All tagged London

A Feel-Good Novel with Surprising Weight: It Felt Like a Kiss by Sarra Manning

But then again, one kiss from someone could mean more than a two-year relationship with someone else. A kiss could change your life.

Sarra Manning’s Unsticky is a novel I recommend all the time—I love how Manning plays with common tropes and archetypes, subverting them into fresh and witty stories. Her newest novel, It Felt Like a Kiss, is no different. And, it has the added bonus of being something of a companion novel to Unsticky, as Vaughn from that novel plays an important role in this one as the owner of the art gallery where It Felt Like a Kiss protagonist Ellie Cohen works.

Ellie lives a carefully-produced life, a reaction to her chaotic, bohemian upbringing with her musician mother.

...when all around you was chaos, you needed to find some area of your life that you could control and let that define you. It didn’t matter that she was on free schoolmeals and had a mother who wore leopard-print catsuits and dressed her in charity-shop clothes, when Ellie had the neatest handwriting in her class and was homework monitor five years in a row. Or when she had a tidier bedroom and better manners than her many cousins, who all lived in two-parent, semi-detached splendour in Belsize Park. When your boss was giving you hell and your flatmates were fighting and you’d been dumped again, there was something cathartic and peaceful in spending the afternoon in your pristine, minimalist office, rearranging your reference books by height and colour. So, a girl who could parade around Glastonbury in a spotless white dress was a girl who was calm and in control. Sometimes you had to fake it to make it.

A Fresh Shapeshifter Story: Skulk by Rosie Best

Skulk’s anything but a typical paranormal teen fiction. Shapeshifters in Rosie Best’s novel consist of foxes, ravens, rats, butterflies and spiders—no wolves need apply to this world. And, Skulk is urban fantasy in the truest sense of the term, with a rich city-focused setting of London, complete with graffiti and urban wildlife that’s not what it appears.

At the center of this story is sixteen year old Meg Banks, a teen girl who appears to have it all. Her mother’s a highly-respected member of Parliament and her father’s a genius with money. Meg attends an exclusive school that churns out students headed for only the best universities and the brightest futures. 

Except…

Meg’s perfect parents, perfect school, perfect life is nothing more than a tarnished cage locking in an unconquerable spirit who struggles to find self expression, individuality and ultimately freedom from her cruel and demanding mother and her aloof father.

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Mini Reviews: A Mystery Mixed Bag

It's been well-documented that I love mysteries of all sorts. I recently devoured three, all of which I recommend--but with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

Game (Jasper Dent #2) by Barry Lyga

I Hunt Killers, the first in Barry Lyga's series featuring Jasper Dent better known as Jazz, a serial killer's son, ended with a cliffhanger--a seriously obnoxious one. Game was released about two weeks after I finished “Killers” so my wait wasn't too painful.  But, Game goes beyond cliffhanger. It leaves you plummeting off the cliff with no way of knowing or guessing what the landing will entail.

Billy Dent, Jazz's serial killer father, roams free to continue his dastardly deeds while Jazz searches for him in New York City. In contrast to his demented father, Jazz has come to his own understanding of humanity and his place in the world.

People are real, Jazz told himself, repeating his mantra. People matter … Jazz had always thought that his past was his own burden to bear, but could it be possible that he was meant to have people around him? Was this the true meaning of “People are real. People matter?

Jazz confronts his past, his own emotional pain and commits himself fully to finding and bringing down his father.

Connie, his girlfriend,  goes against her parents wishes and her own common sense  to follow Jazz to the city with the intention of helping him, even saving him from whatever may come.  

I closed the pages of the second in Lyga's series, frustrated and irritated. Everyone I liked best in the novel was heading down a winding road toward a collision. Nothing is resolved, and this does not read as a complete story.

I haven't found a date for publication of the sequel to Game.  So it goes. I'll just have to wait.

The Name of the Star by Maureen JohnsonI love a good mystery, so when Maureen Johnson takes it to another level creating her witty and fun paranormal young adult thriller The Name of the Star, I was instantly hooked.

Aurora (who prefers Rory) Deveaux comes from Louisiana, the land of all things fantastical and magical, a place where her uncle has eight freezers filled with everything from batteries to milk intended to get him through another Hurricane Katrina (no worries about electricity going out) and an aunt who sees various angels of several hues designating their place on a spectrum from good to not-so-good. With this background, nothing should come as a surprise to Rory.

But, surprised she is.

It’s Rory’s senior year of high school. Her parents have an opportunity to teach at a university in England for a year, so off they go to a place more laden with ghosts of the past than Louisiana could ever scare up. She’s installed in Wexford, an elite prep school where she becomes embroiled in a mystery dating back to 1888: Jack the Ripper.