Good Morning everyone I hope you are having a great Easter so far.

As you’ve probably noticed I love a good book challenge so when I saw this on the lovely Joanne from Portobello Book Blog I knew I had to join in. The idea is to match one of your favourite books with a word you might associate with Easter.

If you’d like to join in please do as I’d love to see what you pick.

What have you been up to this Easter weekend?

Rabbits: A Book You Wish Would Multiply (A Book You Wish Had A Sequel)

I absolutely loved this book when I read it and I am really hoping that the author writes a sequel one day as I’d love to read more about the fantastic Emily and Josh.

Egg: A Book That Surprised You

I love a good thriller but as I read so many of them I’m often able to guess what’s going to happen or who’s done it. This book however absolutely blew me away and I wasn’t able to predict the outcome of it at all which I always love.

Hunt: A Book That Was Hard For You To Get Your Hands On

I had heard lots of great things about this book so I was desperate to read it when it came out. However Waterstones took ages dispatching my order so I ended up waiting a few weeks to receive it sadly.

Lamb: A Children’s Book You Still Enjoy

I was a huge Secret Seven fan as a kid with my sister and I even trying to form are own Secret Seven to solve mysteries. I’m currently reading them with my little girl which I’m really enjoying.

Spring: A Book With A Cover That Makes You Think Of Spring

When I was looking for a book for this prompt I squealed when I found this as not only is it yellow which is a very spring colour but it has daffodils on it which are one of my favourite spring flowers!

Jesus: A Religious Or Spiritual Book You Love

I absolutely loved this book and would highly recommend it to everyone. It was so uplifting and thought provoking with the many wisdoms or ideas it had in it. It’s one of the only books I’ve ever felt compelled to highlight parts of as I wanted to be able to find it again.

Good morning everyone and Happy Easter if you celebrate. I got woken up at half five this morning by three kids who wanted to see if the Easter Bunny has been. It had so I now have three very happy, chocolate covered children!

I thought I’d share the books they were enjoying this Easter weekend:

⭐ Robo Dog by David Walliams

⭐ Izadora -Moon Goes To School by Harriet Muncaster

⭐ Harry & The Dinosaurs Have A Happy Birthday by Ian Whybrow

⭐ We’re Going On A Egg Hunt by Martha Mumford

My eldest kids are huge readers, with my 10 year old in particular being hard to keep up with sometimes as he’s such a fast reader. My little girl loves books and we’ve just discovered the Izadora- Moon series which we’re steadily working our way through. My youngest is reluctantly learning to read and is struggling a bit with it at the moment. He loves being read to though and I always look forward to bedtime stories with him.

Anyone got any kid book recommendations for me?

Book Synopsis:

Welcome to Charon’s Crossing.
The tea is hot, the scones are fresh and the dead are just passing through.

When a reaper comes to collect Wallace from his own sparsely-attended funeral, Wallace is outraged. But he begins to suspect she’s right, and he is in fact dead. Then when Hugo, owner of a most peculiar tea shop, promises to help him cross over, Wallace reluctantly accepts the truth.

Yet even in death, he refuses to abandon his life – even though Wallace spent all of it working, correcting colleagues and hectoring employees. He’d had no time for frivolities like fun and friends. But as Wallace drinks tea with Hugo and talks to his customers, he wonders if he was missing something.

The feeling grows as he shares jokes with the resident ghost, manifests embarrassing footwear and notices the stars. So when he’s given one week to pass through the door to the other side, Wallace sets about living a lifetime in just seven days.

My Review:

Under The Whispering Door is a beautifully written, thought provoking and absorbing read that I’ve continued to think about long after reading.

Firstly I absolutely loved the author’s vision of what happens after we pass away and hope that’s what happens in real life. The tea shop was a lovely creation and I liked the idea of a place where the recently deceased can go to reflect on their life. It was quite amusing to watch Wallace trying to get used to being a ghost, with some of his actions making me laugh out loud.

