All That She Can See
Rating: 5/5
Buy or Borrow: BUY
Source: Sainsburys (Comes with free recipe cards)

Cherry has a hidden talent. She can see things other people can't and she decided a long time ago to use this skill to help others. As far as the rest of the town is concerned she's simply the kind-hearted young woman who runs the local bakery, but in private she uses her gift to add something special to her cakes so that after just one mouthful the townspeople start to feel better about their lives. They don't know why they're drawn to Cherry's bakery - they just know that they're safe there and that's how Cherry likes it. She can help them in secret and no one will ever need to know the truth behind her gift.

And then Chase turns up and threatens to undo all the good Cherry has done. Because it turns out she's not the only one who can see what she sees . .

As YALC draws nearer, panic seems to be taking over my timeline. Tweets of "I haven't read this" and cries of "I don't know how to fit all these books in a backpack" are coming in thick and fast. Deep breath guys, you've got this. And if you're still stressing? Here are some tips to help you survive YALC.

Say Her Name
Rating: 5/5
Buy or Borrow: BUY
Source: Bought from Amazon

When Bobbie and her best friend Naya are dared by their schoolmates to simmon the legendary ghost of Bloody Mary, neither really believes that anything will happen. So they complete the ritual, and chant Mary's name five times in front of a candlelit mirror.

Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary...

And something is called forth that night. Something dark, terrifying, and out of control. She will be there, just out of sight, in the corner of your eye. She will lurk in your nightmares. She will hide in the shadows of your bedroom. She will be waiting in every mirror that you see. She is everywhere. And she wants revenge.

We all love setting ourselves goals and the sense of euphoria we get when we achieve them. Recently, this is something I've found myself thinking about quite a lot and a recurring theme over on my social medias.

I've recently started following a lot more bloggers online and something I've noticed is how much people care. Don't get me wrong, if someone messaged me saying they hated my writing, I'd care about that but a lot of people check their stats daily, check their followers daily and post incessantly about their statistics and their next goal.

I found myself wondering, is this normal? I don't do this, maybe I just don't follow the social norms. When I'm close to a big milestone (GUYS, I'M SO CLOSE TO 300 SUBSCRIBERS AND 20,000 VIEWS ON YOUTUBE), I will keep an eye on them until I reach that target and then not check them again for a few weeks.

I've found that my blog and my YouTube grow naturally, and tend to grow more when I promote my stats less. If I focus more on content and quality, promoting my posts and interacting with others, I know my following increases on its own.

The other day, someone tweeted, "I got 100 page views in a day for the first time since I started blogging" and then another person replied, "I've been blogging for 3 months longer than you and I've never had that, what am I doing wrong?". Let me answer that question for you: nothing. Are you enjoying yourself? Are you enjoying creating the content you're making? Are you proud of what you're doing? If you answered yes to one or more of these questions, you are doing absolutely nothing wrong.

I'm quite sensitive with what I post as I would never want anyone to feel like they should be achieving a certain amount of views by this date and a certain amount of followers by this point because there are no guidelines, there are no rules but just remember there are thousands of bloggers out there, all trying to make it like you are.

This post is sounding really negative but that's not what I wanted at all. What I wanted you all to know is: you're doing good. If you've had a blog for 5 years and you're getting 10 views a day: well done for keeping up with something for so long and keeping a few people engaged. If you've had a blog for 5 days and you're getting 100 views a day: well done for creating a following for your blog so quickly and I hope it lasts a long time.

Views, followers, subscribers, they don't make us any better than the next blogger. People keep saying to me, "you're so good to small bloggers, promoting them is so nice of you"; I promote good content. If I like what I see, I promote it, I don't care if you have 0 followers or 10,000 followers - you're all bloody awesome and we should all be proud of what we've achieved already. No matter how big or how small.

I am so thankful to everyone that reads and enjoys my blog. You brighten up my day but if you suddenly all stopped reading, I'd still keep blogging, it's one of my favourite things to do and I couldn't imagine not tapping away at my laptop every few days.

Wherever you want to be with your blog, you'll get there. Just keep going and enjoy every minute of it.

