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[[image:Bookbag-banner-obooko1.jpg|center|link=https://www.obooko.com/]]
 
 
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=='''13 JUNE'''==
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=='''7 JULY'''==
 
 
{{Frontpage
 
{{Frontpage
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|author=David Solomons
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|isbn=1635866847
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|title=A Beginner’s Guide to Ruling the Galaxy
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|title=The Lavender Companion
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|rating=4
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|author=Jessica Dunham and Terry Barlin Vesci
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|genre=Confident Readers
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|rating=4.5
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|summary=Gavin is being followed, seemingly constantly, by the new (very annoying) girl at school.  Only this is not your typical boy meets girl story.  Because in this instance, the girl in question is Niki, and she is a galactic princess (no, really, she is!)  So what will Gavin do when he becomes embroiled in a situation where, potentially, Earth and everyone on it will be blown to smithereens, all because of Niki?
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|genre=Lifestyle
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|isbn=0857639935
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|summary=It's strange, the things that make you ''immediately'' feel that this is the book for you.  Before I started reading ''The Lavender Companion'', I visited the author's [https://www.pinelavenderfarm.com/ website] and there's a picture of a slice of chocolate cake on the homepage.  I don't eat cakes and desserts - but I wanted that cake viscerally.  (There's a recipe in the book, which I'm avoiding with some difficulty!!) Then I started reading the book and I was told to make a mess of it. Notes in the margins are sanctioned.  You get to fold down the corners of pages.  You suspect that smears of butter would not be a problem.  I ''loved'' this book already.
 
}}
 
}}
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=='''4 JULY'''==
 
{{Frontpage
 
{{Frontpage
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|author=Alex Cotter
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|author=Max Boucherat
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|title=The Mermaid Call
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|title=The Last Life of Lori Mills
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|rating=3.5
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|rating=4.5
 
|genre=Confident Readers
 
|genre=Confident Readers
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|summary=Vivien knows that mermaids don't exist.  But she also knows they have to exist – at least in the public eye.  For there would be nothing to Lake Splendour – a far northern English resort – without them.  A hundred years and change ago, two teenaged girls allegedly spent months with mermaids, but were forced to return to help out with the Great War effort.  They also showed female emancipation, which helped create the town's tourism industry, now faded and falling apart but once a feminist success story.  Alice, a girl who stumbles into Vivien's gran's tourist shop one day, knows she certainly wants mermaids to exist – she thinks her family's black sheep died searching for them, or else was just too successful in her hunt.  When the shy, doubting Thomasina that is Vivien collides with the exuberant, gung-ho Alice, what on earth – or perhaps in water – will they find?
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|summary=We meet Lori on the first evening she's got the house to herself – no neighbour to pop in, babysitter poorly, mother at work, just an avidly rule-breaking eleven year old, on her lonesome.  What could possibly go wrong?  Snuggled in a blanket fort, she has one main intention, and that is to log on to Voxminer, the world-building, critter-collecting game that is a hit in Lori's world.  But first Lori has a tiny inkling that this stormy night doesn't find herself entirely on her own, and then she finds something even more spooky.  For the server she and her bestie and nobody else should be able to enter shows signs of tampering.  When malevolent eyes spark up on her phone screen, and her safe place in the game has been doctored – well, where is a girl to turn?
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|isbn=1839941901
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|isbn=0008666482
 
}}
 
}}
 
{{Frontpage
 
{{Frontpage
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|isbn=0008395632
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|author=Jenny Lecoat
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|title=One Last Secret
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|title=Beyond Summerland
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|author=Adele Parks
 
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|rating=4.5
 
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|genre=Thrillers
 
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|summary=Natalya is an escort.  Well, her name's not ''actually'' Natalya: that's her professional name but it is a nod to her Serbian heritage.  She's actually thirty-one-year-old Teodora Dziewulski, usually known as Dora Wulski.  If you're thinking of 'escort' as being a polite description of a prostitute, run by a pimp, who's turning tricks to fund a drug habit, forget it.  Dora is a professional in all senses of the word.  She has an agent, Elspeth, who takes 30% of her income and deals with the payments but checks out the clients to see that Dora is going to be safe.  Dora describes herself as a self-employed clairvoyant to Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs.
 
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}}
 
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=='''12 JULY'''==
 
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{{Frontpage
 
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|author=A C Wise
 
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|title=Hooked
 
 
|rating=4
 
|rating=4
 
|genre=General Fiction
 
|genre=General Fiction
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|summary=It’s been twenty two years since Captain Hook, now going by just ‘James’, has been in Neverland.  Living a new life in London, he has never completely escaped his past.  But now he senses the edges of the beast circling around his life in London, and when suddenly he finds himself face to face in the street with Wendy, he knows that the line between this world and Neverland is growing thin.  The beast is finally coming to get him, and in the process will pull Wendy and her daughter Jane back into their past once again.
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|summary=Jean lives on Jersey with her mother where they are celebrating the end of the occupation.  During the war, Jean's father was arrested for listening to a banned radio and soldiers took him away one night, leaving Jean and her mother waiting for years for news of him. As the British finally free the Channel islands from the Nazis, and the war is finally over, their hopes rise that they will finally learn what became of him.  But will the truth come as a relief, or will it raise further questions around what else happened during the war? Who was the informer who told the Nazis about the radio? And what other secrets have been kept throughout the occupation?
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|isbn=1789096839
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|isbn=1846976537
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}}
 
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=='''15 AUGUST'''==
 
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{{Frontpage
 
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|isbn=B0B2N7MVYM
 
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|title=The Calculations of Rational Men
 
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|author=Daniel Godfrey
 
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|rating=5
 
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|genre=General Fiction
 
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|summary=It's the 10th of December 1962 when we first meet Dr Joseph Marr.  Just to put what happens in context, the Cuban missile crisis is still very fresh in people's minds.  The world has barely had a chance to breathe out.  But for Joe Marr, it's not the missile crisis that's at the front of his mind.  He's been convicted of murder.  With the current state of medical knowledge, it's hard to think otherwise than that the prosecution would never have been brought but Joe Marr has spent his first few days in HMP Queen's Bench, a relatively new prison.  He's just getting used to his roommate, Mervyn, and learning to be wary of the McArthur brothers.
 
