Alex T. Smith(Scholastic Children’s Books) Ella, the bespectacled ladybird, is forever cleaning up after her two nasty and ungrateful wasp stepsisters Belladonna and Ivy. One day, a famous artist named Pierre in need of inspiration decides to throw a ball in Paris on Valentine’s Day. When the invitation to the Grand Bug Ball lands on the door mat for the wasp sisters, they are sure …
romance
Scattering Like Light
S.C. Ransom(Nosy Crow) Please be aware that Scattering Like Light is the final tome of a trilogy and therefore there might be spoilers in this review! Scattering Like Light picks up where Perfectly Reflected left off. Alex and her family are on their way to Spain for a family holiday. But on Alex’s mind is …
Prisoner of the Inquisition
Theresa Breslin (Random House Children’s Books) When young Zarita makes exaggerated accusations against a beggar to her Magistrate father, she cannot foresee that the catastrophic consequences will not only be instant but that they will also resonate for years to come. Her life is changed for ever, and so is the life of the beggar’s son, Saulo, …
Across the Universe
Beth Revis (Puffin/Razorbill) Seventeen year-old Amy’s parents have decided to be cryogenically frozen, trapped in time, in order to be taken on a 350 year- long space journey on a mission to investigate and colonise a new planet. As a high-ranked US Army office and a genetics specialist, they are essential to the mission. Amy, …
Small Blue Thing
S.C. Ransom(Nosy Crow) When seventeen year-old Alex finds an unusual looking bracelet while she tries to rescue a swan caught on wire on the banks of the Thames, she thinks nothing of wearing it. It’s so pretty, and so unusual. But soon strange things start to happen: the apparition of a young man wearing a …
The Other Countess
Eve Edwards(Puffin)1582, England. Ellie, Lady Eleanor Rodriguez of San Jaime, is in possession of a rather undesirable lineage in the Elizabethan Court : her mother, although deceased, was Spanish and therefore Catholic, and her father is a scholas but also a gold-seeking alchemist. Four years previously, they were ran off the estate of the Earl of Dorset after his father wasted his …
I was Jane Austen’s best friend
Cora Harrison (Macmillan Children’s Books) It is 1791, and shy, sensible Jenny Cooper and her bold cousin Jane Austen are in a rather bad way. Jane is very sick with a fever and the cruel and rather unscrupulous headmistress of their girls’ boarding school is refusing to contact Jane’s parents. Jenny feels she has no …
Splendour
Anna Godbersen(Penguin) I shamelessly admit that I have loved the Luxe series, which follows a group of young upper-class people in New York at the turn of the twentieth-century. It’s all there: the kind, beautiful heroine who is in love with someone she should not; her hateful so-called best friend who stops at nothing to get …