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Review :: DRY :: Neal & Jarrod Shusterman
The drought – or the Tap-Out, as everyone calls it – has been going on for a while now. Everyone’s lives have become an endless list of don’ts: don’t water the lawn, don’t take long showers, don’t panic. Until the taps run dry. Suddenly, Alyssa’s quiet suburban street spirals into a warzone of desperation; neighbours and families turned against each other on the hunt for water. And when her parents don’t return, she and her younger brother must team up with an unlikely group in search of water. Each of them will need to make impossible choices to survive. Ok, confession time – Dry by Neal and Jarrod Shusterman has…
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Review :: The Switch :: Beth O’Leary
I can’t remember whether I’ve mentioned here already that I’ve been participating in the Books & Bubbles virtual book club? It is lovely – every second month we are sent a book in the mail, and we discuss them in a video chat (with members in Adelaide meeting up in real life on a different day). This month we read The Switch by Beth O’Leary, and I was really curious to see what I would think of this one. I feel like O’Leary has quickly become a darling of the romcom/uplift fiction genre, and I had seen loads of glowing reviews both for this one and her first novel, The…
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Book Club :: Something to Live For :: Richard Roper
This evening I had the pleasure of going along to book club for (as far as I can recall) the first time this year! We read Something to Live For by Richard Roper, which is a sweet and relatively light read about grief and friendship and love. It was a hit overall – nobody really disliked it, although it was interesting that everyone had different bits or things about it that they liked or not. I thought it was a nice read, and I enjoyed it, but not enough for it to be a favourite. There was something about the way the story was told that I felt kept me…
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Five New Book Reviews to Look Out for in January 2019
Hello! Happy 2019!We have arrived back in Australia after almost 5 weeks holidaying across North America, and I’m so excited to get back into talking about books again! I thought a good way to start might be to give you a little sneak peek of some of the books I’ll be reviewing over the next couple of weeks. With the exception of Once Upon a River, which I bought for bookclub, these have all been sent to me by their publishers. Melody Trumpet – Gabrielle Tozer As the daughter of global music superstars, Melody Trumpet was supposed to be extraordinary – a melodic genius to carry on the Trumpet legacy. But,…
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Book Stack :: Book Club Reads
This year for the first time I have been a member of a book club where we all read the same book and discuss it together. It is run through my local Harry Hartog book shop, and our host Claire does such an amazing job each month. This month’s meeting was yesterday (we read The Second Cure by Margaret Morgan) and I thought it might be fun for today’s book stack to have a look at the titles we’ve read so far. I managed to round them all up for a photo except for Whistle in the Dark (which I gave to my mum last week). Tin Heart :: Shivaun…
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Book club :: The Yellow House :: Emily O’Grady
I can’t remember if I have mentioned before that until my local Harry Hartog launched their brand new book club in April I had never been a part of a book club where everyone reads the same book at the same time (although I do attempt a regular ‘buddy read’ with a dear, and very patient, friend of mine, I am the worst at actually getting the book read in the right month – see also my success rate with my month TBR stacks haha). In any case, I am enjoying the Harry Hartog book club so much! We have had about 12 people at each meeting so far, and…
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Great Expectations (but not Dickens)
Ok, nobody panic – I havn’t taken up reading the classics (though, honestly, I would love to read more classics, but I just seem to never get to them!). Rather, I’ve been thinking about the way we sometimes go into a book with particular expectations, and the impact this can have on our reading experiences. The thing that got me thinking about this was Whistle in the Dark, by Emma Healey, which we read for book club at my local Harry Hartog this month and met to discuss last night. At the start of our discussion almost everyone said this had been a bit of a disappointing read, and as…
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#loveozya :: Tin Heart :: Shivaun Plozza
In all my time reading and loving to talk books with others, I have never ever been part of the kind of book club where you all read the same book and then meet to discuss it! So when my local bookstore announced that they had a book club starting up this month I was super excited to be a part of it. It helped, of course, that the first book assigned was not only by an Australian author, and not only was the author also a woman, but it’s also a young adult book (my three favourites right now!) – this month we read Shivaun Plozza’s Tin Heart.When Marlowe…
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Book club reads :: Rebecca :: Daphne du Maurier
I’m sure no one is surprised to hear that talking about books is one of my favourite things to do! And where better to get your book chat on than a book club with friends? At the moment I’m part of two book clubs – one with some work friends who are also participating in the Read Harder Challenge – we don’t read and discuss the same book, but instead talk about what we’re reading for each task and recommend books to each other… so good! And then also a more traditional kind of book club where one of my very best friends and I read the same book and…