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}}
 
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=='''18 AUGUST'''==
 
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{{Frontpage
 
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|author= Kit De Waal
 
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|title= Without Warning and Only Sometimes
 
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|rating= 4
 
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|genre= Autobiography
 
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|summary= As Philip Larkin so eloquently put it, “They f*** you up, your mum and dad/ They may not mean to, but they do” Without Warning and Only Sometimes by Kit De Waal focuses on this idea of parenthood and the bonds that bind family. This book is a memoir focussing on the author’s formative years as a teenager living in a lower class area of Birmingham. Her father is from St. Kitts in the Caribbean and her mother is an Irish woman ostracized by her family for becoming pregnant by and marrying a black man. This intersectionality plays a large role in the autobiography. Kit De Waal faces multiple hurdles due to her race, her class and her gender. Her parents loom large and are written with care, love, and the kind of anger only a child can express to their parents.
 
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|isbn=1472284836
 
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}}
 
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{{Frontpage
 
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|author=David Lagercrantz
 
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|title=Dark Music
 
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|rating=3
 
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|genre=Crime
 
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|summary=How far from the original can a book allegedly inspired by Sherlock Holmes get before the allusion breaks?  This does have a wonder-mind at the heart of what little investigating is going on, but there is not a lot that Conan Doyle fans could really pin down as on their exact wavelength.  For one, the main focus of the narrative, Micaela, is no John Watson MD.  She's a Chilean in the Stockholm police, put on a murder squad as she knows the prime suspect of old, in a case where a referee of a junior football match was found stoned to death shortly after the match, and just outside the stadium. Beppe, the suspect, was drunkenly antagonistic to the ref during the closing minutes, but refuses to admit anything, through days and weeks of interrogation.  When some disreputable coppers (the kind who dismiss anything their superior comes up with, the kind who think they can judge Micaela from her fringe and how she might dress – that kind) are told to go and see what brainbox Professor Rekke thinks of it all, she can only smirk when he says Beppe is innocent and the investigation is a shambles.  But taken off the case, she can no longer help solve the crime, and with Rekke the most erratic, irregular kind of guy, she can't get his full verdict on it all. Until, that may be, she manages to stop him in the middle of an apparent suicide attempt...
 
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|isbn=1529413192
 
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}}
 
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=='''6 OCTOBER'''==
 
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{{Frontpage
 
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|author=Alison Hughes
 
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|title=Fly
 
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|rating=4.5
 
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|genre=Confident Readers
 
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|summary=This is a very impressive read, as it does a lot of what mainstream teen and tween fiction still struggles with.  Its focus is courtesy of the first-person narration from Fly, a secondary school lad with cerebral palsy, a down-on-her-luck single mom nearing retirement from being a cleaner, a carer while at school, and a bundle of assumptions people lay on him.  First they assume that with a broken body comes a broken mind, then they decide he's a maths savant – they even believe they can get away with calling him Fly, which isn't his real name, but everybody just uses it.
 
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|isbn=1525305832
 
 
}}
 
}}
 
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Latest revision as of 14:06, 5 June 2024

13 JUNE

 

Review of

The Lavender Companion by Jessica Dunham and Terry Barlin Vesci

  Lifestyle

It's strange, the things that make you immediately feel that this is the book for you. Before I started reading The Lavender Companion, I visited the author's website and there's a picture of a slice of chocolate cake on the homepage. I don't eat cakes and desserts - but I wanted that cake viscerally. (There's a recipe in the book, which I'm avoiding with some difficulty!!) Then I started reading the book and I was told to make a mess of it. Notes in the margins are sanctioned. You get to fold down the corners of pages. You suspect that smears of butter would not be a problem. I loved this book already. Full Review

4 JULY

 

Review of

The Last Life of Lori Mills by Max Boucherat

  Confident Readers

We meet Lori on the first evening she's got the house to herself – no neighbour to pop in, babysitter poorly, mother at work, just an avidly rule-breaking eleven year old, on her lonesome. What could possibly go wrong? Snuggled in a blanket fort, she has one main intention, and that is to log on to Voxminer, the world-building, critter-collecting game that is a hit in Lori's world. But first Lori has a tiny inkling that this stormy night doesn't find herself entirely on her own, and then she finds something even more spooky. For the server she and her bestie and nobody else should be able to enter shows signs of tampering. When malevolent eyes spark up on her phone screen, and her safe place in the game has been doctored – well, where is a girl to turn? Full Review

 

Review of

Beyond Summerland by Jenny Lecoat

  General Fiction

Jean lives on Jersey with her mother where they are celebrating the end of the occupation. During the war, Jean's father was arrested for listening to a banned radio and soldiers took him away one night, leaving Jean and her mother waiting for years for news of him. As the British finally free the Channel islands from the Nazis, and the war is finally over, their hopes rise that they will finally learn what became of him. But will the truth come as a relief, or will it raise further questions around what else happened during the war? Who was the informer who told the Nazis about the radio? And what other secrets have been kept throughout the occupation? Full Review

You can work your way through the newest review, category by category, starting here.

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