Difference between revisions of "Forthcoming Publications"

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[[image:Bookbag-banner-obooko1.jpg|center|link=https://www.obooko.com/]]
 
 
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=='''25 APRIL'''==
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=='''18 AUGUST'''==
 
 
{{Frontpage
 
{{Frontpage
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|author= Kit De Waal
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|author=Sylvie Cathrall
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|title= Without Warning and Only Sometimes
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|title=A Letter to the Luminous Deep
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|rating= 4
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|rating=5
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|genre= Autobiography
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|genre=Science Fiction
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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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|summary= There are few greater joys than a book which lives up to a compelling premise. And this is one of them.
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|isbn=1472284836
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|isbn= 0356522776
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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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=='''9 MAY'''==
 
{{Frontpage
 
{{Frontpage
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|isbn=0241990165
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|author=Tom Percival
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|title=Hope to Die (D I Fawley)
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|title=The Wrong Shoes
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|author=Cara Hunter
 
 
|rating=5
 
|rating=5
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|genre=Crime
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|genre=Confident Readers
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|summary=It began rather oddly.  There was a 999 call suggesting that a shot had been fired in an isolated house but the call hadn't come from the householder.  A couple of PCs went to make certain that everything was alright and it took quite a while for the elderly householder to answer the door. He somewhat reluctantly told them that they'd better come in.  In the kitchen there was a body on the floor: the head had been blown off with a shotgun and the corpse was holding a knife in its right hand.  Richard Swann told the police that he'd heard sounds of an intruder and had come downstairs to investigate.  The ignorant young lout had called him ''Grandad'' and come at him with a knife.  Swann had shot him in self-defence.
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|summary=Will's life is difficult, in a multitude of ways.  He is bullied because he has 'the wrong shoes', he has the wrong shoes because his dad can't work and doesn't have enough money for even the most basic of things like food, and his dad can't work because he lost his job at the college, was working a cash-in-hand job on a building site and had an accident.  Throw into that mix the fact that his mum and dad are separated, and Will's life seems bleak in every direction.  And yet, he still has a tiny amount of hope.  He is good at art, and clings to the moments of joy when he is drawing, that feel like a light at the end of a long, dark tunnel.
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|isbn=1398527122
 
}}
 
}}
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=='''1 SEPTEMBER'''==
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=='''23 MAY'''==
 
{{Frontpage
 
{{Frontpage
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|author=Holly Webb
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|author=Onyi Nwabineli
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|title=The Story of Greenriver
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|title=Allow Me to Introduce Myself
 
|rating=4.5
 
|rating=4.5
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|genre=Confident Readers
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|genre=General Fiction
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|summary=Silken and Sedge, for all their differences, have a lot in common.  Silken is a girl whose father is the Master Builder of what might be the finest beaver lodge on the Greenriver.  Unfortunately she is also a kind of runt figure, and as a result is patronised, and given the most tokenistic tasks when it comes to fetching wood and shoring the dam up.  She also stands out for the unique artistic ability to sing.  Otters like Sedge sing, but he too, as the son of the lady of the holt, has pressure on him to be a bit less feckless and more attentive to class.  He, after all, will eventually inherit the job of keeping the otters safe from the wolf that both animal species fear the most, and from dreaded events like a Dark Spring.
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|summary=Anuri spent her childhood on display to the world, thanks to her step-mother Ophelia's increasingly popular presence on social media, where she posted every step of Anuri's childhood for sponsorships and influencer deals and, basically, monetary gain.  Now Anuri is in her twenties and she is slowly trying to regain her confidence and to get her life back, suing her step-mother to take down the content about her.  Anuri is battling alcoholism, failing to start her PhD, undergoing therapy and secretly abusing people online and receiving money from them for doing so.  Most importantly, she is desperately worried about her little sister, who is the new focus of Ophelia's online empire.  Can she save her sister, and perhaps herself and her relationship with her father at the same time?
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|isbn=1510109625
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|isbn=0861546873
 
}}
 
}}
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=='''6 JUNE'''==
 
{{Frontpage
 
{{Frontpage
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|author=Anna Kemp and David Wyatt
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|author=Kieran Larwood and Joe Todd-Stanton
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|title=Into Goblyn Wood
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|title=Dungeon Runners: Hero Trial
 
|rating=4
 
|rating=4
 
|genre=Confident Readers
 
|genre=Confident Readers
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|summary=Meet Hazel. For the last nine of her eleven years she has been stuck as a foundling in a horrid, Victorian institution, generally peeling vegetables or acting as a servant. She'd arrived at the place at the same time as Pete, and they're inseparably good friends now, until a chance for them both to escape, and enter the outside world, does not go to plan. There had always been the idea of a life idyllic in the nearby forests, Goblyn Wood, and a tribe of Wild Children, but none of that comes to pass, as Hazel finds herself in the care of a professor at the Natural History Museum. But life with him is not anything like what she might have expected it to be – and Hazel is determined to return to the Woods, restore her friendship with Pete – and to work out just what is going on in the forest, both the light and the shade, and the deathly dark...
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|summary=Meet Kit. Like most of the people in his world, it seems, he is an avid fan of Dungeon Running – the sport where a team of warrior, mage and healer enter specially prepared, century-old, magical mazes, and race to the exit, perhaps bothering with the treasure or the big bad and the points they grant you along the way.  Unfortunately for Kit, the only thing he's seen of the latest race on the inn TV equivalent is that one team has been retired, eaten, and a new trio of questors is needed.  Possibly very unfortunately indeed for Kit, he has taken to the goading from the token bully of his world and stumbled into declaring he'll enter as a team. What chance does this friendless, muscle-free-zone have in actually managing that, and how could he possibly hope to succeed?
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|isbn=1398503835
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|isbn=1839945184
 