There are some wonderful characters in this book that I enjoyed getting to know. I started off really not liking Wallace but grew very fond of him as the story progressed and he starts to become a nicer person. This change in Wallace was lovely to see, as was watching him grow closer to the other cafe inhabitants. His growing relationship with Hugo was interesting to follow though laced with sadness as to where it could go. I found myself feeling very sorry for Wallace that he seemed to have discovered this wonderful world too late.

The story starts off a bit slowly as the author sets the scene and we get introduced to the characters but I soon became absorbed into the story. I loved learning more about the cafe and the characters whose backstory was often very heartbreaking. The twist at the end was unexpected but beautifully done. I closed the book very happy though sad to leave the cafe and the wonderful characters behind. This was actually the first book I’ve read by this author but I’ll definitely be reading more from him in the future.

About The Author:

TJ KLUNE is a Lambda Literary Award-winning author (Into This River I Drown) and an ex-claims examiner for an insurance company. His novels include the Green Creek series, The House on the Cerulean Sea and The Exraordinaries. Being queer himself, TJ believes it’s important—now more than ever—to have accurate, positive, queer representation in stories.

tjklunebooks.com

Eek I was so excited to receive a copy of this book. I absolutely loved The Lighthouse Library by this author so I can’t wait to read this.

Huge thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book and to Anne Cater for inviting me onto the blog tour.

Yes I did take this book to a National Trust visit, hoping to get an opportunity to take a nice picture – hopefully I’m not the only one who does that ..

Out 27th April 2023

Book Synopsis:

 
A novel of second chances and blossoming communities from the author of The Lighthouse Bookshop. 

Budding landscape architect Luisa MacGregor is stuck in a rut – she hates her boss, she lives with her sister, and she is still mourning the loss of her husband many years ago. So when she is given the opportunity to take on a parcel of land in a deprived area, she sees the chance to build a garden that can make the area bloom.
 
Arriving in the rundown seaside town of Collaton on the north-west coast of Cumbria, she realises that her work is going to be cut out for her. But, along with Cas, a local PE teacher, and Harper, a teen whose life has taken a wrong turn, she is determined to get the garden up and running.
 
So when the community comes together and the garden starts to grow, she feels her luck might have changed. Can she grow good things on this rocky ground? And might love blossom along the way…?

About The Author:

I’ve been writing since I was a teenager, which is now a distressingly long time ago! I started out as an entertainment journalist – actually, my earliest published work was as a reviewer of science fiction and fantasy books. I went on to become a staff writer and then an editor for print magazines, before beginning to write non-fiction making-of books tied in to film and television, such as The Art and Making of Penny Dreadful and Wonder Woman: The Art and Making of the Film.

I now write both children’s and adult fiction – my first novel was called The Diamond Thief, a Victorian-set steampunk adventure book for the middle grade age group. That won the Redbridge Children’s prize in 2014, and I went on to write two more books in the series before moving on to other adventure books including The Golden Butterfly, which was nominated for the Carnegie Award in 2017, The House of Hidden Wonders, and a YA horror called FIR, which was shortlisted for the Lancashire Book of the Year Award in 2018.

My debut adult novel will be published by Simon & Schuster in August 2021. It’s called The House Beneath the Cliffs and it’s a story set in a very small coastal village in Scotland. The idea for it had lodged in my head years before. I have a love for unusual dwelling places and I came across a tiny house that completely captured my imagination. My adult fiction tends to centre on small communities – feel-good tales about how we find where we belong in life and what it means when we do. Although I have also published full-on adult horror stories, which are less about community and more about terror and mayhem…

I was born in Kent but now live in a very small house in an equally small village in northern Cumbria with my husband, who owns a bookshop in the nearby market town of Penrith.

Good morning everyone and happy first day of the Easter weekend! I thought I’d do a little reading update to show you what I’m planning on reading this weekend.

📚Last- Maybe Next Time by Cesca Major (Review posted Thursday)

📚Now – The Burning Chambers by Kate Mosse

🎧 Now – Daisy & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

📚 Next – The Institution by Helen Fields

I’m really enjoying The Burning Chambers but the more I read the more I’m convinced I’ve actually read this book before as it seems very familiar.

