3.5 stars

Kambili is 15 years old and lives with her domineering father, her scared mother and her slowly defiant brother. Kambili experiences sudden freedom when during the Nigerian military coup, she and her brother are sent to stay with their aunt and she is allowed to bond with her cousins, get to know her grandfather and truly experience being a teenage girl, all in the shadow of violence and government upheaval.

This was a beautifully told story that combined a terrifying home life with a young girl's urge to explore more of what is on the outside of the world and who starts realising that not everything her hypocritical father preaches is true. Kambili was innocent from a lot of things, and horrifyingly not of other, more violent things. This story contains several instances of domestic violence. I loved seeing more of Nigeria in this book, and the way Kambili and her family lived versus how her aunt and cousins lived.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie expertly weaved this story and it had so many tender moments combined with moments full of pain. I really feel like I understood a little bit of what life was like for many Nigerian families living during the coup, and the struggles they faced.

I received this book from Titan Press in exchange for an honest review.

Jane McKeene is training to be a zombie killer because she's a black woman and therefore, by the law, she's forced into becoming a trained combatant against the 'shamblers' to protect the white people in the community. Constantly fighting against the racism she has to face every day, and the hordes of zombies protecting her loved ones, Jane eventually finds herself shipped to Summerland - a Western town that pretends to be a safe haven but could actually be the destruction of them all.

I really enjoyed this story which gave a really fresh take on the average zombie apocalypse tale I have become used to. For starters, this is set post Civil-War America so is a historical zombie fiction, and manages to weave in a tale of racial injustice that really hits home. Jane as a character, for me, was absolutely brilliant and superbly formed and introduced to the reader. She arrived on the page fully-functional with a brilliant past, and a personality that shone through the pages. She had courage and spunk, and was full of brains as well. She could fight, and was pretty bad-ass about it too!

The racism in this book shown towards Jane and her friends is very hard to read at times, but I found the way Justina Ireland made the characters be racist about a zombie apocalypse genuinely believable because I do fully believe there's pig ignorant people on this world that would find some way of pinning a zombie apocalypse on non-white folk!

I really loved the letters between Jane and her mom, which were at the start of each chapter - and even though they were snippets, they told a lovely story in and of itself as well which was very powerful. There's also a great female friendship in it that does start out more frenemies but does end up in a mutual respect and love. I wasn't completely happy that Jane disliked Katherine because she was so pretty at first but fortunately this did end up all okay in the end. It's also strongly applied that Katherine identifies as asexual in this book, and Jane is bisexual.

This was a great story with some fascinating historical aspects to it, and a lot of zombie action as well. Justina Ireland wove in the true way that Native American children were sent to schools and institutionalised into this book, and treated really badly overall, and it was something I never really knew about before or learned about. I'm not sure if there's going to be a sequel to this book but I would have no hesitation in picking up another book about Jane!

3.5 Stars

I received a free copy of this book from Pan Macmillan in exchange for an honest review.

When Jack meets Kate, he falls for her pretty quickly and he finally feels like he’s met the person he could be with for a long time. So when Kate suddenly dies, he’s left devastated. But then Jack finds himself in a time loop, reliving the same three months over and over again from the time he met Kate to the night she dies. Can he do anything differently to save her life?

Who doesn’t love a time loop story? Especially when the mission is to try and save someone’s life. I really liked the writing style of this book, and Jack’s narrative (mostly) - I flew through the story and found it very easy to read. However, I have to admit - I did not buy into this ‘love’ story at all. It just wasn’t one for me and i did not find myself rooting for it, which is kind of what you’re suppose to be doing.

I feel like I didn’t really grasp who Kate was as a person, and why Jack liked her so much. It felt for the most part to me that Jack liked her so much simply because she was a pretty girl who was talking to him, and who also liked cereal. And even though we were getting a lot of different versions of their relationship, I still didn’t get anything beyond surface level with her.

Also Jack just didn’t seem to be a particularly nice person when he was with Kate - he didn’t treat his friends and family well because he was so focused on trying to save Kate which is a little but understandable but also, be there for the people who love you too. And there was one really, really terrible thing Jack did in one of his loops that he wasn’t really apologetic for at all, and he didn’t really get properly pulled up on it if you ask me because oh there he goes into another loop and he gets to try again and erase his past misdemeanours.

I did love that this book is very diverse in that pretty much every character is a POC which was great. Jack’s parents are also real parents in that they’re there all he time, they want to know what he’s doing, where he’s going and reprimand him when they don’t or when he does wrong. They’re present and for YA we all know that doesn’t always happen. I also love the relationship they had with Franny.

This book touches on a lot of different issues, and while some are only a small point in the book in different loops, they’re all pretty powerful.

I don’t really think this book is a love story, it’s mostly a book about friendship and being there for your friends and knowing when they need you and just making sure they know you’re there. The real relationships explored were that between Jack and Jillian, and Jack and Franny and then all three together and I appreciated that a lot more than the Jack and Kate story that was failing to sell to me.