3.5 stars

Rune Germain has a gift of a beautiful, powerful singing voice but it's only a curse, leaving her feeling sick and faint after every performance. Rune is sent to Roseblood, a special school dedicated to the art of opera, in Paris, France, which has a link to the legendary Phantom of the Opera. Rune becomes obsessed with the legend, convinced she is seeing and hearing her very own phantom.

I quite enjoyed this. It took me a while to get properly stuck into the book and its story but I think that was just because of me and not necessarily anything wrong with the book. I don't much about the Phantom of the Opera. I haven't read the book, and I've only ever seen snippets of the movie but I think I knew enough to really enjoy this book and how AG Howard made it her own.

First off, I loved the setting - not only Paris but the whole setup of Roseblood. The idea of this huge, kind of creepy school seeped in opera is literally something you'd only find in a story and the images i had of it in my mind were great. The stage, the classes and its weird teachers, the taxidermy, the dark, candle-lit canteen. I just really loved it. I really think that AG Howard did a fantastic job wrapping the reader into the story through all these elements, from the school, the underground caverns, the garden. She took a lot of what is famous about the phantom and placed them into a different setting, twisting them so the story became original and able to stand on its own.

The mystery behind Rune and her voice was pretty great once I understood it. I did feel it took a bit too much time, and I got frustrated being left in the dark and hearing cryptic comments between Thorn and Erik but once I found out, everything made sense then. Rune and Thorn's relationship had some problems for me, more so that there was a bit of insta-love (I know, I know, twin flame and all that but still!). Rune seemed to fall for Thorn so easily and I feel like they didn't have that much conversation before literally bonding to each other forever (!!). However, despite all that, it was very easy to get swept into their relationship and their love for one another. This book is written in a very poetic way and some of the writing is very flowery and I think that helped the over the top relationship between Thorn and Rune.

I think everything wrapped up very neatly and the way it was wrapped up (with Rune going person to person to update the reader on each individual) reminded me of how a movie wraps up. It was a little bit too neat but for the type of story it was, I didn't mind it too much.

This book is just so lovely and magical and wonderful but sad at the same time. I loved, loved, loved it!

This was a cute and fun Christmas read. I loved the festive spirt of it and I really liked Carol as a character for the most part. This book lost a star just for the whole 'three days and in love' thing which kind of annoyed me. Ben and Carol hadn't talked much apart from arguing about Christmas and suddenly they were in love. I don't know why being attracted to each other just couldn't be enough. I do think this would be an excellent Christmas movie and I was totally fancasting as I read it - Jude Law for Ben Hansen and Anna Kendrick as Carol Kane - perfection.

St Piran is a sleepy hamlet in the corner of Cornwall with only 300 people and is the type of place where everyone knows everybody else. So there’s a lot of excitement when a naked man is found washed upon the beach and saved, and the next day a fin whale is beached causing the village to work together to save her. Joe, the man from the beach, instantly becomes part of the village but soon talks about a machine he built that predicts the future and that the end of the world is talking. Joe is determined to save the town but can he convince everyone to believe him.

This was a great read in my opinion. At first I thought I was reading a story about a Dibley-like village full of all types of characters with their own kind of charming and loved how they all immediately welcomed and helped Joe when he came along. Then I realised Joe was not some random crazy but a stock trade analyst/computer programmer who did actually build a reputable machine to help predict stock rise and fall by reading the news around the world every day. All his worrying suddenly made sense and I could totally go along with Joe’s mission to make sure the village survived what was coming for the world and I loved, loved, loved how when they realised he was using his life saving’s to buy enough food for all of them, they went along with it and helped rather than brushing him off as a lunatic.

On the front of this book, there are the word’s “This book may restore your faith in humanity” and this is 100% true. This story turned from a funny tale into a survival story but not one full of gun-wielding gangs and men who kidnap women (like you see in a lot of survival stories) but a small village who ganged together to make sure every single one of them was looked after, fed and safe and they even extended that to another town close by, proving that even if resources were scarce and people were dying, people could still be human and look after each other.

This reminded me a little bit of what if the events in Station Eleven by Emily St.John Mandel happened BUT people knew it was going to happen? This is what it would be - at least in some corners of the world.

At times the way the story was structured in terms of Joe’s memories could be a bit confusing. Sometimes he would remember his time on the “fifth floor” and the story would slip into a conversartion he had had with his old boss without a break in paragraph and then go right back to present day with no indication. It’s something that was a bit weird at first but then I got used to it.

I really enjoyed this story, I actually think I’m in love with the book cover and I’m 100% checking out more of John Ironmonger’s writing and characters as I just love what he creates.

4.5 stars

3.5 Stars

For the most part I enjoyed all of these stories. My favourites were The Snowmama, Christmas in New York, Christmas Cracker and The Lion, the Unicorn and Me. They were just cute with a great hint of Christmas magic. I didn't like Dark Christmas, it was way too haunted for me and actually made me feel a bit spooked and uneasy which is NOT how I wanna feel at Christmas time.

I also didn't care about the recipes. This book could have been just the short stories and not had the recipes for all I cared. Granted, I don't really cook so I wouldn't have a huge interest but the recipes had no connection to the stories, which I found strange so there was a bit of a disconnect for me between finishing a story and going onto a recipe. I did like some of the facts about Christmas Jeanette Winterson added in to the start of the recipe bits but I never actually studied any of the recipes as I knew it would be a waste of time on my part.

