The other week I got House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland (Penguin, 2021). The mesmerizing cover stares at me begging to be read. Yes, yes, I’ll get to you, first I have to rant about the marketing campaign for it. And the sad story of how I fell for all their tricks…
“According to my mother, no book is only a book. A book can improve your mind or it can break it.”
Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All by Laura Ruby (Balzer+Bray 2019) is amazing. It broke my heart and mind at every turn.
“We need our monsters to know what it is to be human.”
I came to Ballad for a Mad Girl wishing for another magnificent tale woven through my soul by the hand of Vikki Wakefield. The story is entirely more strange than I anticipated. I still can’t work out if Grace could see unquiet ghosts or if she had one of those annoying mental illnesses. Grace is as confused as me.
Spoilers ahead
“There’s nothing more real than the things that can haunt you.”
This is not a regularly scheduled book review, this is an intervention. We really need to talk about Kirra and why her behaviour is not ok, at all.
“The cemetery was full of dead people. It had always been that way, since long before Magrit had come to live here.”
Magrit by Lee Battersby (Walker Books, 2016) is a creepy delight, with just the right amount of “awful, ugly, terrible.”
When I was 12 I read The Boy on the Lake by Judith Clarke (UQP, 1989) and fell in love with these horror filled tales of the supernatural.
I’m doing the May #AusYAChallenge on instagram and today the theme is “a book that changed you.” I had no idea what to post. Every book changes me, until I start the next and it happens all over again. My first thought was some of the books I’ve already posted because they are favs.
“Here’s the thing about moments. The world can change in them and people can die in them and just one is all it takes to make a mistake that will last you a lifetime.”
In The Skin of a Monster by Kathryn Barker stole my composure and refuses to shake its dreamscape from my bones. After whinging about The Pause not meeting my expectations, this book spirals so far past surreal, it bypasses the sublime completely and exits somewhere out west where the baked earth meets the Milky Way. Sadly the CBCA Book of the Year for Older Readers 2016 didn’t meet my expectations. In The Skin of a Monster made the longlist but not the shortlist. It did win the Aurealis Award for Best Young Adult Novel 2015.
There’s a reason why movie theatres don’t encourage people to bring their goats.
I read Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link weeks ago and meant to blog about it before its 31 May release, unfortunately a strange encounter befell me, which could have jumped from the pages of Pretty Monsters.
I met an old crone and she offered me an apple, the likes of which I had never seen before. Its ruby luster promised delicitude I’d never tasted, how could I refuse? And she wanted nothing in return. I took a bite, smiling my thanks for her generosity, but a nagging feeling of déjà vu tangled in the back of my mind. Then I fell into a deep sleep, perhaps never to wake again. No princes round here, but lucky for me a fallen angel texted me some lines from Danté’s Inferno. My phone has the loudest, most annoying txt noise ever. Sometimes it makes me jump if it’s near my ear. Obviously I woke up and Danté jolted that chunk of apple right out of my throat and I spat it on the ground. Danté’s good like that. Sheeba the sk8 dog* sniffed it, but she refuses to eat apple. So now I was awake and could blog again. If you’ve emailed me recently and are waiting desperately for a reply, now you know why I haven’t, but might one day.
After loving The Wrong Grave earlier in the year I was very excited to get my paws on Pretty Monsters, again with illustrations, sorry decorations, by Shaun Tan. The Australian editions are from Text Publishing. They’re publishing lots of cool US titles. Although we have to wait (2 years!?), they are much nicelyer produced with real white paper, not that grey crap they fob off on cheap US paperbacks, and bindings that stay bound – who’d o thought.