New Boy
Rating: 5/5
Buy or Borrow: Buy
Source: Penguin Platform

Arriving at his fourth school in six years, diplomat’s son Osei Kokote knows he needs an ally if he is to survive his first day – so he’s lucky to hit it off with Dee, the most popular girl in school. But one student can’t stand to witness this budding relationship: Ian decides to destroy the friendship between the black boy and the golden girl. By the end of the day, the school and its key players – teachers and pupils alike – will never be the same again.

The tragedy of Othello is transposed to a 1970s’ suburban Washington schoolyard, where kids fall in and out of love with each other before lunchtime, and practise a casual racism picked up from their parents and teachers. Watching over the shoulders of four 11-year-olds – Osei, Dee, Ian and his reluctant girlfriend Mimi.

Ask No Questions
Rating: 4/5
Buy or Borrow: Buy
Source: eBook copy in exchange for an honest review

After an operation goes badly wrong, undercover specialist Detective Caelan Small leaves the Metropolitan Police for good. Or so she thinks. 

Soon Caelan is drawn back into a dangerous investigation. But when the main lead is suddenly murdered, all bets are off. Nothing is as it seems. Everyone is a suspect – even close colleagues.

Someone in the Met is involved and Caelan is being told to Ask No Questions.

That isn't an option: Caelan needs answers… whatever the cost.  

Hello lovely people. I'm sure many of you know that the new Zoella and Friends Book Club is finally out! I have absolutely loved being involved in the previous two Zoella Book Clubs with WHSmith and for the latest one, I thought I'd host my own Zoella Book Club chat. My first unboxing video had the most wonderful feedback and a lot of the comments suggested reading them together and then asking what order I would be reading the books in etc, so this blog post will explain all.

Every Saturday, I will post a video review over on my channel here at 5pm of the book that we're discussing that evening. That way, if you haven't got round to reading the book, you can watch my review and still join in. At 6pm, the chat will start and I'll be choosing discussion points for the hour (if there's anything you'd like to talk about in particular, feel free to message me!). At 7pm, when the chat's over, I will post a graphic of what we'll be discussing at the next chat and when it will be. I would love as many of you to get involved as possible! The feedback to this idea has been great already.

The order of the books is something I'm getting asked a lot. As many of you probably know by now, the first book we'll be discussing is MOXIE by Jennifer Mathieu. All information on the first chat can be found here:

I wanted to save writing this post for the last stretch of the readathon so whilst I "rest my eyes" for ten minutes, I'm going to type this up. Just to warn you all, I haven't slept for...a long time now and what the heck, I'm not going to proof read this; so don't expect anything great!

It's 5am. I've technically been awake for 24 hours already but have been reading since 9am yesterday morning. I'm just about to start my 9th book in that period of time and do you know how I feel? Well, apart from a little dizzy and tired...I FEEL INCREDIBLE. I feel exhilarated. I feel amazing. But mostly, I feel proud.

A few hours in, I was struggling; majorly. I wanted to give up and felt that someone like me just couldn't do something as challenging as this with my conditions. But look at me, I F**KING DID IT! I have tears in my eyes typing this because you know what? Nothing and nobody can stop you from achieving what you want to achieve. No matter how big, or small. All you need is belief and right now, I have tonnes. Mostly, thanks to you guys.


All of you drove me to where I'm at now. Nothing is going to get in my way. I've managed to stay awake and read 9 books (possibly 10, it's only 5am guys, there's time!) in 24 hours, produce 24 blog posts with some truly inspiring, incredible people and raise over £500 for a charity that looks after people like me. Now if that isn't an achievement, I'm not sure what is.

Now this girl needs sleep and she needs it baaaaaaad.

The Novice ‘When blacksmith apprentice Fletcher discovers that he has the ability to summon demons from another world, he travels to Adept Military Academy. There the gifted are trained in the art of summoning. Fletcher is put through gruelling training as a battlemage to fight in the Hominum Empire’s war against orcs. He must tread carefully while training alongside children of powerful nobles. The power hungry, those seeking alliances, and the fear of betrayal surround him. Fletcher finds himself caught in the middle of powerful forces, with only his demon Ignatius for help’.