I’ve been very intrigued about Daisy & The Six for a while now and have heard great things about the audiobook. I’ve got a few jobs to do this weekend so I’m looking forward to listening to this while I work.

Helen Fields is one of my favourite authors and I’m excited to read her latest book The Institution. I might end up reading it alongside The Burning Chambers as it’s difficult to read with the kids around so I might need a gripping book to ensure I manage to read this weekend.

What are you planning on reading this weekend?

Good afternoon everyone I was lucky enough to be accepted onto the Tandem Collective read-along for this fantastic sounding book. It sounds right up my street and I’m excited to read it alongside some of my lovely book friends.

Huge thanks to Tandem Collective for the invite and to Karen Kingston for recommending me for this read-along.

Do you like read-alongs or buddy reads?

Book Synopsis:

Born into a basket of clean sheets–ruining a perfectly good load of laundry–Emmeline never quite fit in on her family’s rural Nova Scotian farm. After suffering multiple losses in the First World War, her family became so heavy with grief, toxicity, and mental illness that Emmeline felt their weight smothering her. And so, she fled across the Atlantic and built her life in England. Now she is retired and living in a small coastal town with her best friend, Vera, an excellent conversationalist. Vera is also a small white dog, and so Emmeline is making an effort to talk to more humans. When she joins a memoir-writing course at the library, her classmates don’t know what to make of her. Funny, loud, and with a riveting memoir, she charms the lot. As her past unfolds for her audience, friendships form, a bonus in a rather lonely life. She even shares with them her third-biggest secret: she has liberated hundreds of spoons over her lifetime–from the local library, Cary Grant, Winston Churchill. She is a compulsive spoon stealer.

When Emmeline unexpectedly inherits the farm she grew up on, she knows she needs to leave her new friends and go see the farm and what remains of her family one last time. She arrives like a tornado in their lives, an off-kilter Mary Poppins bossing everyone around and getting quite a lot wrong. But with her generosity and hard-earned wisdom, she gets an awful lot right too. A pinball ricocheting between people, offending and inspiring in equal measure, Emmeline, in her final years, believes that a spoonful–perhaps several spoonfuls–of kindness can set to rights the family so broken by loss and secrecy.

The Spoon Stealer is a classic Crewe book: full of humour, family secrets, women’s friendship, lovable animals, and immense heart.

About The Author:

I love the ordinary moments.
I celebrate everyday things.

They are too often lost in the race for something grand. I hold dear our humdrum routines. These accumulating hours make up our lifetimes and when we remember, it is always the simplest of pleasures that make us happy. These are the memories I create in my books.

Hubby and I were raised in Montreal, but have lived in the same house in rural Cape Breton for forty-five years. It remains a sanctuary for our children and pets, both living and remembered. My writing began as an exercise in trying to understand my world and quickly became something that brought me joy. I dearly love my family, baby blueberry Gia, all creatures great and small, children’s books, and breathing in the wild ocean air. 

Also, raisin tea biscuits.

(Taken from author’s website)

Good morning everyone. I saw this fun challenge on @dems_book_den ‘s Instagram page and knew I had to join in!

My lovely bag was made by my Mother In Law for my birthday. She makes the most amazing bags and I always love receiving a new one from her.

In my bag we have:
⭐My diary
⭐ A note book and pen in case I have any good ideas whilst out. Also useful for entertaining the kids if needed.
⭐ My book with the lovely bookmark my daughter made me
⭐ My kindle just in case I manage to finish my book 😂
⭐ My wallet
⭐ A drink – I normally use my water bottle but couldn’t find it…
⭐ Chocolate
⭐ Birthday book vouchers

There is also a load of random receipts and a few kids toys too.

I’ve tagged a few people who might want to take part on Instagram but if you see this feel free to join in too!

What book would you recommend I buy with my book voucher?

Good morning everyone I was lucky enough to receive this fabulous package from Graeme Williams and Vintage Books to celebrate the paperback publication for Confidence by Denise Mina.

This book sounds great and I’m very excited to read it soon. You can find out more about the book below.

