and Grace are finally together but their future is far less certain than they believed in Shiver.

Cole, a new wolf, has a past that puts the entire pack at risk, and, with Beck no longer able to take charge, Sam suddenly finds himself with new responsibilities. Responsibilities he doubts he can cope with, especially whilst worrying about Grace who just doesn’t seem herself…

After Grace’s parents take a dislike to Sam, their future together seems bleak unless Grace can find the courage to take a stand against them. This would be easier were Grace not trying to hide a secret from everyone around her, even Sam. A secret that could change everything, or even end it all.

Shiver was a story about finding love at any cost, Linger is a story about fighting for love through everything life throws at you.

What I Liked: I loved Linger even more than I loved Shiver which is quite impressive. On top of everything I said about Shiver this book had even more to offer.

Firstly it cleared up my complaint about Grace’s parents quite neatly and I can now accept their attitude and absence in the first book as a necessity for the final story. An example of complaining about something before it’s finished there, but I wasn’t to know that at the time.

Secondly the introduction of the new wolf, Cole, and Isabel to the narrative mix added brilliantly to the depth of the writing and characters. The relationship between Isabel and Cole helped to define and show a different side to love than that between Sam and Grace and it also brought out elements of the characters that you had never seen before. Sam through Isabel’s eyes for example, and the whole situation through a newcomer thrown in head-first to the deep end.

I loved Cole’s character. He is horrible and flawed, lost, frightened and obnoxious. Everything you would expect him to be which makes him so brilliantly human despite the fact that sometimes he’s furry and has four legs. I think he is possibly the most human character in the books and keeps the story grounded even when the fantasy romance of Sam and Grace threatens to take over.

Grace’s secret is kept beautifully throughout the story too, even though many parts are from her viewpoint you are never certain what is going on because she is denying it to herself as well as everyone else for a lot of the time. This added an uneasy undercurrent to much of the story and resulted in me crying on more than one occasion as the emotions and tension flew around. (Much crying done on a busy train I might add, so I looked like a right idiot snivelling away behind a book.)

What I Didn’t Like: This is where I have an issue because my only complaint in Shiver was cleared up in Linger so I now can’t actually think of anything I didn’t like. Apart from having to wait until Summer 2011 for the final book that is. I really don’t like that at all.

Rating: No beating around the bush with this one. 5/5 no question. A brilliant read, so much so that I forgive Liberty for making me cry in public by lending it to me. (Sometimes I’m sure she only lends/recommends books to me because she knows I will cry and she can laugh at me…)

~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is book two of my September Spectacular Reading Challenge. Two down, three to go! (And yes, to those observant people out there, I have changed my list. I lent one of the books on it to my sister so it is now over a hundred miles away from me, thus quite hard to read…)

Review: Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater

Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater

Published By: Scholastic Ltd, 2009 (Paperback)

Length: 434 pages

Summary: When she was eleven years old, Grace was attacked by the wolves that lived in the wood behind her house. Ever since, she has been obsessed, particularly with the wolf with yellow eyes that had protected her from the rest of the pack and has haunted her garden every winter since.

Years later she meets a boy with instantly familiar yellow eyes and knows without a doubt that he is her wolf. But surely that’s impossible.

Sam has led a double life since he was seven. Hot lazy summers spent as a boy, growing up, reading, writing and learning his times tables followed by long, frozen winters running and hunting in the woods with his pack, a wolf.

One day he saved a girl the pack attacked and ever since has watched over her whenever winters grip forced him into his fur.

He’s not supposed to mention the secret of the wolves to anyone but when a local boy is killed by the pack and a wolf hunt begins Sam finds himself face-to-face with his girl and has no choice but to tell her the truth.

What I Liked : Basically everything! I loved Stiefvater’s take on the werewolf legend mostly because, for a pleasant change, the werewolves turned into wolves. Proper wolves that thought wolfy things, acted like wolves and ate wolfy foods with only the faintest memory of the human things that were most important to them in their human lives – people’s faces were familiar but their names forgotten for example. It’s been ages since I read a werewolf book like that, recently they all seem to turn into massive super-wolves, weird human/wolf mixes or have telepathic abilities allowing human speech and communication. I liked that they became truly wolf in Shiver, it made the change somehow more frightening because the human in them was basically lost as soon as they transform.

I also very much enjoyed the world of Shiver. It was a natural, beautiful yet slightly sinister place where wolves and humans naturally came together which was perfect for the story. Having it set in a city with wolves randomly sprouting up would never have worked so well. Also, it was cold. I’m not sure how she did it but as you read the book you felt the same cold that the characters did adding to the tension as you moved through the story.

I found that the shifting viewpoint between Sam and Grace added depth to the story and helped to stop it from becoming one of those romance books where the entire story is just girl meets boy, they randomly fall hopelessly in love, they kiss a lot, fall into bed, have a minor argument, make up, story finished. Instead, the romance between Sam and Grace is just one of they key plot-lines, being carried along by some of the obvious issues you would have if your boyfriend changed species whenever it got cold and a few other, much more sinister ones that came with part of the package of discovering a supernatural world in your back yard.

What I didn’t like: Grace’s semi-permanently absent parents bugged me a little. I could almost buy into the ‘had a child young and then, as soon as it got old enough to take care of itself, went back to their old life and social circle’ story because the rest of the story helped you to just accept it. However, there was always that little bit of me being a bit unconvinced that they would be out quite as much as they were and wouldn’t notice Sam basically living in their house for weeks. For a start, did they not notice that Grace was suddenly using two lots of cutlery and crockery at every meal? As I’m sure she wouldn’t have always managed to do the washing up before they randomly came home.

I have heard a few people saying that it was just a below-par Twilight rip-off, which I think is generally unfair considering it’s much better written and completely different aside from also being a paranormal romance novel for teens and young adults. Plus I think Shiver was actually written before Twilight anyway…ahem…rant over…

Rating: Apart from the above, which is practically nothing, I can’t really think of anything I didn’t like which draws me to the conclusion that this book deserves a rather impressive 5/5 on my brand shiny new rating system that I have decided to use. Can’t wait to get stuck into Linger next!