The Inquisition ‘A year has passed since the Tournament. Fletcher and Ignatius have been locked away in Pelt’s dungeons, but now they must face a trial at the hands of the Inquisition, a powerful institution controlled by those who would delight in Fletcher’s downfall. The trial is haunted by ghosts from the past with shocking revelations about Fletcher’s origins, but he has little time to dwell on them; the graduating students of Vocans are to be sent deep into the orc jungles to complete a dangerous mission for the king and his council. If they fail, the orcish armies will rise to power beyond anything the Empire has ever seen’.

The Battlemage ‘One boy's ability to summon demons will change the fate of an empire ... The epic conclusion to the fantasy trilogy described as 'Harry Potter meets Lord of the Rings meets Pokémon'. After the thrilling cliff-hanger at the end of book two, we re-join Fletcher and his friends in the ether, where they must undertake a mortally dangerous quest, all the while avoiding capture by enemies and facing foes more terrifying than anything they have yet encountered. But this is nothing compared to what truly lies ahead for Fletcher, as his nemesis, albino orc Khan, is on a mission to destroy Hominum and everything and everyone that Fletcher loves’.

After the Hunger Games, dystopia became a trend – a huge trend, with many different stories exploring many different scenarios. But I didn't set out to write dystopian fiction because it was fashionable. I first had the idea that would become ACID when I was fourteen years old. Back then, YA wasn't even a genre (as a reader, I went from to Sweet Valley High and Point Horror straight to adult novels). But as a reader, I'd always been fascinated with what if? I grew up in the shadow of the Cold War. The four minute warning was a very real part of everyday life; we even had an assembly about it, and I remember feeling incredibly anxious about the threat of nuclear war, knowing that if the warning went off while I was at school I'd never see my family again. In the midst of all this, aged 9 or so, I read Robert Swindells's Brother in the Land, a post-apocalyptic children's novel about life after a nuclear attack on the UK. About people who survived. Reading it helped soothe my fears somewhat: I began to feel there might be some hope should such a disaster ever occur – if you were one of the lucky ones.

This fascination with books which looked at disaster, survival and hope continued through my teenage years and into my adult life. After graduating from university in 2002, I decided it was time to take my writing seriously. By 2007, I'd signed with an agent, but the novel she took me on with didn't sell. At the time, there were a lot of things on the news about the UK that were making me uneasy: stories about how the Shetland Islands, a group of islands more than 100 miles off the north-east coast of mainland Scotland (and one of the smallest local authorities in Great Britain), had more CCTV cameras per person than the San Francisco Police Department; about shops being able to tag products, allowing them to keep track of where these products went so the stores could monitor their customers' lifestyle habits, and Tesco installing face scanners at petrol stations so that screens could play targeted ads at people. Scary stuff.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I started to wonder what life in the UK would be like if the authorities really did watch everybody all the time. What if they controlled everything about our lives – where we lived, where we worked, who we were in a relationship with, even what we ate? What if they controlled the internet, replacing it with a state-run intranet a bit like North Korea's Kwangmyong network, where everything uploaded onto it is controlled by the authorities? And – most sinister of all – what if the government had been replaced by a police force who were in charge of everything, locking people up for the slightest transgression? This was 2008-9, when the world was in the grips of the financial crisis, so it didn't take much to imagine a situation where the UK government had been ousted after failing to deal with the country's debt, allowing a militia called ACID (the Agency for Crime Investigation and Defence) to take over and isolate the UK, now known as the Independent Republic of Britain, from the rest of the world.

Dystopia might have become a trend, but  - as with most trends, there's a reason for that. Books imagining dark futures speak to us because we want to try and make sense of all the terrible things that are happening around us in the real world, right now, and still feel like there is some hope for the future. Stories that show a heroine or hero fighting the system that oppresses them helps us do this. So while trends in fiction might wax and wane, I think there will always be room for dystopian stories – just like there will always be room for stories in any genre.


