Waterstone's Teen Book Club Freebies

I posted about the book club after the first meeting in March. At that meeting we were given a few free books. 
Since then we have been given even more books so I want to share them with you.
There are some that I wouldn't normally read so I'm excited to try them.

This is a photo of all of the books together. I've just ordered them in the order we received them.

They are:

• The Knife Of Never Letting Go - Patrick Ness
• 2015 Fiction Previews - Electric Monkey
• The Boy In The Smoke - Maureen Johnson
• Rock War: The Audition - Robert Muchamore
• Smart - Kim Slater
• Charm And Strange - Stephanie Kuehn
• Black Heart Blue - Louisa Reid
• Cowgirl - G.R. Gemin
• Flirty Dancing - Jenny McLachlan
• Dead Ends - Erin Lange
• Seven Days - Eve Ainsworth
• A Thousand Nights - E.K. Johnston

These 4 are the first 4 we received and are world book day/night books. 

I really like the cover for the Patrick Ness book because it's so unusual. I'd never even heard about World Book Night events before receiving this book! I've also never seen that cover design before. Kirsty has the Chaos Walking Trilogy and they are 3 of her favourite books.
The Electric Monkey 2015 fiction previews has the first chapter of several books that are being released throughout 2015. It's a really good way of getting a feel for the way the books are written before deciding if you want to buy them. Unfortunately, none of them grabbed my attention.
The other two books are from the selection of £1 books you could buy on World Book Day 2014. I haven't read either of them yet, they are both companions to full novels, but they are ideal for shorter car journeys or tram rides.



These are the 2 hardback books we received.

A few days before one of the meetings, we were looking online for books we want to put on our TBR lists.
Kirsty wrote down Smart because it sounded similar to The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time so when she saw it on the shelf she grabbed it straight away. The inside of the cover is illustrated.
I picked up the other book to see what it was about and really liked the cover. It's a story about a werewolf and that's about all I know! I haven't started reading it yet but I will soon.



These are 2 book proofs we received

The first one is an old book proof - the book was released late 2014. But it said that it was similar to Louise Rennison's Withering Tights. I LOVE Louise Rennison's writing style. The Georgia Nicholson series is one of my favourite ever series. I am about halfway through this book and it has not let me down. It's really light hearted and funny and is a really nice thing to read when you don't feel like getting stuck into a heavy book.
Also, we were really curious to know what was underneath the sticker so spent ages trying to peel it off and then wash away the stickiness. All we had to do was open the cover to see the mystery font used on the first page -_-
The second one is for a book that will be released 22nd October 2015. The cover is beautiful. I love metallic prints on covers. The story is about a girl who marries a man to save her sister, and then uses magic to save herself. That is a very vague description because I don't want to give too much away but it sounds really exciting.



These are 4 general books

Black Heart Blue is about twin sisters, one is disfigured. I'm pretty sure this book will contain a big twist and I can't wait to read it.
Cowgirl is about a girl who herds cows! I'm not really sure where the storyline goes but cows are in my top 5 animals and I can honestly say I've never read a book about a cow girl before.
7 Days was on a postcard we received at the first book club meeting. We read the words on the postcard and were intrigued. The cover contains some pretty nasty insults and just really draws you in. Who are they saying this to and why? What will happen in 7 days?
Dead Ends is a book I have picked up several times in book shops and wanted to buy but always convinced myself not to. It's not that I didn't find it interesting enough, just that I have so many books waiting to be read already. After I received this book, I read it over 2 days and absolutely loved it. The main characters are so likeable and the storyline is quite adventurous. I kind of want it to be made into a film but I'm not sure if it is long enough.


Do you have any teen books you can suggest for me to read?
Let me know if you have read any of these books and what you thought of them.

30 Day Book Photo Challenge - April 13

This was designed by Books & Cupcakes.

8. One Word Title

Stolen - Lucy Christopher 

Sixteen year old Gemma is kidnapped from Bangkok airport and taken to the Australian Outback. This wild and desolate landscape becomes almost a character in the book, so vividly is it described. Ty, her captor, is no stereotype. He is young, fit and completely gorgeous. This new life in the wilderness has been years in the planning. He loves only her, wants only her. Under the hot glare of the Australian sun, cut off from the world outside, can the force of his love make Gemma love him back? The story takes the form of a letter, written by Gemma to Ty, reflecting on those strange and disturbing months in the outback. Months when the lines between love and obsession, and love and dependency, blur until they don't exist - almost.

I really love how books about people being kidnapped make me feel. I get completely gripped by these types of books and feel completely terrified and sick to my stomach throughout. It sounds like a really strange thing to love but it's just a completely different reading experience and I love feeling so shocked.
This is one of my favourites of this sort but I also highly recommend Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend and Living Dead Girl

30 Day Book Photo Challenge - April 12

This was designed by Books & Cupcakes.

12. Fiction or Non-Fiction

Fiction 

I definitely prefer fiction. I have a handful of non-fiction books but fiction is my true passion. As much as I enjoy learning documentaries and learning new things, I love getting lost in a storybook world much more. Fiction takes me to places I would never otherwise go, feel emotions that don't belong to me, and make fictional friends that I can always come back to in the pages of a book. I wasn't sure what to take a photo of for this so I just took a photo of my bookshelves

30 Day Book Photo Challenge - April 04

This was designed by Books & Cupcakes.

4. 1990s—1990s: Book set in the ‘90s, a book you read in the ‘90s, or a book published in the ‘90s.

 Anastasia Krupnik - Lois Lowry. 

