4.5 stars

Kingsbane is the second book in the Epirium Trilogy - a fantasy world with a prophecy about the rising of two queens. A Sun Queen - a woman who will bring peace and prosperity, and a Blood Queen - a queen with terrible power and brings death and destruction. Rielle believes she is the Sun Queen but her powers are still growing and she doesn't yet know where they will lead her. And she has evil angel Corien whispering in her head - and he's the only one who appears to truly understand her. Centuries later Eliana is getting to grips with apparently being the prophesied Sun Queen, and understanding her connection to Rielle, the legendary Blood Queen while trying to help lead the revolution against the terrifying Emperor.

I loved this follow-up to Furyborn, and was surprised by how quickly i fell back into the world and with ease with all the characters. I continued my great love for Rielle in Kingsbane, but also grew closer to Eliana who was a little bit less self-righteous in this one, and seemed a bit more human at times. I love how morally complex Rielle is in this trilogy, and how her decisions affected the future of the world that Eliana now lives in. I found myself growing angry at times in Eliana's chapters by the way they would speak about Rielle, as there is so much more of a story about her actions that they could know, and I feel very protective over her.

This book had fantastic references to bisexuality (Rielle and Eliana are both bisexuality) and there's various times throughout the book when we meet other characters and families of all kinds of sexualities and races. There are some mentions of polyamory in this book which was interesting and I actually think the relationship between Audric, Rielle and Ludivine sometimes borders on polyamrous as it definitely seems like more than friendship. But beautiful all the same.

I loved everything that happened in this book but did find myself a bit surprised, and a tad confused, at some of the big reveals in the last parts of Eliana's story. I do think we are building up to a truly epic climax though and I cannot wait for the third and final book.

In a small Cornish town, there's a lot of activity going on among the residents. Thanks to an adopt-a-granny initiative, 85-year-old Julia ends up 'adopting' her 110-year-old neighbour May who has a few magical secrets as to how she's reached the ripe old age. May starts helping Julia with a family mystery and soon enlists the help of Julia's granddaughter Emily from New York.

A lovely beachside setting and a somewhat magical twist, 59 Memory Lane has the ingredients for a lovely read and for some of it, it was but I couldn't help become a bit aggrieved over some things in the story that really irked me. I definitely enjoyed the older characters in this book - May and Julia who both have different stories (though they definitely weren't really delved into enough in my opinion) as well as Ida and Tristram.

I think the author really forced a lot of relationships on characters in this book and none of them felt particularly natural. It seemed like Andy had decided to woo Emily before she even stepped off the plane, and then most of their relationship was really petty fights and none of the romance seemed organic at all. It felt like a kid mashing her two Barbies together.

I also thought there was a definite problem in this book with a lack of follow-through. A lot of things were mentioned by characters and then just never brought up again which I found really odd. From the start of the book, May's aim was to get to her 111th birthday and while she had a lot of reservations about Julia's memories and her cause in it, there wasn't really an actual moment May decided she would give up on her goal. And then there was Striped and her kittens - it was so weird for me that there was a whole scene about orphaned kittens and everyone working together to help raise the kittens and then they were literally never mentioned again for the entire book?! What happened to the kittens!! 

There was also May's adoption storyline which honestly - I don't think needed to be in the book if nothing was ever going to come out of it. The same with a lot of relationships in this book - Emily's miscarriage (which she bounced back from really fast), her chicken pox a day after said miscarriage (come on) and her relationship with Max and all of that. Her relation ship with her boss also seemed really unrealistic. 100% bosses can be really nice but if I had one show up at my door when I had chickenpox and then call me 'sweetie.' Big nope. Also no way a publishing house would accept a major job change like that.

There was also really unnecessary female rivalry in this book with Candice who seemed to fancy Andy so had a thing against Emily. And the way everyone talked about Candice was really vile. I'm not here for girl on girl hate like that.

I definitely think parts of this book could have been good if some things were given more focus than others, and a lot of the unnecessary was stripped away. I feel like the author got too excited about all her characters and kind of wanted to do everything at once and it lacked a lot of finesse.

I received this book from Abrams&Chronicle in exchange for an honest review.

Kate and Tam are from the opposites sides of the tracks in their high school. Kate is the perfect cheerleader with an overbearing mom, and Tam is the volleyball jock with a bounce to her step. But somehow the two end up becoming friends, and then a little bit more. But can the girls accept themselves for who they truly are - both within themselves and their own sexual identity.

