I received a free copy of this book from Penguin Random House in exchange for an honest review.

Florida is a set of short stories which are all somehow linked to the US state of Florida. I found a majority of this collection of short stories quite gripping, and I really enjoyed the focus most of them had in the sense of home, and family, as well as place. Not all the books are physically set in Florida, some of them just focus on characters who grew up there but Florida plays a role in each story.

As someone who doesn’t t read a lot of short story collections, I enjoyed this one more than I thought I would and I liked most of the stories.I did find halfway through I lost some of my interest in the book but more along the lines of when I put it down, I wasn’t rushing to pick it back up which probably would have been different if this was a novel instead of short stories.

I do recommend this for people who like quieter short stories that focus on family life.

The Surface Breaks is a feminist retelling of many people’s favourite tale - The Little Mermaid.

Gaia is 15 years old and is the favourite daughter of the wicked Sea King, who thinks mermaids should be seen and not heard, and banishes ugly, fat or physically deformed merpeople to the outskirts of his city. Gaia is entranced with the human world and when she’s finally allowed a peek, she falls in love with a human man and is prepared to give up everything to be with him.

Following a lot of mixed reviews, I was nervous about reading this as I didn’t know if i’d love it or hate it. I found myself pleasantly surprised as I really ended up enjoying this.

I did think the feminist message about misogny was a bit in your face, and I think this could have been toned down. I’m loathe to believe that every single merman was a woman-hating pos, and I like to think there were some good seeds among a lot of bad eggs. There are some conversations an thoughts Gaia have that are hard to read about body image or just general thoughts about females and what they should do or not do. There was also a lot of jealousy and bad feelings among her and her sisters, and that was sad to read.

I really liked Ceto, the Sea Witch, and how she talked to Gaia about female sexuality, sensuality and was also a plus-sized sass queen. I agree with others in that it would have been great to have had more of Ceto in the novel (or honestly, just a whole novel about her because she was great).

I think this was a good effort for a modern, feminist retelling of The Little Mermaid but it’s definitely not the best example of Louise O’Neill’s writing.

This is a really nice, simple book about what life is like on a racing yard - especially for a young girl who wants to make it to the top.

As someone who is horse mad, and once thought about being a jockey, being able to read a first-hand experience of a stable lass in a racing yard was really interesting. I thought the writing style, and storytelling was a bit on the simple side but considering Gemma is a horsewoman and not a full-time writer, this is to be expected.

The way Gemma tells her stories about different experiences, horses and people she met during her career as a stable lass was done in a really nice, conversational way. This is a nice book to curl up with alongside a cup of tea, and a dog to cuddle and maybe, if you're lucky, a horse as well.

I received a free digital copy of this book from the publishers/author via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Eva is a survivor of the drowning, an apocalyptic event that left no land in the world, and the survivors all have to make a new life out at sea. Eva lives on a flotilla - a community of dozens of boats roped together - and at the start of the novel, volunteers are being sent out to find somewhere better. The problem is no volunteer has ever returned. Eva says goodbye to the man she loves, and then as soon as he's gone, things start happening in the community - people are murdered, and secrets are being kept. Former detective Eva sets out to investigate and discover the truth.

This was an okay book. It kept me gripped from a few chapters in so kudos for that but I knew very quickly that it was going to be an average read for me.

I felt like everything happened way too quickly on the boats - we were barely into the first chapter when there was an attempted murder, the second chapter there was an almost robbery, the third a murder, and so on. As a reader, I had no grip on the world or the characters before everything began to move at top speed and I really didn't like it. I like to have a moment to start caring about characters before they all start getting knifed, meaning the plot is tense and high drama for me as a reader because I care about those involved.

The writing felt very haphazard, almost like sometimes the author was just making everything up as he went along. For a post-apocalyptic thriller though, this book has something for everyone - a good Captain, a bully boy gang, religious zealots, infection killing everyone, a bad-ass female character taking down the bad guys.

This was okay, but I wouldn't be dying to read the next one.