I received a free digital copy from the author/publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest feedback.

Rachel’s 8-year-old son Ben is missing. One moment he was with her, the next he ran around the corner and vanished. Now Rachel is trying to hold it together while the police desperately try to find him before it’s too late.

This book was absolutely excellent and I just couldn’t put it down! I read the majority of it in more or less one sitting. I was immediately sucked into the story - the pain and anguish pouring out of the words from Rachel’s POV - was agonising yet addictive to read. I felt her pain as a mother who didn’t know where her son was was done really well - the range of emotions, the desperation, the media’s vilification of her for her reactions. All done great.

Burnt Paper Sky is highly descriptive and at first I thought it might be too much but then after a couple of chapters it began working really well. I feel like i got a good feel of Rachel and the other POV in the book - the detective James ‘Jim’ Clemo. Clemo’s chapters really wrapped up the police investigation for me, seeing how they were pursuing leads and filling in what Rachel couldn’t tell the readers. His back and forth storyline of how the case affected him was done very well and i think highlighted an important point that different cases can affect different police officers and it’s not just the parents or family who suffered from PTSD, depression or anxiety after such an incident (I think Clemo’s chapters with a therapist also highlight how important it is to talk about your feelings and thoughts as well.)

There was a great point in this book as well in how the media treated Rachel as a single mother who had lost her son. Within a day the media and public had turned on her because she didn’t act like the meek, crying woman they wanted her to be. She showed anger and appeared a bit unstable (all understandable really given the situation) and suddenly she was acting oddly while the crying father who had walked away from his wife and son for another woman was shown in a good light. I think it highlighted the gap in how media sometimes treats women versus men very well. And it also highlighted how social media today and comments under articles affect people in the middle of the story and how hard it is to get away from them.

I was a bit surprised by the outcome but not too surprised as it’s the type of story that really makes you suspect everyone! I was hooked and couldn’t put it down. Fantastic read.

3.5 stars

The Three-Body Problem is a Chinese science fiction thriller translated into English and follows several different scientists during different parts of their lives. First there's Ye Wenjie who witnesses her father getting beat to death in front of her during the Cultural Revolution and is then brought to a government base to work on a special project, under the eye of commanding officers and other scientists. Decades later, Wang Miao a nano-scientist is dragged into a strange police investigation which ends up with him involved in an online game where he tries to solves The Three-Body Problem and all the dots in the story so far begin to connect.

Okay, so this was good and I did actually enjoy reading it but there was just so.much.science and I was too stupid for it. I liked science in school and I went on to study chemistry and biology for my school exams but I do not like or understand science on this level and every single page was just saturated with it. In saying that, I could more or less get what was going on with the plot without actually understanding every single thing but I do feel like some of it did go over my head at times.

This was well paced, and despite the science jargon kept me hooked and wanting to keep reading. I really wanted to figure out what the hell was going on. Because this was originally Chinese, there were some bits I didn't quite understand (though the Translators Notes came in very handy at different point) but it was also very well translated and Ken Liu really kept the story flowing and engaging in English, as much as I can believe it is in its original Chinese. It was also great for me to read a book set in China and learning a lot about it as I went.

I received a free digital copy from the author/publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest feedback.

Zoe Maisey is only 17 years old but she’s a convicted killer. When she was 14, she was involved in an accident killing three school friends and the court found her guilty. Now, more than two years on from the ordeal, Zoe and her mother are trying to put the past behind them but in one night it catches up and in the morning, Zoe’s mother is dead.

To start off with: I really think publishers should stop putting Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train quotes (you’ll love this if you loved…) on the front of these books cause a lot of people end up being disappointed. This book is thrilling but in its own way. It has the mystery aspect of The Girl on the Train and the good girl possibly gone wrong vibe of Gone Girl but it should be treated as an individual and not compared too much to such modern mystery/thriller classics.

This was an enjoyable and fast-paced read and just like Gilly Macmilan’s other book Burnt Paper Sky it was very hard to put down until I had every page read and all the mysteries revealed. In this book, a majority of the events happen all in one night, other than some flash backs from the first episode, and it led to things happening very quickly and I really felt an urgency around everything that was going on. While Macmillan’s first book had me feeling intrigued, this book left me feeling a it more tense about what was going on and what hadn’t been revealed as well as feeling desperately sad for most of the characters in the book. Zoe is definitely the kind of character that you feel for, she’s very fragile and feels like she’s going to break into pieces though there was a part of me reserved in case the whole thing was an act.

