When her mother is killed in the Blitz, and her father’s ship goes down, Louisa Adair feels she has lost everything. The country she has called home since her family left Jamaica is not a friendly place for an orphaned girl with brown skin, and she badly needs money and a roof over her head. Finally she finds work looking after an old lady at a pub near an airfield in Scotland. There she meets Ellen, a driver for the RAF, and Jamie, a pilot – two other young people just as exhausted by the toll the war has taken on their loved ones, and just as desperate for a…
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I’ll be Home For Christmas – a YA Anthology
Supporting homeless charity Crisis, this collection of short stories explores the lives of a number of young adults as they venture into very different Christmases. I have enjoyed reading short stories more and more since having Spike. I don’t have the time to commit to a book in full anymore and short stories give me the ideal reason to pick up a book for 10 minutes. This is why I thought I’ll be Home for Christmas was the ideal thing to read over the Christmas period last year. It features a number my favourite authors; Cat Clarke, Non Pratt and Juno Dawson. As well as a couple I’ve been meaning…
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Monster – CJ Skuse
“That last week at school before the Christmas Holidays, death was in everything. Im Geography, the sea was saying away at the coasts. In English, Juliet was stabbing herself with Romeo’s dagger. Even the school gerbil, Rafferty, was found stiff in his water bowl on Tuesday lunchtime. The skies above us bore a foreboding grey gloom, telling us snow was on its way to suffocate the land.” Nash believed that the hardest thing she would have to do this school year was convince the head that she was the right girl for the Head Girl job. That was, however, before Bathory Girls for School became the place she feared most…
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Read Me Like A Book – Liz Kessler
“Where’s your best friend when you need her? I mean, seriously. It’s Saturday night and here I am in Luke’s front room with his sister, Zoe, and a bunch of his mates, listening to a rock band blaring about how we’re all going to die, and watching a couple of lads do something that I think is intended to be dancing but looks more like they’re being slowly electrocuted. Oh, and did I mention? It’s my birthday.” Ash’s 17th year is meant to be full of fun and laughter before she has to think about what the future holds and what to do with her life. But nothing is ever…
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The Art of Being Normal – Lisa Williamson
“One afternoon, when I was eight years old, my class was told to write about what we wanted to be when we grew up. Miss Box went round the class, asking each one of us to stand up and share what we had written. Zachary Olsen wanted to play for the premier league. Lexi Taylor wants to be an Actress. Harry Beaumont planned on being Prime Minister. Simon Allen wanted to be Harry Potter, so badly that the previous term he had scratched a lightening bolt on to his forehead with a pair of craft scissors. But I didn’t want to be any of these things.” When rumoured bad boy…
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Cold Spell – Jackson Pearce
“There were plenty of reasons to love winter. Warm fireplaces, stews, Christmastime. In her head she listed everything pleasant about the season, yet she still puled a handmade quilt closer around her body, like a shield that could protect her. It rarely snowed here – Atlanta usually settled for a motionless, quiet winter, with the sort of cold that carpet into her bones and was hard to shake. Before Christmas the cold seemed a necessary price for the holiday, the presents, the celebration. Now in January, still months to go till spring, the weather was hateful.” Ginny and Kai have been in love for as long as Ginny can remember,…