This is a really great book written in verse, and I found it immediately addictive, bouncy and quote fun - yet not without some hard punches packed into it as well.

I really liked the different struggles between Kate and Tam, and I warmed very quickly to their incredibly sweet relationships. It felt very natural and youthful, and I just wanted to squish them together. I do think there was more focus on Kate's own struggles to accept herself and her relationship with her mom (which was never truly rectified or confronted) than Tam's but I loved still seeing Tam's relationships in her life. Her mom was lovely, the type of mom you want to see in a YA book (particularly one about sexuality), and she had her neighma Frankie as well which was a nice touch.

I didn't quite understand the inserts of the Alexes and their commentary though I did like it. They weirdly reminded me of the Three Witches in Macbeth but just not scary or threatening in any way. While it was great that Tam and Kate found themselves and each other in the book, I would have liked a bit more friendliness and acceptance with their friends such as Becca and Levi.

I did fly through this book though as it's easy to do with verse and I was thoroughly sucked into Tam and Kate's world. It didn't give me all of the emotional feels I've experienced with other verse books but I still did love it a lot.

I received an e-copy of this book from the publishers via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
When Caro's stepmother dies, she moves back to her childhood home that she ran away from as soon as she could leave for college. Confronted with past memories, Caro begins to explore what really happened when she was a child and unearths forgotten memories. What really happened between Caro, her stepmother and her estranged sister Steph - who claims to want no part of the inheritance, all that time ago and is Caro safe in the house now even though her tormentor is gone?

This was a very sinister psychological thriller with roots in creepy fairy tales - particularly The New Mother by Lucy Clifford. I definitely felt a bit unnerved while reading this book. I did like that Caro began to fall into the unreliable narrator trope as it appeared her mind was beginning to unravel and her memories were mixing up and as a reader I wasn't really sure what she was actually seeing versus what she was imagining. 

I didn't really get on with Caro though as a main character, I never really clicked with her or the story in general. This is a slower-paced thriller which isn't really my favourite - I much prefer fast-paced ones that leave me on the edge of my seat. I found a lot of Caro's actions a bit silly, and as a grown adult I couldn't quite understand how much she wasn't in the know about her own situation. There was an attempt at showing tha Caro was recovering from an abusive relationship but I definitely think this could have been explored more, and didn't quite bring much to the story besides fortifying Caro as a person who has been abused for most of her life by people she should have been able to love and trust. She never really comes across as a strong character, even when confronting people. The whole book she seems a bit cowed and I would have liked her to rise from the ashes a bit more.

I did think for a bit that Caro's mental unraveling seemed a little bit odd and out of place, as up to that point she had appeared to be fine. The drinking was also strange as at the start of the book, there's a couple of references from Caro that she wasn't a big drinker yet several times during the novel she drinks a bottle of whisky (the results of which do serve to bring the plot forward but I still thought it all an odd character choice).

This book was fine, it just wasn't one I really connected with or found myself really engrossed in. 

3.5 stars

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

It's 1988, and Saul Adler, a historian, is getting ready to travel to East Berlin to study when he is clipped by a car as he crosses the famous Abbey Road crosswalk for a photograph. Saul shrugs off the near miss but the incident becomes a catalyst for everything that follows in Saul's life - from the people he meets in Berlin, the connections he forges and the illness he suffers from 30 years later.

This is a book I went into not really knowing what to expect but preparing myself to not enjoy it. I think because I haven't had much luck with Man Booker Prize authors before, I was afraid Deborah Levy wouldn't be for me. But her writing, and her unfolding of Saul's narcissistic but utterly endearing character really spoke to me, and I truly loved this book.

I really found myself warming to Saul - from his beautiful looks to the almost tender way he seemed to go through life. He seemed strangely innocent in a lot of things, and he was the type of character you wanted to bring into your arms and protect from the world. His relationships with both Jennifer and Walter were both real and complex, and he seemed to really love yet it was never truly enough for anyone.

He had not censored his first thought when he'd touched me. His hands had been fluent in every language, his lips soft, his body hard."

It was really interesting as well to see Saul navigate East Berlin in 1988, a year away from the unification of Berlin, and still a totalitarian state in a way. It was so different from everything we know today, and it's so easy to forget that it wasn't actually that long ago that the Berlin Wall came down and Germany was split in this horrid way. Saul definitely does appear to really know the danger he is in and at all times, and we do see him and the people he loves suffer because his naivety eventually. But the brief look we got at East Berlin, was an intriguing one. I would have liked for more of the book to be focused on this time in Saul's life.