}}
 
}}
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=='''13 JUNE'''==
 
{{Frontpage
 
{{Frontpage
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|isbn=1473680883
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|isbn=1635866847
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|title=The Skeleton Key
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|title=The Lavender Companion
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|author=Erin Kelly
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|author=Jessica Dunham and Terry Barlin Vesci
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|rating=5
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|rating=4.5
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|genre=Thrillers
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|genre=Lifestyle
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|summary=''The Golden Bones is going to follow me around for the rest of my life.  How can I trust anyone? It all leads back to you!''
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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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}}
  
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Nell didn't want to go to the reunion to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of ''The Golden Bones''.  She'd had no benefit from it - in fact, it had made her life precarious and unbelievably challenging.  I'd better explain.  ''The Golden Bones'' was a treasure quest book painted and written by Frank and Cora Churcher.  The story revolved around murdered  Elinore whose golden and bejewelled bones were hidden around the country.  The clues - some of them quite tortuous - were disguised in the words and pictures of the book - and all the parts were discovered except for the pelvis.  As with such quests, some people were obsessive and the theories became more and more outlandish.
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=='''4 JULY'''==
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}}
 
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=='''6 OCTOBER'''==
 
 
{{Frontpage
 
{{Frontpage
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|author=Alison Hughes
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|author=Max Boucherat
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|title=Fly
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|title=The Last Life of Lori Mills
 
|rating=4.5
 
|rating=4.5
 
|genre=Confident Readers
 
|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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|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=1525305832
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|isbn=0008666482
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}}
 
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=='''13 OCTOBER'''==
 
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{{Frontpage
 
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|author=Lilja Sigurdardottir and Quentin Bates (translator)
 
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|title=Red as Blood
 
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|rating=4
 
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|genre=Thrillers
 
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|summary=When Flosi’s wife goes missing, all the evidence seems to point towards her having been kidnapped. The ransom note tells him not to have any contact with the police, so instead he enlists the help of Arora, a financial investigator. She manages to persuade Flosi that they will need the help of the police, and she calls her detective friend, Daniel, whom she met when he was investigating her sister’s disappearance. Together, they start to secretly investigate Gudrun’s disappearance, trying not to arouse the suspicion of anyone, since they have no idea who the kidnappers might be, yet the more they uncover, the more confusing things become.
 
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|isbn=1914585321
 
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}}
 
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=='''21 OCTOBER'''==
 
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{{Frontpage
 
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|author=Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams
 
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|title=The Book of Hope 
 
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|rating=5
 
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|genre=Politics and Society
 
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|summary= The done thing is to read a book all the way through before you sit down to review it. I’m making an exception here, because I don’t want to lose any of the experience of reading this amazing book, I want to capture it as it hits me. And it is hitting me. This beautiful book has me in tears.
 
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|isbn=024147857X
 
 
}}
 
}}
 
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Revision as of 09:18, 8 April 2024

25 APRIL

0356522776.jpg

Review of

A Letter to the Luminous Deep by Sylvie Cathrall

5star.jpg Science Fiction

There are few greater joys than a book which lives up to a compelling premise. And this is one of them. Full Review

9 MAY

1398527122.jpg

Review of

The Wrong Shoes by Tom Percival

5star.jpg Confident Readers

Will's life is difficult, in a multitude of ways. He is bullied because he has 'the wrong shoes', he has the wrong shoes because his dad can't work and doesn't have enough money for even the most basic of things like food, and his dad can't work because he lost his job at the college, was working a cash-in-hand job on a building site and had an accident. Throw into that mix the fact that his mum and dad are separated, and Will's life seems bleak in every direction. And yet, he still has a tiny amount of hope. He is good at art, and clings to the moments of joy when he is drawing, that feel like a light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. Full Review

23 MAY

0861546873.jpg

Review of

Allow Me to Introduce Myself by Onyi Nwabineli

4.5star.jpg General Fiction

Anuri spent her childhood on display to the world, thanks to her step-mother Ophelia's increasingly popular presence on social media, where she posted every step of Anuri's childhood for sponsorships and influencer deals and, basically, monetary gain. Now Anuri is in her twenties and she is slowly trying to regain her confidence and to get her life back, suing her step-mother to take down the content about her. Anuri is battling alcoholism, failing to start her PhD, undergoing therapy and secretly abusing people online and receiving money from them for doing so. Most importantly, she is desperately worried about her little sister, who is the new focus of Ophelia's online empire. Can she save her sister, and perhaps herself and her relationship with her father at the same time? Full Review

6 JUNE

1839945184.jpg

Review of

Dungeon Runners: Hero Trial by Kieran Larwood and Joe Todd-Stanton

4star.jpg Confident Readers

Meet Kit. Like most of the people in his world, it seems, he is an avid fan of Dungeon Running – the sport where a team of warrior, mage and healer enter specially prepared, century-old, magical mazes, and race to the exit, perhaps bothering with the treasure or the big bad and the points they grant you along the way. Unfortunately for Kit, the only thing he's seen of the latest race on the inn TV equivalent is that one team has been retired, eaten, and a new trio of questors is needed. Possibly very unfortunately indeed for Kit, he has taken to the goading from the token bully of his world and stumbled into declaring he'll enter as a team. What chance does this friendless, muscle-free-zone have in actually managing that, and how could he possibly hope to succeed? Full Review

13 JUNE

1635866847.jpg

Review of

The Lavender Companion by Jessica Dunham and Terry Barlin Vesci

4.5star.jpg 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

0008666482.jpg

Review of

The Last Life of Lori Mills by Max Boucherat

4.5star.jpg 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

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

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