3.5 Stars

This was really funny. Imagine the Pride and Prejudice that everyone knows and loves and swap nannies for dojo and parasols for katanas. A slight to a warrior woman at a ball could end up in a man walking away with one less ear, or not walking away at all! There was enough changed in the text to make it a new story but it definitely didn't lose the charm and wit that I love from the original works. I was surprised to find the movie was very different from the book in the end, though I don't know why. I definitely preferred the book as the movie was a bit too over the top in my opinion.

Twylla is only 17 years old and she can't touch anyone or else they drop down dead. Believed to be the Goddesses' Daughter Embodied, Twylla is able to drink poison and not die but this makes her touch deadly and she is used as an assassin for traitors. Twylla loves a lonely life but suddenly things start to change. Her betrothed, the Prince, arrives back from his travels and into her life again and her new guard Lief suddenly has her questioning everything she's ever been told.

This book was good and I did enjoy it but to be honest, I think I was more excited over the beautiful cover of the book rather than the content itself. I enjoyed the world building and the history we received about the stories about the gods and their daughters but for the most part, Twylla basically did nothing. She sat around and moaned about her life, and then she talked to Lief for a bit and then moaned for a bit longer. It got a bit boring after a while. I also found that Twylla mentioned her sister wayyy too often. I mean she has brothers and doesn't seem to care about them a jot. She mentioned them twice, and not in a particularly emotional way but as a reader, I felt like i was totally getting the little sister cliche pushed into my face (The Hunger Games has been there, done that) and i got tired of it. I did really enjoy hearing about The Sin-Eater. I thought it was such a unique custom and anytime she talked about it, I was riveted.

I didn't particularly enjoy the relationship between Twylla and Lief. It was very forced and obvious but I wonder if i would have enjoyed it more if Lief didn't remind me, personality-wise, so much of Po from Graceling which this novel itself resembled (the only difference being that Katsa can fight and be fairly independent - I didn't feel like that with Twylla). It just went too quick for me, and i would have enjoyed them getting more time to actually get to know each other. I also found the lack of female friendships in this book a bit sad and annoying. I understood that Twylla can't really be near anyone and no-one can be near her but I would have liked if she had sparked a friendship with the maid or someone or even have had some kind of trope matronly figure to watch over her. I also found it strange how she was being groomed to be Queen yet they never taught her to read.

Overall, I found this book just a bit too dull for my liking. I don't think I'll be buying the next book, but I'll get it from the library if I see it. It seems to be following two different characters as well so I'm hoping the story will be a bit more exciting and action-packed than this one.

4.5
Out of most of the books I had shelved to read this year, This is Where It Ends probably topped the list and was definitely in the top five of my anticipated reads of 2016. This book tells the story of a school shooting from a number of different points of views. And that's all you need to know.

It may sound twisted but as soon as I found out this book covered the events of a school shooting I knew I wanted to read it and I wanted to read it that very instant and I was devastated I had to wait for it. As a journalist, I have been in the newsroom while myself and my colleagues have been the people behind the computers trying to find people posting social posts, images and videos from such events and other events such as the Paris Attacks and Charlie Hebdo. It's my job to become involved in such an event and to want to report it. I've seen the graphic imagery that comes from such an act of senseless violence but nothing will ever come close to being as chilling as the eye-witness accounts regularly reported by media, and accounts such as the fictional ones laid out in This Is Where It Ends.

There's a cold ruthlessness that creeps into every corner of this book that is Tyler Browne, the shooter. The way he 'takes no prisoner' and shoots down people with a methodical ease in the way it seems most shooters do. It's frankly terrifying and I think the detached cruelty held by Browne could be quite reminiscent to how we've seen real-life shooters being described. The only problem I had with the book, and is why I knocked off a half point, is that I don't think all school students are so...black and white as Browne. We did have different view points of his character, his sister who loved him, her girlfriend who hated him, and his ex-girlfriend who had loved him once. We do see the good sides of him in Autumn and Claire's POV but I think they're always overshadowed by the implications Slyvia lays down about him. The common case of shooters seems to be the isolated white male, often with a gun fascination, who seems to think the world owes him something and he's angry he hasn't got whatever he's looking for yet. And while Tyler certainly was that, the book gave him another edge that was pure evil and I'm not sure it was 100% realistic.

I definitely felt emotion while reading it and unlike other reviews I found myself attaching myself to some characters but not all the main characters. Asha, Matt, Tomás and Farseed were a few that really locked themselves into my heart. I found myself silently begging that none of them would get hurt and I could feel my stress levels rising as I flipped each page waiting to see the outcome.

Even though they were some of the main characters, I actually didn't care about Autumn and Sylvia. I found their love story too dramatic and I think it tried to take too much away from the overall plot. I understand that their relationship was one of the things that brought Tyler to breaking point but there were other factors in there as well and well, I just didn't like Autumn and Sylvia, they irritated me and I don't even have a really good reason for that. I much preferred reading from Tomás POV. I really loved him and the whole hero thing he had going on.

I just wish he hadn't been that much of a hero

As a journalist, I found the subtle nods of how some media reacts to these events (incessantly tweeting people that could be in a dangerous situation for information) really interesting. It's something a newsroom needs common sense in and a certain approach to and with the internet today, it's something that can really get people in trouble.

Overall, I found this a great fast-paced read and once the 'action' gets going it 's very hard to put down. I literally had to throw the book away from me to force me to get some sleep for work the next morning!