There's definitely a different feel to the second part in the book, set in 2016, and it can get quite confusing at times. It's hard to really know what Saul is thinking and what's real and not real, and what really happened. And as a reader, I began to question the story we had just read from 1988 as it appears some things didn't happen (the matchbox of his father's ashes for example). But even in this part, Saul was still Saul - and though he was older, fatter and not in his right mind, it was still very easy to love him.

There was something just really beautiful about this entire story and I loved been carried along with it.

Nexus is the follow-on book to Zenith in the Androma Saga and follows space pirate Andi as she has to fight tyrannical leader Nor, and help her friends who are trapped with mind control.
I read this on audiobook with a full cast narration and while the audiobook definitely wasn't ,y favourite, I think I liked the actual book better than if I would have read it in physical format like I did Zenith.

I will say that I definitely did like the world created in The Androma Saga. I like that there seems to be loads of different planets and different kind of species, and how everyone lives and worships varies from planet to planet which makes things interesting but I do think that the world definitely wasn't used to its full potential. I would have loved a bit more planet hopping with Andi and Dex as they tried to fight their way back to the rest of the crew, and maybe they could have picked up a few interesting tagalongs along the way. We got it to an extent but I definitely think more could have been done (and there could have just been les overall of Andi being angry and not doing anything).
I've seen some reviews slate the 'science' in this book but honestly, there's never mention of earth or anything we actually know of our own galaxy in these duology so I'm okay with accepting the science as it is and not questioning things too much. 

I have to say again that the characters in this aren't particularly original, and none of the characters' decisions ever really surprised me. I found Andi a bit of an exhausting character - maybe because I was listening on audio- but she was just always so angry, which to an extent is understandable but it made her very antagonistic and the narration very loud and shouty and I didn't like that energy. 

Overall, this duology was fine for me. I wouldn't shout about it from the rooftops but it wasn't absolutely terrible either. I will still support the authors and read other books they come out with,

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

Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a sweet, short novel about a very special cafe in Tokyo that allows people to go back to their past. There are, however, three rules - you can only go back in the past to meet someone who has visited the cafe, you must sit in a particular seat in the cafe while doing so and you must drink your coffee during your time travel window before it gets cold.

This was a very sweet novel that's very much about the different characters who frequent the cafe almost every day, as well as the reasons why some people we meet decide to go back to the past. Family, love, and different types of loss are the main reasons behind people's decisions to time travel and we see them explored in different ways and a huge array of emotions felt by all of our characters during them.

There's definitely some bittersweet lessons in this story about not being able to change the true outcomes of our actions, and therefore perhaps living each moment as we would always want to and appreciating those who show us kindness and bring something special to our lives.

A very nice read for a rainy day, and perhaps the perfect book to read while drinking a hot beverage ;)

3.5 stars

TW: Sexual assault and some homophobia

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

In the late 1950s, the CIA published Russian copies of Doctor Zhivago and smuggled them behind the Iron Curtain in order to spark an unrest among Soviet citizens. In The Secrets We Kept, Lara Prescott explores the women who may have helped the mission, as well as the intriguing relationship between Russian author Boris Pasternak and his mistress Olga, who is known to have inspired the Doctor Zhivago character Lara.

I really enjoyed this book, and learning some really amazing things about the revolutionary Doctor Zhivago which I never knew before. I definitely have to put my hands up and admit that, at the time of writing, I have yet to read Doctor Zhivago but I have very much enjoyed the BBC mini series of it with Keira Knightley, which I'm pretty sure we got free DVDs of in the Sunday paper!

The complexities of all the female characters in this really drew me in, and the amount of character growth we see (particularly with Irina). I loved the chapters from the 'typists' in the CIA, and how this book also focused on women who had done some amazing things during the war and then been relegated to secretarial and homemaking duties once the men came home, and how hard this was for a majority of them.

I will say that I feel like I did want something more from this book. I think I expected to be wowed and I didn't quite get that wow moment - and I really felt like the reader would eventually get more from Irina and Sally's relationship, and it definitely felt more like it just meandered away a bit sad and disappointing.

Besides that, the history behind this book really just fascinated me, and I think Lara Prescott did a great way in bringing it to life using some fictional characters.