Claire Stevens's Blog, page 55

The Art of Being Normal by Lisa Williamson

The Art of Being Normal tells the story of David Piper, a fourteen year old who has known for as long as he can remember that he is really a girl trapped in a boy's body. His two best friends, Essie and Felix, know but so far his family are completely unaware. 

Leo Denton is the new boy at school. All he wants to do is keep his head down, avoid everyone and get through Year 11 in one piece. But when he witnesses bullies picking on David, he intervenes and catches the attention of one of the girls in his class.

Told from the dual point of view of David and Leo, this is an very moving account of how David and Leo both deal with the problems that they face in trying to work out what 'normal' is.

I thought the characterisation in this book was just amazing. Leo and David were such well-written characters, both with distinct voices and experiences and they both grow and evolve as the book progresses. Their stories are told with sensitivity and humour and there were points, especially in the first half of the book, where I was laughing on one page before wanting to burst into tears a couple of pages on.

I think the author has managed to strike a very good balance between showing the struggles that transgender people can face when trying to come out to the people they love and the prejudice that can often follow, while at the same time showing that actually people might surprise you and turn out to be more supportive than you anticipated. I think it would have been easy for the author to make this book all about the struggles and woe and while that would have made for a very tense, emotional read, the book would have lost something overall. It also wouldn't have been very realistic, because while there are plenty of dicks out there who automatically hate something just because they don't understand it, there are plenty of accepting, supportive people too, and I think for a teen (or indeed anyone) who is struggling with their gender identity, this might not always be something that's immediately obvious.

I really think The Art of Being Normal is going to prove to be an important book, not only for the LGBT canon and for diversity in YA fiction, but I think it's also going to have much wider-reaching implications as it really challenges assumptions about what is 'normal'. 

I found this a great book, not just for the diversity (although that's obviously a plus point) but mostly for the human story it tells.


5 stars

Feature and Follow Friday #10

Feature and Follow Friday is a weekly book blog meme hosted by Alison Can Read and Parajunkee's View.  The idea is to answer the featured question, link back to the hosts and featured bloggers and then hop around the blogs on the Linky thingy making new friends!  This week's featured blogger is Laura's Bunny Tales.

This week's featured questions is: What is the first book you remember reading? - Suggested by
Bookish Findings.

I think as far as little-kid picture books go, the first one I remember looking at myself was The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  I know.  A classic.  Then once I could read, the first books I remember reading to myself were The My Best Fiend series by Sheila Lavelle.  I think they're kind of obscure, but they're well worth looking out for the six-year-old in your life!

What about you?  What's the first book you can remember reading?

Library Haul!

A little while ago, I was looking at my extensive TBR list on Amazon, sighing at how much money it was going to take me to actually read all the books on my list, when my mum looked over my shoulder and suggested that I just get the books out from the library instead.

It's a measure of how entrenched I've become in Kindletopia that this option hadn't occurred to me.  The main reason I moved away from paper books was because the the sheer space they take up in my house.  Five of us live in an okay-but-not-massive house and I read over a hundred books a year.  There just isn't the space to have them all hanging around.  But if the whole point is to give the books back in a couple of weeks...

Essex Libraries have an awesome online reservation system - if the book you want isn't in your local library they'll have it sent over from another library in the county.  Fifteen minutes later I had the following beauties winging their way to my library from such exotic locales as Canvey Island and Basildon.

All hail Essex Libraries.  In a time of massive local government budget cuts, you are still being awesome.

Ketchup Clouds by Annabel Pitcher

Zoe (not her real name) is a girl with a guilty conscience. Six months ago, she did something really, really bad, and the worst part is that she got away with it. Completely. No one suspects a thing. Now, though, the guilt is weighing her down to the extent that she’s finding it hard to function, so when she hears about a website where death row inmates in America look for penpals, she starts writing to Stuart, a man who killed his wife and neighbour.

Ketchup Clouds is told entirely through Zoe’s letters to Stuart - she never tells him her real name or address, so he never writes back to her. Over the course of six months of letters, she tells him about her life now as well as a narrative of the events leading up to the terrible thing she did (we find out in the first few pages that she killed someone).

This was a very powerful book for a number of reasons. The epistolary nature of the book actually works well and comes across as very natural and not contrived like some letter-based books can. Zoe’s voice is a heartbreaking mixture of childish (she’s only fifteen) and mature and her descriptions of people and events are excellent. Her relationships with her best friend, her parents and her sisters are well written and almost mundane, which serve as a foil to the heartbreak and guilt hat’s eating away at her.