BIO: Emma Pass is the award-winning, Carnegie Medal-nominated author of two books for young adults, ACID and The Fearless, published by Penguin Random House. When she's not writing, she runs workshops in schools, libraries and community settings, mentors other writers and has been a writer-in-residence for First Story. She is also the co-founder of the popular Author Allsorts blog and the UKYA and Children's Extravaganza (UKYACX) and lives with her artist husband and her crazy greyhound G-Dog in the East Midlands.

I mainly read YA literature, and it is safe to say that I have a fair few favourites from the last few years. And each and every has made it on to my top ten list of young adult literature for their own reasons.

Often when we see lists of the top (insert number & theme) books they often cover “classic” titles and nearly always books that have been in the charts, or made into films etc. Fun and interesting though those lists can be I wanted to offer something that was a little more personal for this blog post on some of the books that have really had an impact on me or been intriguing or influencing in some way. So, in no particular order. . .

How can books help?

How can books help people to ‘live well’ with a long-term condition?

Some books are purely informative, cluing people and their loved ones into the details of the conditions and what current best practice is for treating and managing it. But there are also books for carers, books for kids needing to adjust to a parents’ illness or disability, books about managing things like sleep (as this is often impacted by a long-term condition), books on nutrition and exercise to help manage specific conditions or improve your general health, books on managing mental health generally and specifically, books on recovery, self-help books…so many different books. 

I love reading about things that go bump in the night, and particularly enjoyed horror books when I was at secondary school.

This was partly because - let’s face it - being a teenager can be really, really hard. There’s quite a lot of stuff to stress about when you’re a teen. And, for me, horror books were a great form of escapism. They kept you engaged, and on the edge of your seat, even when you had real-life problems on your mind. They could also make it seem like your life really wasn’t that bad by comparison. Whatever issues you might be having at school or home, at least you weren’t being haunted by a vengeful ghost, or pursued by a demented axe murderer.

Horror stories give us the opportunity to explore the deepest, darkest “what-if’s,” all from the safety of our armchairs. There’s no other sane way to experience the awful thrill of running for your life, or being trapped in an asylum, or watching your life implode around you. And, for some reason, we humans rather enjoy the twisted excitement of flirting with darkness in this way.

The Point Horror books were my go-to series when I was a teen, and I tore through them very quickly. I think the Red Eye series is very much Point Horror for contemporary times, and have really enjoyed the books that I’ve read so far. I also have a new Red Eye book of my own being released later this year. It’s called Charlotte Says and is a prequel to my first Red Eye book, Frozen Charlotte. Expect Victorian séances, haunted dolls’ houses, chilling schoolhouses and, of course, demonic dolls.

BIO: Alex Bell is the author of several books, including Frozen Charlotte which was featured in the Zoella Book Club last year. You can find out more about Alex here.

Thank you, Zoe, for giving us this topic to blog about because dreams are lovely! Don’t listen to people that tell you to ‘get your head out of the clouds’ (most people to me most of my childhood), we all need some time up there. A little escapism is a pleasure, not a guilty pleasure. And there’s something special about teenage dreams. It’s a time in your life when you’re looking forward, so much is unsettled. Teens can dream big about becoming (often in quite a random way) someone who inhabits an extraordinary life – the ordinary teenager who turns out to be a princess (the Meg Cabot books tapping brilliantly into that classic fantasy), the gangly, nerdy girl who suddenly finds herself as the face of an international modelling campaign (Geek Girl of course), the teenager who one minute is ‘acting’ a carrot and the next is in the running for a big role in a dystopian movie (our Waiting for Callback books). And you can dream about doing the ordinary teenage things (like first love) in an extraordinary way. We can write and you can read a dreamy love interest and have it all work out – Honor won’t let me write these scenes because of the cringe factor and (sadly) she’s the first to admit that Archie, the ‘practically perfect’ love interest in our books isn’t 100% drawn from real-life observance of her male peers… Blame it on Darcy. Maybe the dream is just not messing up and turning up to a Halloween party dressed as an olive. We’ve all been there. Our books and lots of my favourites combine the downright weird with the weirdly recognisable.