I enjoyed Tessa’s POV, as it was kind of a calming, sane, point of view other than Zoe’s. Sam’s was good too from the legal point of view but not being as ingratiated into the family, he wasn’t there to talk about some things the way Tessa was. I just really liked her. Sam’s also became stagnant near the end and I didn’t quite see the point of it.

This book brings up some sensitive topics, such as slut-shaming and online bullying.

I did feel some frustration with the lack of communication between the characters, particularly in the first half of the book. I just couldn’t see what was so hard about just sitting down and talking, that’s all that needed to be done and then Lucas’s creepy scripts - why not just tell Zoe rather than get her to read a whole script. There were a few times where I wanted to scream at everyone to get a grip and just talk.

I wasn’t too shocked at the end, I had a bit of a feeling in the back of my mind it would be that person bit I still really enjoyed the book.

I received a free digital copy from the author/publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest feedback.

Stephanie Starr has lived her whole life under the thumb of her controlling mother. She eats, sleeps, dresses and works the way her mother wants her too but now she’s in senior year and almost 18, she’s ready to break free. Then two new students Zack and Haley Smith arrive to school and from the get go, there is an intense chemistry between Haley and Stephanie. Something odd is going on with the world. Something almost godlike.

This is a Persephone and Hades retelling set in high school and I really enjoyed how the author played around with some of the well-known facts around the love story between Persephone and Hades from the six pomegranate seeds to the mom who is basically mother nature. I thought Stephanie as a character was pretty good to follow and she definitely had some nice character development. I really loved Stephanie and Helen’s friendship - some great female friendship there, as well as the male inclusion of super smart Morris.

I think the story dragged for me a little bit in the middle and it seemed to take too long for Stephanie to figure out what was going on. Some of the behavior from Jordan, Kara and the other people in the school was also a bit hard to believe and was hard to accept from the heavy desperation of the flirting from Jordan and the snide bullying from Kara - would this really happen? To be honest, the sad answer is probably yes.

The ending was good and now I want another story about Helen and Zack. Or Morris and Katie Jones, when Morris gets a bit older of course!

Jude and Noah are twins and friends but something terrible happened when they were 13 and now at 16 they hardly speak. Their story is told through two different timelines, Noah at 13 and Jude at 16, and we slowly find out what happened to tear the two apart.

First off, all the blurbs for this book always go on about how Jude and Noah are inseparable and the most important people in the world to each other but I didn't really get this at all. Right from the start, there's a huge gap between them and the distance is very easy to see. Unlike some other reviews I've read, I actually preferred Jude over Noah. I found Noah to be extremely immature at all times, petty, mean and really judgmental as well. He constantly seemed to put down his mother, his father, his sister -pretty much everyone unless he was attracted to them. While Jude was a bit silly at times, I felt like she had more character development than Noah and was really able to recognise her mistakes earlier on in the book and try to mend them - Noah only seemed to develop at the very, very end of the book. They both continued to be pretty terrible towards each other until the end.

The writing in this is very flowery and definitely extremely beautiful at times. However at times, the prose was almost too flowery for me and I would have liked it toned down just a little bit, particularly in Noah's chapters. There were times his descriptions were just a little bit too much and too over the top for me.

I did find it very interesting that Noah and Jude's personalities seemed to completely swap after the incident. Noah suddenly became popular and normal, and then Jude became a bit weird and closed off. That was a nice touch.

The relationships could have done with a bit more work despite the whole soul mate thing. I felt like we as readers were suppose to accept that okay, I guess that's it for them but I would have liked Oscar and Jude to be a bit more real with each other - you can't keep passing an orange back and forth and be like okay I'm in love.

I did like it but I don't think Jandy Nelson's writing does it for me the way it seems to for everyone else. I read The Sky Is Everywhere when I was younger and, again, it was good but it didn't blow me away. I will continue reading what she puts out though as she definitely has some talent!