The two boys in the book, Max and Aaron, are like two sides of the same coin, in terms of looks and personality. One of them she has but isn’t sure if she really wants; the other is the boy she wants desperately, but can’t have. The way all three of them deal with the situation they are in felt very real and really kept the pages turning.

One of the most powerful aspects about Ketchup Clouds is that the reader is left guessing as to who it is Zoe has killed almost until the very end, so it’s almost like a murder-mystery in reverse. The very final letter, the only one not written by Zoe, is so beautiful it almost had me in tears.

Ketchup Clouds has a love triangle in it, and while I’m not a fan when these are just randomly chucked in to increase the tension in a book (lazy lazy lazy) the love triangle is the driving force behind the whole book, and it is actually very well done so it didn’t put me off. Also, this love triangle ends in death, which is how all good love triangles should end (Wuthering Heights, Infernal Devices Trilogy). 

All in all, I’d thoroughly recommend this book.


4 stars 

June Wrap-Up

June was interesting, reading-wise.  I was lucky enough to read some completely superb books, all of which were review copies, while on the other hand there were some books in there that were really only okay.

My top-notch, absolute, one-hundred-per-cent favourite book this month was Fire Colour One by Jenny Valentine.  It was a beautiful book about a girl who reconnects with the father she hasn't seen since she was a toddler.  Another book I found to be great was Thirteen Days of Midnight by Leo Hunt, the story of a boy whose absentee father dies, leaving him a vast fortune and control of eight angry ghosts.  It was a cracking read with some really spine-tingly moments.

Not-as-good-as-I-thought-it-would-be was The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin.  It's a minority opinion, I know, but I really couldn't connect with these characters.  In fact, I wanted to punch them!  There are plenty of people who think Mara and Noah are amazing though, so maybe it was just me!  Another book that I had high hopes for was There Is No Dog by Meg Rosoff, which just goes to show that even if you're God, you still need to have some character development to make you interesting!

Waiting On Wednesday - Joyride by Anna Banks

Waiting On Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Jill over at Breaking The Spine and it highlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week, my Waiting On Wednesday pick is:  Joyride by Anna Banks.

From Amazon:  
It's been years since Carly Vega's parents were deported. She lives with her brother, studies hard, and works at a convenience store to contribute to getting her parents back from Mexico. Arden Moss used to be the star quarterback at school. He dated popular blondes and had fun with his older sister, Amber. But now Amber's dead, and Arden blames his father, the town sheriff who wouldn't acknowledge Amber's mental illness. Arden refuses to fulfil whatever his conservative father expects. All Carly wants is to stay under the radar and do what her family expects. All Arden wants is to not do what his family expects. When their paths cross, they each realize they've been living according to others. Carly and Arden's journey toward their true hearts-and one another-is funny, romantic, and sometimes harsh.


This book just sounds awesome and I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on a copy!  It looks so summery and it's 35 degrees here in England (yes, England!  I know!) today, so I'm roasting in the sunshine and starting to get in a really summery mood!

Joyride is released in the UK on the 13th July by Feiwel & Friends.

What about you?  What books can't you wait to get a copy of??

There Is No Dog by Meg Rosoff

I picked There Is No Dog up as part of a recent library haul because it looked amusing and irreverent, which are two qualities I admire greatly in books. I’ve just finished it and I’m not really sure what to make of it. It’s either a work of such staggering philosophical and existential brilliance that it would take a lifetime to fully comprehend, or it’s a vaguely unsatisfying paranormal romance. I’m not sure which.

The premise is that God is a nineteen-year-old boy called Bob. Bob’s mother won Earth in a divine poker game and gave it to Bob to give him something to do. Sadly for Earth, Bob is feckless, lazy, whiny and irresponsible, spending most of his time as a sort of deified Kevin the Teenager, complaining about how unfair everything is and obsessing about sex. Luckily for the Earth, Bob has a sidekick, Mr B, a sort of deity-personal-assistant, who sorts out as many prayers as he can while Bob goes around trying to have sex with all the women he created. But when Bob meets Lucy, a pretty, virginal zoo assistant, however, he is determined that she is the girl for him and won’t stop until she agrees to be his.

There Is No Dog is part thought experiment, part fantasy/paranormal romance and raised and answered some interesting questions. Meg Rosoff’s writing is really very good and her descriptions and dialogue are spot on.