I was always the only Grace in my class at school. In my whole year group, throughout primary and secondary education. I was stupidly proud of that fact, and curse my parents for it a little nowadays because it's basically made me want to give my children the most obscure and magical names imaginable – that is, if I ever have any, to ensure they never end up seated next to a namesake in their classes. Ridiculous, right? That's me! I expect my little sis, Fleur, will have the same unfortunate name snobbery someday too...

Then, upon starting my second year of college, I was faced with her – my first ever fellow Grace! I won't lie, it was a thrilling experience. I wasn't peeved at all, as I had always assumed I would be. This Grace went by 'Grace G' in our English Lit class, while I was 'Grace L' (pronounced 'luh!'). She became a very good friend in my last year of college. We would have 'Grace moments', when we'd say the same thing at the same time, or get similar scores on our coursework. I could not think of a better first IRL namesake.

I now know a lot of people my age, who I've met through Twitter or at book events or university, called Grace. At some point they've all appeared in recent years, all of them no doubt each being 'the only Grace' growing up, as well. Hiya, Graces. We're here! We were a rare breed once.

I say 'were', because I can't help but notice that these days every other little girl is called Grace. Seriously. I know several women a little older than me who have had baby Graces, and in my years working in customer service every other day I'd hear a parent shout 'Grace! Gracie! Over here, sweetie!' to a wayfaring toddler picking up products, grabbing at biscuits and snotting on the shelves. It must be a trend. Looking it up, I see that Grace has been one of the most popular female baby names for the past couple of decades. Not in the 90s, though. That explains it!
I personally would love to see a little boy called Grace, I think he would be a right character. It could be short for 'Gracius' or 'Gracer'...

Y'know where else there are quite a few Graces emerging? In contemporary YA novels! No, for real. I am amazed at the amount of namesakes I'm discovering in each new read. Let's look at a few, and the fantastic novels they all feature in...

Hi I'm Rebecca from This Booky Place and as of the end of June I have been blogging for a whole six months. I know to a lot of you that probably isn't anything, but for me it's the longest I've managed to go without people at school finding out and bullying me into stopping, or just generally thinking I was doing something stupid. So, to be finished university now and having the confidence to blog almost every day, is so liberating.

Since I have only been blogging for half a year there's still a lot that I'm learning, but I wanted to share a few things that I have already learned, proving that you don't have to have thousands of followers to be recognised as a blogger.

Hearts mean a lot to me – my family doesn’t have a great track record with them, either medically or romantically! But as a writer, hearts are indispensable. We use them literally, to convey fright, excitement, attraction. And metaphorically: broken-hearted, heart-sick, heart’s desire.

So I decided to take a look at how I use the word in GILDED CAGE, the first part of my political fantasy series, set in an alternate modern Britain. In this world, a magically skilled aristocracy rules over the rest of us, who must give 10 years of our life in service – this 1% / 99% society is unnervingly like our own.


I found I used ‘heart’ a whopping 49 times!

There’s a great maxim from E.L. Doctorow that ‘good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader – not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.’ In the same way, when I write about hearts, I want not so much to tell the reader that this character is afraid/excited/attracted, etc., but to try and help them feel the same emotions. Never an easy thing to do! But there are three of my favourite ‘heart-felt’ moments in GILDED CAGE, and you can judge!

‘Leah’s heart was pounding. He was the last one of them that she’d trust. The very last. Still, she had to take the offered chance, even if it was no more than a cat momentarily lifting its paw off a mouse’s back.’ 

This is from my opening scene. A young woman is running away from one of the aristocratic estates, but knows there is magical gate she will need to escape through. Her only hope is her baby in her arms, who may have magical ability. But then she encounters the dangerous youngest son of the family, who makes her a risky offer. Leah is overwhelmed with adrenaline and fear, but she’s also got to use her brain to think her way out of this. That’s what I wanted to convey with the three short, blunt sentences: the bam-bam-bam of her heart. Then the longer, more intricate sentence as she tries to think her way through.

‘“All Bodina thinks about right now is her heartbreak, and the next party to help her get over it.”’ 