Anastasia Krupnik is a freckle-faced 10 year-old dynamo who knows her own mind and thinks for herself. Contemporary fiction for the modern girl!
Anastasia – her mum’s an artist, her dad’s a poet – decides to leave home when she hears she’s to have a baby brother. How gross when her mother is so old! She resolves to work things out to her advantage.

 

This is a series of 9 books which were published between 1979 and 1995. I read one of these books when I was in Primary School. I was about 8 years old and it was the first real book - (not a picture or non-fiction book) - that I read completely by myself. I wrote a 2 page book review for my homework and I completely fell in love with Anastasia. A few years later I bought 2 of the books, I didn't really think about reading them in order until I re-read one not long ago. So I went online and hunted down copies of the book with the same style cover as the one I read in the 90s. 
(Some of them are in my bedroom so I just took a photo of the ones on my shelf)

These books never fail to make me laugh. Anastasia, her family and her friends are all such real characters that everyone can identify with. My favourite book involves Anastasia's guilt over accidentally mixing up a bag of dog poo and a letter which needs to be posted!

30 Day Book Photo Challenge - April 02

This was designed by Books & Cupcakes.

2. Newest Purchase

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit - Judith Kerr

Partly autobiographical, this is first of the internationally acclaimed trilogy by Judith Kerr telling the unforgettable story of a Jewish family fleeing from Germany at the start of the Second World War
Suppose your country began to change. Suppose that without your noticing, it became dangerous for some people to live in Germany any longer. Suppose you found, to your complete surprise, that your own father was one of those people.
That is what happened to Anna in 1933. She was nine years old when it began, too busy with her schoolwork and toboganning to take much notice of political posters, but out of them glared the face of Adolf Hitler, the man who would soon change the whole of Europe – starting with her own small life.
Anna suddenly found things moving too fast for her to understand. One day, her father was unaccountably missing. Then she herself and her brother Max were being rushed by their mother, in alarming secrecy, away from everything they knew – home and schoolmates and well-loved toys – right out of Germany…

I am interested in World War II documentaries and watched a lot of them at the beginning of 2015. One of them had British refugees talking about their experiences, and one of these refugees was Judith Kerr. She is the author of Mog the Cat and The Tiger Who Came To Tea.
In the documentary she told how her father published satirical illustrations of the Nazis which caused her family to have to flee the country and his books were amongst the first to be burnt when Hitler gained power. The book she has written about her experience fleeing Germany is now mandatory for German children to read in School. This is a great achievement for her family and her father's legacy.
Her story really inspired me to get the book and I'm really enjoying it so far. It's partly autobiographical which I prefer, with an autobiography there are parts of the memories missing so the retelling of the story can be a bit confusing. So with this book these missing memories are filled in and it flows nicely. As she is also an illustrator there are little drawings at the beginning of each chapter to set the scene.
There are a further 2 books that follow this story which I will be purchasing in the future.

Book Review: All The Bright Places by Jennifer Niven

I read All The Bright Places by Jennifer Niven as part of a teen book club. I had seen the book before but not been interested enough to read it. The cover doesn't attract my attention and the story seemed predictably "girl meets boy and falls in love". I don't usually read teen romances. I prefer dystopian/dramatic/crime books.


I started to read with an open-mind. However the predictable "girl meets boy" happened within 3 pages. There was no real build up of the individual characters before the meeting so you never really find out what they are like by themselves. The entire book then revolves around these two characters together; how they feel about each other, how long until they will see each other, talking to each other on facebook.

This book is massively lacking in descriptive narrative. I had no idea that Finch had black hair until about 100 pages in. Occasionally I get to read that he is wearing a beanie.
I have no idea what colour Violet's hair is or the type of clothes she wears. There is no description of her bedroom (minus a pinboard), her house, her mum's car etc.
I don't know what their voices sound like, their accents, the way they carry themselves, the way they look when they see each other etc.

It's as though the author was solely fixated on Finch's mental health and nothing else mattered. As for that aspect, it seemed as though every possible aspect of bipolar was thrown onto his character without much thought. It felt like she had tried to cram every possible symptom into the 350 pages. But just in case we forgot, let's follow the author's suit, and briefly mention Violet's grief and self-blame over the car crash too.

The character of Finch seems to know no boundaries where Violet is concerned. He will turn up to her house in the middle of the night and tell her to come with him, with little care for what she wants to do. She does what he wants her to do because she is worried about his feelings. I can't recall him worrying about hers. The story tries to paint them as a perfect romance but I disagree. It seemed pretty one-sided to me.

The title of the book refers to a part where they recite a Dr. Seuss poem. For me it was such an insignificant part of the story. I understand that it is supposed to symbolise their future and show that they have hope but it was such a small part of a big book and there weren't many bright places. "The blue hole" would make a lot more sense. As I was reading I actually thought to myself that, had the book been called "The Jovian-Plutonian Gravitational Effect" I would have been a lot more likely to pick it up. However, this book came out around the same time as Meghan Trainor's song with the lyrics "all the right curves in all the right places" which is all I think of when I see the title.

I did really enjoy the parts where they would go wandering - there seemed to be more description for these parts so it was easier to feel like you are part of the story and it was interesting enough to hold my interest and keep me reading.

Some parts of the book are written well and it flows nicely. But every now and again there just seems to be a mash of romance, mental illness, loss, abuse and general school life as if the author is trying to appeal to all possible teen audiences. I prefer books that stick to one main theme but this might be good for those that prefer a bit of everything.

The story does get more interesting towards the end where the characters have chapters that don't solely revolve around each other.

The helplines at the back of the book is a nice touch and the author's note did make me sympathise a little more with the characters.

I wouldn't read it again but it wasn't the worst.
3/5