Bob started off as quite a funny character. He didn’t really seem nineteen years old to me; more like thirteen, and a pretty spoilt, nasty thirteen at that. His one redeeming feature (and there really is only one) is his brilliant imagination and creativity and I was willing to go with this, but unfortunately over the course of the book Bob didn’t grow or change at all and by the end of the book I just wanted to punch him.

His love interest, Lucy, was kind of dull. She’s pretty and loves animals, but that’s all I can really tell you about her. The romance between her and Bob was a bit skeevy. He sets himself up as her stalker, following her about and spying on her and coming on way too strong. Lucy’s okay with this but unfortunately the old It’s Only Stalking If They Don’t Fancy You Back trope is a bit of a peeve of mine so this didn’t sit too well. After their first encounter, Bob decides not to rape Lucy, which is big of him, but he conceals who he really is, so their whole relationship just felt a bit unsettling and weird.

I didn't really understand what the point of Luke was, as he didn't seem to do much besides harbour a secret crush on Lucy which he covered up by being cold towards her. The other gods were fun characters, especially the long-suffering Mr B, Bob’s personal assistant/sidekick, although I was never sure why, if he had enough creativity and power to create whales, he never just got on and sorted the world out himself instead of waiting for Bob to get his backside in gear. The character I felt really sorry for was Bob’s much-abused pet, Eck, and I was glad he had a happy ending.

I think I get what Meg Rosoff is trying to say: that in a world filled with rainbows and icebergs, tsunamis, earthquakes and warm summer days, with cats and blowfish and peregrine falcons, where there is so much water, but people are dying either through too much, not enough, or from it being poisoned to bits, where paedophiles walk the same pavements as saints and where children get cancer but war criminals live to ninety, it’s far more likely that the Creator (if indeed that’s how the world began) is some ADD-inflicted, capricious child rather than some benign old geezer sitting up in the sky on a cloud.

I think that's what she's trying to say, anyway.

Ultimately, this was an okay book, but really only okay. It was a quick read and held my interest, but some things were just left too uncertain for me to love it.


3 stars

Because You'll Never Meet Me by Leah Thomas

Because You’ll Never Meet Me tells the story of Ollie, a boy who is violently allergic to electricity, and Moritz, a boy who relies on his electric pacemaker to keep his heart beating.  By necessity, Ollie and his mother live in a secluded cabin in the woods, away from any form of inorganic electricity and in the normal course of things these boys would never meet, but against all probability they strike up a correspondence and become friends, only to discover the truth about their entwined pasts.

I thought Because You’ll Never Meet Me was a very sweet book.  It’s about friendship and finding someone who might be able to understand a little of what you’re going through when you feel like you’re all on your own.  Ollie and Moritz have both had their life-experiences limited by their respective conditions and they both  blossom when they find each other.  There’s some romance in it, but the romance is mostly about the difficulties of having a romantic interest when the odds are stacked so high against you.

The book is epistolary, laid out as letters exchanged between Ollie and Moritz, the two main characters.  Leah Thomas has done a great job of giving their dual POVs very distinct voices - on the one hand you have Moritz, a dour, unhappy German boy and on the other you have Ollie, a slightly manic, isolated American boy, who kind of sounds like my friend’s Labrador would sound, if he (the lab) had sufficiently developed vocal chords.  The two voices both took some getting used to, partly because they’re so different and partly because Ollie is so very manic at the beginning, but once I’d adjusted and Ollie had calmed down a bit, their two voices really worked.

Although the letters are exchanged solely between Ollie and Moritz, the surrounding characters have their own distinct voices too.  I really liked Fieke and Liz seemed very savvy and really challenged Ollie as a friend.

The book was slightly sci-fi and deals with the contrast of having a limiting condition (like Ollie’s electricity-induced epilepsy and Moritz’s blindness) but at the same time a super skill (Ollie’s control of electricity and Moritz’s echolocation).  In addition to this, the book also deals with ‘real world’ subjects like bullying and how we treat people who are different to us in a sensitive way.

While the plot was interesting and I enjoyed finding out about the boys’ pasts and how they were trying to adapt to their lives in their own ways, for me, the pace was a bit too slow and not enough happened to keep me on the edge of my seat wondering what was going to happen next.  I’m usually drawn to faster-paced novels though, so while this didn’t work for me, I’m sure others would find it not a problem.

All in all, this was an interesting read with some really great characterisation, and while the plot was too slow for me I think there are a lot of other readers who would find it spot on.