GILDED CAGE has two central characters: everyday siblings Luke and Abi. But there are three more narrators: aristocrats Gavar, Bouda and Silyen. One of the pleasures (I hope!) of reading the book, is the way we meet characters through one person’s eyes, then later see a different side of them, or even their own thoughts. This is Bouda Matravers, an ambitious young female politician, talking about her little sister. Bouda is ruthless and hardworking, and dismissive of her sister’s lifestyle – and yet loves her dearly. In this line, her empathy at her sister’s recent breakup is undercut by her rather cool dismissal of her partying nature. Whether Bouda’s worldview is right, we find out rather later…

“The confusion in her heart was beyond her brain’s ability to solve. What problem in a textbook was more difficult than this? None.”

This is Abi, the smart, eldest child of a family beginning its ten-year service. Abi’s learning journey may be the longest and hardest of any of the characters in this trilogy – and this is where it begins. She’s fallen hard for the middle son of the family to whom she’s in service. But their differences in status and the power imbalance in their relationship are hugely problematic. This is the moment it first hits home. Abi’s emotional and logical processes are a challenge to write, because she’s simultaneously very rational (she was due to start studying medicine before her family began their service), yet she has a wide romantic and emotional streak, and the two are constantly at war. This is her trying – and failing – to apply her book-smarts to her feelings.

You may have noticed that these three examples are all female characters. Fear not! The two most intuitively emotional characters in the books are two of the guys, commoner Luke and aristocrat Gavar. They don’t find it any easier than the girls, though, to work out what their hearts are telling them – and the heart-felt journeys of all the characters are at the heart of the sequence. If you read GILDED CAGE, I hope you ❤  it!

BIO: GILDED CAGE is the first in the Dark Gifts sequence. The Guardian called it ‘impressive’ and the Daily Mail ‘dazzling’. The sequel, TARNISHED CITY, is out in September! Find Vic on twitter @DrVictoriaJames. Big thanks to Zoe for inviting me to join this fundraiser for a cause that’s very dear to my heart.

BIO: Katharine and Elizabeth Corr are sisters and the authors of The Witch's Kiss and The Witch's Tears. If you'd like to know more about them, or their books, please click here.

The concept of the Strong Female Character has been written about and debated by people far cleverer than me in recent months and years: is it a feminist achievement, or a reductive archetype? A valuable shorthand that will encourage (particularly younger) female readers to a story, or a meaningless phrase that really just refers to characters that are three-dimensional, well-rounded and convincing and flawed i.e. everything that we should reasonably expect?

Dogs have always been an important part of my life from my very first imaginary dog - Paddy, a beautiful golden Labrador to my first actual real life dog, Candy, a tiny white west highland terrier with a passion for chasing lorries. I remember the day my parents finally caved in and agreed to buy us a real dog, we went into Crickhowell to buy a dog bowl, lead and so on. It was a very hot day (alright, hot for Wales) so the windows were down in mum’s blue fiesta. My brother, Andrew and I were bouncing in excitement on the back seats so much that I fell out of the window – this was when windows went all the way down without any child safety regs. We very nearly didn’t get the dog that day.

As a teacher for nearly twenty years, and later as a parent and a writer, I have come to believe that the first most important lesson for young people to learn is to be kind, and the second, the one I want to write about today, is to think for themselves.

Social media, YouTube, games consoles, iPads --all of them—have opened the floodgates in a way which just wasn’t possible to the children of my generation. Information: credible, farcical and everything in between, is available so readily now--in this new era of voice commands, we don’t even have to touch a button to find it. The world has changed forever, and it’s both a blessing and a curse.

In the classroom, setting the task to children of any age of finding out more about topics of interest, has quickly become a more and more pointless activity. Why bother going to the library and looking in books when information can be found online in a matter of seconds? Completing a research homework in the 21st century means a child printing pages and pages on a given topic off the internet. The most diligent students cut and paste from a number of sources, and some of them even read what they hand in, but certainly not all of them. Perhaps they evaluate the source they acquired it from, considering if it is credible and legitimate, but often they don’t, and in this era of fake news, in a world where anyone can make a website and anyone can post online about anything at all, it’s not always easy to tell who does, and who doesn’t know what they’re talking about anyway.

