Scott Burroughs, a painter living in Martha’s Vineyard, takes a last minute seat on a private plane, only to have it crash into the sea 16 minutes after take off. He emerges from the depths to hear a child’s cry. Calling on all his strength (and experience as a swimmer) he manages to get the child and himself through miles of churning water to land. They are the only survivors. The little boy, JJ, is the son of a wealthy media mogul, David Bateman. His […]
Here be monsters (and angels)
Karou lives in two worlds. In one she is an art student living in Prague, set apart by her blue hair and tattoos. In the other she works with the chimaera, creatures that are a cross between different animals and sometimes human. For Brimstone, the chimaera who raised her, she collects teeth. These are turned into wishes, and other powerful magic, but she does not know their main use. There are doorways to this other world all over Earth, and this makes her teeth gathering […]
Escaping is only half the battle
Skylar Evans is getting out of her crappy small town if it kills her. She’s escaped the typical life of teen mother working at the fast food joint, in part thanks to the pact with one of her best friends – that neither of them can be distracted by romance. Now she has a full scholarship to art school waiting for her, she just has to make it through one more summer. But then her mother loses her job and shacks up with a shady […]
Barbecue intrigue
There’s a reason you should write reviews the moment you’ve finished the book, because otherwise you’ll be sitting here faced with a blank page struggling to remember what the hell happened at that barbecue of doom anyway. But a trip home to the UK and dealing with two babies with jetlag (as well as my own, oh god never fly with babies) has meant this got pushed to the bottom of the queue. But I am determined to do this, damn it. And the three […]
I Want to Live With Wonder Woman
“[Women are] told that they are not reliable witnesses to their own lives.” There are sentences like this throughout this collection of essays, that seem so obvious and yet feel like a gut punch every time you read them. Here’s another, from The Longest War: “Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.” Or “Women are afraid of being raped and murdered all the time and maybe that’s more important to talk about than protecting […]
The Breakfast Club, with Murder!
Imagine The Breakfast Club if the geek, jock, criminal and princess hated Ally Sheedy’s basketcase so much that one of them murdered her, and that’s pretty much the premise of One of Us Is Lying. Cooper (jock), Addy (princess), Bronwyn (brain), and Nate (criminal), all wind up in detention on the same afternoon. All swear they’ve been set up and don’t belong there, but the teacher isn’t interested in their excuses. Also there is Simon, owner of a notorious school gossip app. During detention Simon […]