If you're new here, why not subscribe to our email updates or follow us on Facebook? You can also add us to your Google Reader. Thanks for visiting!   When reading PG Wodehouse’s Love Among the Chickens recently I was struck by the narrator’s curiosity regarding “to what extent the work of authors is influenced by their private...

“When the doorbell rings at three in the morning, it’s never good news,” begins Stormbreaker, the first in Anthony Horowitz’s bestselling Alex Rider series. I would definitely concur. The last time someone buzzed me at three in the morning it was my twenty-one-year-old sister-in-law asking to borrow a MacBook cable for someone’s...

My husband Jono and I have pretty divergent reading tastes: his section of the bookshelf is largely business books and non-fiction, whereas mine’s largely fiction with the odd piece of narrative non-fiction thrown in. But there is some overlap in our reading habits, and zingy fiction that treads the line between MG and YA definitely comprises a large part...

Anyone who’s been reading this site for a while knows that I regularly pass on zingy series fiction to my husband. Though his reading interests are polar opposites of mine, he’s possibly an even tougher critic. He’s basically a thirty-year-old teenage boy, and a mere paragraph of extraneous exposition results in him skim-reading–or...

Languid, dark and poetic, The Wish House is unlike any young adult novel I’ve read recently. In fact, with its rich language and dark undercurrents it exhibits a similar aesthetic to Helen Dunmore’s Talking to the Dead. Even the setting is similar: a blazing hot summer, so hot that the world seems to fade and feather a little, and a ramshackle...

  EL Konigsburg’s Silent to the Bone is the third book I’ve read recently involving a character who has withdrawn from the spoken world. I’m fascinated by the idea of voicelessness, particularly as a form of protest: it’s a world apart from a mere failure to speak up. A deliberate, defiant silence is a removal of oneself from the...