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Joanne Owen - Editorial Expert
Author, publishing expert, and LoveReading’s Literary Fiction Champion and YA Lead Reviewer
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).
Cutting to the core of a suite of timely topics, including the non-consensual sharing of intimate images and the pernicious effects of pornography, Rebeca Spargo’s Such a Nice Boy exposes the dark misogyny of the manosphere through the guilt-ridden lens of a middle-class everywoman who’s haunted by her past inaction.
In the present-day narrative, Amanda’s life starts to unravel when she learns that her neighbour’s fifteen-year-old daughter has committed suicide. This hits especially hard as the teenager was in the same school year as her son. Soon after, an outburst from a ... View Full Review
First novel in the Detective Gavin Piper series, Rachel Amphlett’s The Cold Shore is steeped in atmosphere as a race-against-time investigation ramps up to all-but confound the nascent skills of a rookie detective.
Gavin Piper had only travelled to Kent’s eerie Hoo Peninsula to help his DI superior with a minor task when the discovery of a brutally murdered body on a boat sees him embroiled in a complex case that would challenge even experienced detectives (Piper is still at the stage of thinking of applying to take his detective’s exam), and so ... View Full Review
Imagine waking up to learn that you’re married to the big-head who made your life a misery through school. That’s the alarming situation 27-year-old Molly is forced to face in Amanda Gayle’s Once, Again, Always debut.
After coming round in hospital feeling hazy, as if “she was nothing more than candle wax dripped between bedsheets”, Molly is flipped into the real world when Aster Bishop, with his “wide, icy blue eyes”, forces his way into her room yelling, “She’s my fucking wife!” Turns out Molly ... View Full Review
In Our Strange Duet, Erin A. Craig has reimagined Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera as a lushly romantic, tormented love story that gives greater agency to young soprano, Christine Daaé. Playing out on the stage of the glamorous Parisian Opéra Populaire, it tells a story that feels at once rooted in a very specific context, and timeless in its evocation of dramatic matters of the heart.
The drama begins in the dressing room of the Parisian Opéra Populaire, where we meet dancer Christine, and discover how she was taken under the wing ... View Full Review
With a graceful structure mirroring its title (partita refers to a form of composition comprised of contrasting movements), Barbara Kingsolver’s latest masterpiece amounts to a stirring orchestral suite that connects coming-of-age experiences, mid-life reflection, social class, profound loss, and profound love, and all this comes in the wake of an extraordinarily arresting opening line: “Here’s my question. How does a person step in front of a train and leave everything right there? Inhale, no exhale”.
The person in question is Livia’s brother, who died after stepping in front of a train when ... View Full Review
Published to coincide with the golden anniversary of her dazzling showbiz career, Debbie McGee’s A Magical Life conjures personal experiences from across her life, with stories of being evacuated from war in Iran as an eighteen-year-old ballerina, battling breast cancer, and losing her beloved husband Paul, shared alongside sparkling theatrical anecdotes.
Beginning with her days as a little girl whose mum took her to see Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Debbie goes on to reveal how she shared a stage with the film’s biggest star, fell for Paul Daniels long before he was rich and famous, ... View Full Review
Dancing with character and period detail, Susan Brownrigg’s 1926-set The Secret of Abney Hall is a playful fictionalised embellishment of Agatha Christie’s real-life disappearance and recuperative period. Told through the lens of Christie’s private nurse, Jane Goodbetter, the thrilling locked-room tale it weaves reads like a dazzling successor to Agatha Christie’s own murder mystery fiction tradition.
“Agatha Christie. She’s as described in the newspapers. An attractive woman, mid-thirties, a fashionable shingled bob”. Thus readers are given their first glimpse of Christie through the eyes of nurse Jane as ... View Full Review
Written by Hope Daniels, whose bestselling Hackney Child shared unflinching detail on her childhood in the care system and subsequent recovery from abuse, Inside the Madhouse is a memoir of the most eye-opening, impactful order from the off, when Hope asks herself: “How had it got to this? My life had been blown apart, detonated, as surely as if I had pressed the big red button myself. Hope Daniels. Social Worker. Mother. Best-selling author. Nutjob.”
On the face of it, the years following the success of Hackney Child had been good to Hope. More books were published, and ... View Full Review
Written by novelist Andy Boot, who cut his metal teeth as a Kerrang! music journalist, Metal Mythology does what it declares on its tin, and more. Dissecting the multi-faceted mythology of metal, and sharing detail on iconic heavy weights of the genre, the book is based on Boot’s belief that heavy metal is the post-industrial incarnation of ancient storytelling traditions, which makes it instantly intriguing.
The introduction sees Boot set out his stall in bombastic style: “Before the distortion pedals, before the leather jackets, before the iconography of skulls, swords, runes, demons and angels, there were stories. ... View Full Review
“You’re not like the others and you never could be… You’re not meant for a life of submission…You’re meant for something more, my wild bird”. Such is seventeen-year-old Alexis described by her mother near the start of Sentinel of the Sun, Eira Morgan-Jones’ unique YA fantasy debut, which is driven by its protagonist’s fierce fight to survive and fathom who she really is.
Alexis has always been an outcast in her rural valley home: “Since her earliest childhood she had felt like a solitary question ... View Full Review
“The Long Night begins with flesh and ends with blood, the Sisters liked to say, as if their prose rendered the occasion mysterious and beautiful”. But the way Bryn sees it, once the Trial of the Long Night was underway, “I’d be naked before lunch, and dead by dawn”. Such is the arresting opening of M.J. Hastings’ Firstborn, and such is the fiery, forthright nature of its protagonist, who finds herself facing the ultimate conflict between remaining loyal to country or family, and between saving herself or her siblings. &... View Full Review
Known as The Repair Shop’s “electromechanical maestro”, Mark Stuckey’s Bright Spark shares his remarkable journey from a difficult childhood, to his secret life as a magician (and more) en route to his present-day work for the top BBC show.
Structured around specific repairs Mark has undertaken (“Every repair begins with the same question: why is this not working? But that’s only the beginning of the curiosity; sometimes there are further mysteries that need solving”), each repair sparks Mark to delve deep into defining moments from his past, including revealing, for ... View Full Review
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