Author of the evocative Thrown Away Children series, Louise Allen new Slave Girls series starts with Charlotte’s story. Recounting the horrors of County Lines gangs and the sexual exploitation of young girls, and the insidious nature of this criminality as it targets the vulnerable in all aspects of our society, in Charlotte’s case grooming her from her private boarding school.
Charlotte is the youngest of four children and doesn’t seem to fit in with her family of high academic and professional achievers. With wealthy and influential parents, brothers that have all found their niche ... View Full Review
Fans of The Hunger Games series finally learn Haymitch’s story as we get an account of his Hunger Games. Following The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, The Hunger Games prequel that explored a teenage Coriolanus Snow, Sunrise on the Reaping begins with the reaping of the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, where in District 12 sixteen year old Haymitch tries not to think too hard about his chances.
By now readers of the series will come to recognise the spectacle and horror of the games and the Quarter Quell delivers them in abundance, with double the amount of tributes ... View Full Review
Where do I begin with Silvercloak? Each time I go to write something I remember another moment I loved. I’ll start at the beginning, a scene introducing Saffron as a child being delighted by her father casting really daft illusions. It felt like the most realistic representation of humans using magic that I’ve ever read.
Then comes the catastrophic end of the Prologue that tore my heart out like it was a Disney movie. However, it provides our main character with the motivation for the main plot. After spending years in training to become a ... View Full Review
Edira is her town’s healer but she keeps her true identity of being a magic wielding Threamender a secret. Threadmending is a rare power that allows her to heal, but at the cost of shaving time off her own life. But the powerful Ever, Orin Fernglove discovers her secret and when her brothers contract the sudden death sentence that is the Blight sweeping the town, she turns to Orin for help. Maybe together they can find the answer.
Being whisked off to a fairytale house in the midst of turmoil with the female lead potentially being the solution ... View Full Review
“Hypercompetent idiots” isn’t a trope I’ve ever seen included in a book’s description but when I saw it on The Irresistible Urge to Fall For Your Enemy, my smile at an interesting premise turned into a laugh and I immediately knew I was going to have to read it. Osric Morduant is a gentleman assassin, a member of the Fyren Order. His magic is also fading and he’s in desperate need of a healer. Aurienne is a Haelen, just who Osric needs in fact, and she is desperately working alongside ... View Full Review
In this eleventh instalment of Louise Allen’s popular Thrown Away Children series we begin Milo’s Story at his placement with new foster parents Michelle and Andy. Sold a pipe dream of significant additional income for the simply “putting an extra pair of jeans in the wash” and with noble yet naive intentions of rescuing a child, they enroll with a private agency to become foster carers. But the realities of the system turn this pipe dream into something rather more like a pipe bomb and Milo arrives with more complex behaviours than either of ... View Full Review
When Stace was seven her world was turned upside down when she realised she was in foster care. Thinking every child had a social worker and loving her life, her parents and her family, a brief encounter at the park with her biological father changed everything. On top of the already devastating revelation for a child to have to comprehend - that their life isn’t what they always thought it was - what came after was worse. Years of upheaval, confusion, neglect and abuse that shattered a once happy, football-mad child. When the most horrifying happens and she ... View Full Review
The Stolen Heir reintroduces Suren and Oak, eight years after the battle of the serpent in Holly Black’s popular The Folk of the Air series. With part one of this tale written from Suren’s perspective we dive into The Prisoner’s Throne to see how their story continues from Oak’s point of view. The plot follows immediately on from the dramatic conclusion to its predecessor and concludes The Stolen Heir duology. Prince Oak is paying for his betrayal but how far reaching are the repercussions of his deceptions, and what choices will he ... View Full Review
We’re now on the third instalment of the Empyrean series, which had the book world clamouring for Fourth Wing and led us on with an almighty cliffhanger in Iron Flame. If you haven’t read either of these books, do. Definitely read them before picking up Onyx Storm, but also just read them anyway - they’re wonderfully all-consuming, I haven’t been this in love with a book series since I was a teen and they are my go-to book recommendations. On picking up the first two books, I was not of this world ... View Full Review
Available from Amazon
My experience of the concept of a utopia is an environment where everyone is uncannily happy and gets on. In this interesting twist on a utopia, in Anthem everyone wants to be a psychopath. To lack empathy and compassion is revered and to fail the psychopathy test is to be outcast and branded deviant. Jason Freeman is a service android, who doesn’t dream of murder, but of being accepted. Prince Marcus Kane, a role model for Jason, was raised to despise those who are like Jason, but behind closed doors is also struggling to emulate ... View Full Review
Book nine in the Joe Pickett series by C. J. Box starts with our Wyoming game warden in exile after the conclusion of the last book, Blood Trail. But when his eldest daughter Sheridan is supposedly contacted by the foster daughter they buried six years ago, he races back home to try and uncover what’s going on. Could April really still be alive? And how is she related to the string of violence that seems to be making the same journey across the country.
Although this story takes place outside of the hunting season, with the wildlife ... View Full Review
As you may expect by now, in the eighth of a series following Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett, hunting takes centre stage in this tense new thriller. But this time the target isn’t big game. The story opens on a hunt, the practised stalk becoming more sinister as we realise this is the voice of our killer. When Joe Pickett takes the call that a hunter has been killed, field dressed and hung like an elk, it puts the rest of the hunting season in jeopardy and levelling a massive blow to the state. Is the killer part ... View Full Review
-262x400.jpg)
