“Holding Eleanor’s hand was like holding a butterfly. Or a heartbeat. Like holding something complete, and something completely alive.”
Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell was recommended to me by Jazmin at Writersmania. Being a child of the 80s, how could I resist? Rainbow Rowell knows how to mesmerize words into things of beauty and the 1980s music, comics and books had me reliving my childhood.
“Seven girls nose to toe, wearing stone like skin as they made their way towards the harvest”
A Single Stone by Meg McKinlay is beautifully written, and raises disturbing questions in its dystopian world with parallels to our reality.
Four years later, I finally read A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness (but before the movie is released next year). If I had known the book is illustrated with incredibly dark depths by Jim Kay, I might have read this stunning convergence of word and image sooner. Siobhan Dowd died in 2007 and A Monster Calls would have been her fifth book. She had the premise and characters, but not enough time. I read and loved her amazing Bog Child in 2008. Patrick Ness’s development of her ideas into the finished A Monster Calls is a heart-wrenching memorial to Siobhan Dowd.
I found another book review I wrote four years ago! Sorry Magabala Books and the Goonack clan. In 2011 Scaly-Tailed Possum and Echidna by Cathy Goonack, with pictures by Marlene, Myron and Katrina Goonack was a Children’s Book Council of Australia Early Childhood Notable Book. I wrote this review then.
Continue reading “Wunambal Dreaming”
It’s been too long between revels with Holly Black, my fault, not her’s. Holly Black’s been writing just as fast as her enchanted quill allows. The Darkest Part of the Forest is the perfect balm to reacquaint myself with Holly Black’s dark fantasy because she’s back in the faerie court, not the Seelie and Unseelie Court of Tithe and Ironside, somewhere sideways at the Alderking’s dark hillside. I loved the Tithe series, so revisiting the nasty doings of tricksy faeries was a horrifying pleasure.
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of ceiling wax 