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Joanne Owen - Editorial Expert

Joanne Owen’s lifelong love of reading and writing began when she was growing up in Pembrokeshire, and very much wished that witches (and Mrs Pepperpot) were real. An early passion for culture, story and folklore led Joanne to read archeology and anthropology at St John’s, Cambridge, after which she worked as a bookseller, and led the UK children’s book buying team for a major international retailer. During this time, Joanne also wrote children’s book previews and features for The Bookseller, covering everything from the value of translated fiction, to the contemporary YA market. Joanne later joined Bloomsbury’s marketing department, where she had the pleasure of working on epic Harry Potter launches at Edinburgh Castle and the Natural History Museum, and launching Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. After enjoyable spells as Marketing Director for Macmillan Children’s Books and Consumer Marketing Manager for Walker Books, Joanne went freelance, primarily working for multi-award-winning independent children’s publisher, Nosy Crow.

Alongside her publishing career, Joanne has written several books for children/young adults. She’s now a fulltime reviewer, workshop presenter and writer, working on YA novels with a strong basis in diverse folklore from around the world, as well as fiction for younger readers (in which witches are very much real).

Latest Features By Joanne Owen

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Latest Reviews By Joanne Owen

Kokoro Japanese Wisdom for a Life Well Lived
After experiencing devastating losses and midlife malaise, Japanologist Beth Kempton embarked on a monumentally transformative journey that’s here shared in enlightening style. Positing answers to life’s big questions through the lens of kokoro — a word that’s “been alive in the Japanese language since before there was a system to write it down” — it’s a beautiful book, and might just change the way you think about life, death, and time.  Kokoro is pithily summed up by this statement: “When we approach life heart-mindfully, we experience the joy ... View Full Review
The Doctor of Hiroshima
At times harrowing, and always incredibly humbling, Dr Michihiko Hachiya’s autobiographical account of the immeasurable pain and devastation that came in the wake of the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima tells an extraordinary story of survival.  “The hour was early; the morning still, warm, and beautiful. Shimmering leaves, reflecting sunlight from a cloudless sky, made a pleasant contrast with shadows in my garden as I gazed absently through wide-flung doors opening to the south.” And then comes a bright flash as an atomic bomb strikes close to Dr Hachiya’s home. Both injured, he and his ... View Full Review
Thrive
Based on his experience as a leading advisor in the field of high-level sports performance, and informed by his personal experience of developing resilience as a result of a tough childhood, Richard Sutton’s Thrive is a trove of practical, thought-provoking tools designed to help readers reach their full potential. Drawing on neuroscience, dietary science, personal experience and professional insights, it’s incredibly thorough as it seeks to set folks on a path to escaping self-imposed and externally-inflicted limitations through harnessing eight lessons from neuroscience, and seven tools Olympic athletes take from behavioural science. Peppered with tests that ... View Full Review
Slum Boy A Portrait
Heart-wrenching, beautifully-written, and inflamed with love, Juano Diaz’s Slum Boy is an outstanding memoir. Tinged with poetry and painterly magic as it tells the story of the author’s journey from childhood neglect, through being placed in the care system, to finding his identity and place in the world as an adult, it reads like a novel with a powerfully arresting voice that shifts through time. Born into poverty in Glasgow in the 1970s, at four years old John has already experienced a lifetime’s worth of hardship, and these early years are related through his ... View Full Review
Secret Voices A Year of Women’s Diaries
Traversing four centuries, Secret Voices: A Year of Women's Diaries sees biographer and journalist Sarah Gristwood present an enlightening record of female experiences, revealing what has and — crucially — what hasn’t changed through time. Illuminating and often entertaining as it covers domestic life, working life and social life, sex, children, men, and engagement with the wider world, Gristwood notes in her introduction that though incredibly varied, the entries are connected by one telling theme: “if I were to pick out the single strongest emotions voiced through all these diary entries I think it would be anger &... View Full Review
Hard Copy A story of girl meets printer
Quirky and existential, Fien Veldmen’s Hard Copy debut — a love story, of sorts — presents an astute, tragi-comic commentary on the loneliness of our age through a strange story of the relationship between a young woman and a printer. The nameless protagonist of this brilliant debut is a customer service assistant in a Dutch start-up. A young woman who feels alienated from everyone, bar the printer she shares her little office with. “Question: What is loneliness? Answer: Jumping when someone speaks to you.”  In this state, with no one to talk to (or, rather, ... View Full Review
How to Make a Bomb A Novel
Moving from London and Bergen, to Cadiz and Crete before returning to London as it explores a middle-aged man’s visceral existential crisis, Rupert Thomson’s How to Make a Bomb presents an enthralling story of alienation, and feeling fragmented and trapped in a dislocating world: “If he suddenly found what surrounded him unbearable, it was because it was artificial/Everything had been designed and manufactured, and he was trapped in it”. A world in which, “We were surrounded by things we hadn’t asked for, and didn’t want/Things that upset ... View Full Review
The Radfords Making Life Count
If you don’t already know them from their reality TV show and YouTube channel, meet the endearing, effervescent Radfords. With 22 children, they’re Britain’s biggest family and this honest, entertaining account of their life — penned by mum and dad Sue and Noel Radford — shares engaging personal stories of their experiences.  With their first child, Chris, born in 1989 and number 22, Heidie Rose, born in 2020, just months before the birth of their sixth grandchild, their situation is extraordinary, but also relatable as The Radfords: Making Life Count reveals the couple’s self-professed addiction ... View Full Review
Where the Dark Stands Still
Inspired by the author’s love of Slavic mythology and childhood summers in the Polish countryside, Where the Dark Stands Still is an arresting feminist reimagining of Beauty and the Beast. The writing is beautiful — poetic and precise, delicate and mesmerising as a finely-spun web as it tells the story of a girl’s search for freedom from her past, and from her dangerous magic. Amidst summer solstice celebrations, Liska leaves her village in search of the blooming fern flower that might just save her: “She knows what rumours the villagers whisper: that she ... View Full Review
Goddess Crown
Driven by the daring of a 16-year-old protagonist who’s guided by the Goddess, Shade Lapite’s Goddess Crown is a richly conjured feminist fantasy set in sumptuous West African- inspired Galla, a patriarchal kingdom that’s long conspired against women. Kalothia had “lived in the forest for sixteen harvests”, since the day her parents were forced to flee the palace during what was known as the “Great Upset”, after being exposed as enemies of the king. Now, on her 16 th birthday, her home and guardians are attacked by the king’s ... View Full Review
Where Sleeping Girls Lie
Bravo to Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé for creating such a compelling dark academia mystery that’s also layered with such potent depth. Though just shy of a whopping 600 pages, the pace and plotting of Where Sleeping Girls Lie is chef’s-kiss superb, with tremendous page-turning power propelling a tale of surviving loss, trauma and abuses of power amidst the dark halls of an elite boarding school. Shot-through with suspense and escalating menace, the story begins when new girl Sade encounters trouble as soon as she sets foot in ... View Full Review
Dominoes
Thought-provoking and thoroughly engaging, Phoebe McIntosh’s Dominoes sees the love of a lifetime thrown into conflicted disarray when a Londoner born to a Black British-Jamaican mother and an absent white father falls for a man whose ancestors profited from the British slave trade.  Moving from London, to Jamaica and back again as its protagonist experiences the enduring impact of slavery, and a palpable pull between her past, present and future, Dominoes also explores the injustices of the ongoing Windrush scandal, colourism, family love, romantic love, and what it means to be free, and to honour ancestors. All ... View Full Review