It has become more important than ever to evaluate sources of information and consider their reliability, but propaganda and bias are far from new phenomenons. The traditional “legitimate” press in this country is often pursuing its own agenda and there are certain newspapers in particular which are very good at creating xenophobia and prejudice with the slant they use and the stories they choose to report.

We need to question all views and opinions expressed to us, even the ones presented by the people we trust, by people we respect and love, by those nearest and dearest to us. Are they really true? Could they just be one person’s interpretation? Is there another way of looking at things? I love my parents deeply, but do I agree with all of their political views? No. And do I want my own children to grow up simply repeating the opinions I express to them? No. Even if we have the best role models in the world, we should never simply regurgitate the political and social views of others without stopping to consider and evaluate them.

Literature has taught me empathy and tolerance, and it has taught me to question. In Show Stopper, one of the characters, Priya, tells Ben, the main character, to judge for himself--to make up his own mind and to think with his head and his heart. It’s something Ben learns to do as the story progresses and it’s something I think we all need to do, young and old, now more than ever before.

BIO: Hayley Barker's debut novel Show Stopper was released recently and it did not disappoint. Find out more about Hayley here.

As someone who suffers from a chronic illness that has the side affect of chronic fatigue, I often find it difficult to enjoy my hobby of reading. I can’t even remember the amount of times I have given up on a book after not being able to read it for a long period, or because I simply cannot concentrate enough to complete one page, let alone a whole book.  I’ve had plenty of time to discover some new ways to enjoy reading when the brain fog takes over, so today I thought that I would share some of my Reading Through the Brain Fog tips.

Hi everyone! Samantha Shannon here. If you haven’t discovered my series yet, let me tell you a little bit about it . . . 

THE BONE SEASON is the first installment in a seven-book series of dystopian urban fantasy novels. Beginning in the year 2059, the story follows Paige Mahoney, a nineteen-year-old Irish clairvoyant working in the criminal underworld of London. Paige is a dreamwalker, an especially rare kind of clairvoyant, who can walk in people’s minds and see their innermost selves. Along with eight other countries, the Britain she lives in is under the control of the Republic of Scion, which persecutes and executes clairvoyants for their abilities. 

Everything changes for Paige when an accident on the Underground leads to her arrest.  She soon discovers a secret at the heart of Scion – a secret that will rock the foundations of her world . . .  
Currently the first three books in the series have been published by Bloomsbury: THE BONE SEASON, THE MIME ORDER and THE SONG RISING. Welcome to Scion. No safer place.

Title: Murder Games
Author: James Patterson & Howard Roughan
Summary: 'The next hand he deals you may be your last. A serial killer is loose on the streets of Manhattan. His victims appear to be total strangers. The only clue that unites the crimes is the playing card left behind at each scene that hints at the next target.' (Goodreads)
Bought/Borrowed: Bought from WHSmiths

That transition from Wattpad to traditional publishing has been a fascinating experience. I had never really considered it objectively, perhaps because I remain on Wattpad and am still very much a part of the community. But now that nosaferplace have kindly given me the opportunity to write about it on their blog, a lot comes to mind. So here goes.

Hello lovely readers!

I’m so delighted to be able to support Zoe in her 24 Hour Readathon – holy guacamole I think I would not be able to make that, I need TONS of sleep!

Chatting about what the topic of my blog post would be Zoe mentioned that the whole publishing process is a bit of mystery to her. And then it came to me: it was for a lot of the authors I worked with as well! Working for a small independent publisher the realities of budget and the limits of manpower were often a large part of my conversation with authors. The reason everyone knows about those six-figure, multi book deals is because they’re RARE.

The Opposite of You
Rating: 4/5
Buy or Borrow: Buy
Source: Copy sent by Stripes Publishing 

There are two sides to every story.

A fast-paced YA about finding out who you really are
.
Naomi is ready to escape. She’s fed up with being one half of Bex-and-Naomi. What’s the point when her identical twin sister doesn’t know a single thing about what she’s really thinking?

Bex doesn’t know who Naomi is any more. Every time she reaches out, Naomi pushes her away. But when her twin skips their final exam, Bex realizes just how little she understands her sister’s life. 
Now Bex needs to get her sister back, before it’s too late…