3.5/5

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.  Many thanks to Bloomsbury and Netgalley.

Thirteen Days of Midnight by Leo Hunt

The title of this book should really be: Why You Should Never Sign Things Without Reading The Fine Print.

Luke Manchett lives just outside a small town in the north of England.  He plays on the school rugby team, has a mum who believes in healing crystals and he harbours a huge crush on one of the girls at his school.  When he receives a letter one day to tell him that his absentee father has sadly passed away, he is sad but not devastated.

When he’s called to the offices of his dad’s solicitor and discovers he’s inherited millions of pounds, all he can think of is the flashy sports car he’s going to buy to impress the girl he fancies.  He happily signs the documents the solicitor flashes in front of him (even though one of them is made from goat-skin vellum, which, frankly, should have sounded some alarm bells).  Soon Luke discovers he’s inherited more than money from his dad: he’s also inherited a Host of eight vengeful ghosts.  Now he has just thirteen days to solve the riddle of his dad’s necromancy notes to keep the spirits from revolting.

I thought this book was awesome and has the triumvirate of a five-star book: great characters, great plot, great writing.

Luke and Elza were superb MCs and sparked off each other nicely.  Mr Berkley is sly and slippery and exactly how you’d expect him to be.  Horatio is weaselly and snivelling and the Host are great - well rounded, spooky, but you can still see their human aspects coming through.  The only character I didn’t connect with hugely was Holiday.  She was okay, but really she was just the object of Luke’s crush, one of the markers of his previous life as a normal kid.  Having said that, it would have been really easy to cast her as the Pretty Mean Girl as a foil for Elza and the author avoided this, so I was glad about that. 

The writing is hugely enjoyable and the author strikes a good balance between dry wit and spookiness.  There are some genuinely tense, prickles-on-the-back-of-the-neck moments and the last quarter of the book where the action really ramps up had my heart thudding.  I did that thing where you try to read slowly to spin the book out, but you can’t help reading really quickly because you’ve just got to see what happens next.

The plot rockets along at a fair old pace and left me quite breathless at times.  It slowed down a bit in the middle where Luke and Elza basically spend a lot of time clutching each other, going, ‘What are we going to DO?’, but even this part was still a lot more interesting than a whole bunch of other books I’ve read this year.

Thirteen Days of Midnight would work just fine as a standalone, but it’s also been left wide open for a series.  I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out!

I received a copy of Thirteen Days of Midnight in exchange for an honest review.  Many thanks to Hachette and Netgalley.

4.5 stars

Faking Perfect by Rebecca Phillips

Faking Perfect is the story of Lexi, a girl with a pretty crap home life who thinks that the answer to all her problems is to try and fit in with the popular crowd.  Unfortunately for her shiny image, she also has a weakness for bad boys and when she seduces resident tattoo-sporting, weed-dealing miscreant, Tyler Flynn, at the beginning of her senior year and carries on a secret relationship with him, she makes him avoid her at school, keep her secret and never ever tease her about her crush on her friend and local golden boy, Ben.

This was a really fun contemporary romance with some great characters and some really nice writing.  The publisher has stuck a label on this book recommending it for fans of Sarah Dessen, and while I can see the similarities, actually I thought this was a whole lot better than the Sarah Dessen book I read recently.  It was a lot fresher and feistier than a lot of contemporary romances I’ve read and I raced through it.

Lexi was a really great MC; fun and mixed-up and sarky in equal measures and I really enjoyed her narrative.  She was totally flawed but really likeable too and I liked the way she developed over the course of the book.  She was so relatable in the way she felt so much pressure to conform to being the image her friends wanted of her and how she thought

The author has got a good ear for dialogue and the scenes with Lexi and Tyler were great fun.  I really enjoyed Tyler too.  The surrounding characters were okay but there were quite a few of them so none of them got developed as much as Lexi and Tyler did.

The plot has a whole lot packed into it so it rockets along, and although I could kind of see where it was going most of the time and managed to predicted most of the plot points, I didn’t mind at all because there was plenty going on.  The author highlighted a lot of high school struggles and issues: teen pregnancy, popularity, drugs, drinking, sex and this kept things pretty interesting.

All in all this was a fun, fresh story and I’d thoroughly recommend it for a beach read this summer.

I received a copy of Faking Perfect in exchange for an honest review.  Many thanks to Kensington and Netgalley.


4.5 stars