Katharine Forsyth

SO EFFING ADORABLE.

Casual rape in the first chapter made me go “nope”. I couldn't face a whole book where a lead character rapes a complete stranger without thinking anything of it.

Probably more of a 4.5 than a full five, but it felt better to round it up rather than down, since I did really love it. Most of it was read during a couple of busy weeks when I had to take the train into London nearly every day, and I don't even remember those journeys; I was so engrossed in the world of Jess and the Library.

I have mixed feelings about Purity, because the book is told from different characters' points of view. And my problem was that I loved some and disliked some (and one character I hated so much I wanted to murder her with a blunt instrument). Some of the sections I disliked were necessary for the plot, but I wish they'd been trimmed down to the bare essentials.

Absolutely loved this.

4.5/5

Not quite as good as “I'll Give you the Sun”, but just as beautifully written and emotional.

So beautiful I didn't want it to end. Absolutely my favourite book of the year so far. I'll be very surprised if something beats it.

I honestly have no words for the beauty and emotion of this book. I think I read most of it with tears pricking the backs of my eyelids.

I've read most of Meg Cabot's adult and teen fiction, and I always enjoy her sense of humour and fun-but-predictable romances. However, “She Went All the Way” didn't work for me at all. It just felt clunky and clumsily-written, almost like an average fanfic written in Cabot's style. The characters' internal thoughts got very repetitive, and the way Jack constantly refers to Lou by her full name when he's thinking about her was pretty irritating. It almost felt like Meg Cabot was trying to get the word count up by writing “Lou Calabrese” every time, instead of just “Lou”.

However, it's a cute enough story, though unlikely as hell, but then we're not reading these stories because they're likely. :-) But it's definitely the weakest of Cabot's adult novels by a long shot.

This was really really good, though perhaps a smidge longer than it needed to be.

I loved this! It might have got me out of my reading slump.

3.5 stars, really. Pretty good; not what I expected, but that's no bad thing.

Total delight. I didn't want to leave these characters behind,

Couldn't get past the first couple of chapters - I read a ton of these student-teacher forbidden romance ebooks, but this one was so badly-written I had to delete it.

3.5 stars, always enjoyable and I'll definitely read the next one!

This is a middle grade book that's for everybody. Non-binary kids, queer kids, kids who don't feel like they fit in. And all other young people too, so they can learn, understand, and empathise.

And it's for adults, too. The struggle Jamie has to be understood and taken seriously as who they are by the adults in their life is a real-life struggle faced by many young queer people (and adults). “You can't just make up a gender” and other similar comments Jamie gets given are exactly the sort of hurtful things people say when they don't understand gender identity. Reading a book written from the POV of a non-binary character is a fantastic way to learn through empathy.

This book reads a little younger than Lapinski's “Strangeworld Travel Agency” trilogy, but it's just as compelling, and so incredibly important.

DNF at 15%

I don't know why, but I'm just not interested in this. The writing style doesn't draw me in, and neither does the story so far. And life's too short!

Also, there were some irritating inconsistencies. The book is set in Johannesburg (which I was really intrigued by, since I'm from Joburg, and you rarely find novels set there), but the author used a mixture of South African and definitely not South African terms.

For instance: SMS instead of text - correct.
Gas station -incorrect. South Africans say petrol, not gas.
Apartment - incorrect. South Africans say flat, not apartment.

3.5 stars.

I was all set to give it a solid four stars, but unfortunately I found the last act a bit rushed and anticlimactic.

This was a good surprise. A student-teacher romance that has a little meat to it, as well as being miles better written than most books in this genre. A little darker and grittier than my taste, but I'll take that any day over some of the cheesy rubbish I've read lately in the genre.

3.5 stars

Meh. One of those books where there's no reason for the couple not to be together, and yet one has been created so the book isn't over in 50 pages.

I stalled a lot with this one. It's one of those books that's perfectly fine and enjoyable while you're reading it, but you never feel the need to pick it up again. Caitlin Moran is a really good writer, but I've enjoyed her non-fiction writing much more (strange because I usually prefer novels to non-fiction).

So...it's a sweet story, and goodness knows we need more stories about accepting people and embracing their differences. And I quite enjoyed Walliams' writing style (lots of directly addressing the reader and sharing in-jokes with them). But what drove me absolutely bonkers was the incorrect use of (or, generally, the lack of correct) punctuation throughout the book. Many battles are fought over the Oxford comma, but it's not correct to have a sentence like, “I'm going to be late, Dad!” without the comma before “Dad”. It's the difference between “Let's eat Grandma” and “Let's eat, Grandma”, to quote an internet meme I've seen a hundred times. And this book was full of mistakes like that. I read a lot of children's books (I used to be the buyer for the children's department in a big chain of bookshops), and I've never seen an author omit that sort of comma. I don't know why Walliams did it, or why nobody corrected it, but it irritated me no end. Children learn how to write by reading, and if they read it and it's wrong, they're going to learn it wrong. For that reason alone I wouldn't give this book to my children (or pupils, if I were a teacher).

I read this because I really like the film adaptation, and since said adaptation has some flaws which have always niggled at me, I thought the book might get those bits right, and be - as books nearly always are - a much deeper and richer version than the film.

However. Much like another book-to-film adaptation starring Anne Hathaway (The Princess Diaries), the book and film of Ella Enchanted have very little in common aside from the main character names and the basic premise that Ella has been “gifted” with obedience. Nothing else bears any resemblance to the film I saw. And yet it's still hard for me to judge them as separate entities, because I found the film so much more interesting and fun. The book really fell flat for me, because I never really got a sense of what the characters were like. Even though it's told in first person, I didn't really get to know Ella, somehow. Things happened to her, or she caused things to happen, but the book never got under her skin. Same problem with Char. If I had to write fanfic about them, for example, I'd have no idea how, because neither of them really had a voice.

I'm being quite harsh here on what is really a sweet story with an interesting premise and take on the Cinderella story, but unfortunately it just left me cold. Two stars = “it was okay”, but I think if you haven't seen (or enjoyed) the film, you might enjoy the book more. Unfortunately I just kept comparing it to the fun, self-aware humour of the film, and its strongly-drawn characters, and the book fell short.

1.5 stars.

This book is such a mess. Poor writing, bad grammar, and an absolute mess of a plot. The only reason I'm giving it two stars instead of one is that the premise was pretty good. Good idea, terrible execution.