Out in all formats now!

Book Synopsis:

A MISSING FILMMAKER. A STOLEN ANTIQUE. SOMEONE WILL KILL TO STOP THEM BEING FOUND…

‘Denise Mina is crime-writing royalty’ Val McDermid, author of A Place of Execution

When filmmaker, Lisa Lee goes missing, alongside a priceless Roman silver casket, there is no doubt the two are linked together.

The day after her vanishing, the casket is listed for auction in Paris with a reserve price of fifty million euros.

On a thrilling chase across Europe to discover what happened to Lisa, journalists Anna and Fin are caught up in a world of international art smuggling, billionaire con artists and religious zealotry.

About The Author:

Denise Mina was born in Glasgow in 1966. Because of her father’s job as an engineer, the family followed the north sea oil boom of the seventies around Europe, moving twenty one times in eighteen years from Paris to the Hague, London, Scotland and Bergen. She left school at sixteen and did a number of poorly paid jobs: working in a meat factory, bar maid, kitchen porter and cook. Eventually she settle in auxiliary nursing for geriatric and terminal care patients.

At twenty one she passed exams, got into study Law at Glasgow University and went on to research a PhD thesis at Strathclyde University on the ascription of mental illness to female offenders, teaching criminology and criminal law in the mean time.

Misusing her grant she stayed at home and wrote a novel, ‘Garnethill’ when she was supposed to be studying instead.

‘Garnethill’ won the Crime Writers’ Association John Creasy Dagger for the best first crime novel and was the start of a trilogy completed by ‘Exile’ and ‘Resolution’.

A fourth novel followed, a stand alone, named ‘Sanctum’ in the UK and ‘Deception’ in the US.

In 2005 ‘The Field of Blood’ was published, the first of a series of five books following the career and life of journalist Paddy Meehan from the newsrooms of the early 1980s, through the momentous events of the nineteen nineties. The second in the series was published in 2006, ‘The Dead Hour’ and the third will follow in 2007.

She also writes comics and wrote ‘Hellblazer’, the John Constantine series for Vertigo, for a year, published soon as graphic novels called ‘Empathy is the Enemy’ and ‘The Red Right Hand’. She has also written a one-off graphic novel about spree killing and property prices called ‘A Sickness in the Family’ (DC Comics forthcoming).

In 2006 she wrote her first play, “Ida Tamson” an adaptation of a short story which was serialised in the Evening Times over five nights. The play was part of the Oran Mor ‘A Play, a Pie and a Pint’ series, starred Elaine C. Smith and was, frankly, rather super.

As well as all of this she writes short stories published various collections, stories for BBC Radio 4, contributes to TV and radio as a big red face at the corner of the sofa who interjects occasionally, is writing a film adaptation of Ida Tamson and has a number of other projects on the go.

Book Synopsis:

A serial killer is on the loose in Hamburg, targeting dancers from The Acapulco, a club in the city’s red-light district, taking their scalps as gruesome trophies and replacing them with plastic wigs.

Chastity Riley is the state prosecutor responsible for crimes in the district, and she’s working alongside the police as they investigate. Can she get inside the mind of the killer?

Her strength is thinking like a criminal; her weaknesses are pubs, bars and destructive relationships, but as Chastity searches for love and a flamboyant killer – battling her demons and the dark, foggy Hamburg weather – she hits dead end after dead end.

As panic sets in and the death toll rises, it becomes increasingly clear that it may already be too late. For everyone…

My Review:

The Acapulco is a gritty, compelling thriller that I really enjoyed.

Firstly I have been a huge fan of this series from the first book so I found it fascinating to go back to the beginning and see how everything started for Chastity. I’ve always liked how realistic a character she is and how affected she gets by what she sees as it shows that she cares. Her way of coping though was quite heartbreaking to see sometimes and I found myself hoping that someone would help her or give her the love I feel she desperately needs.

It was interesting to learn more about Hamburg and to visit the seedier side of the city, where I would never dare visit in real life. The investigation, with the aspect of ritual killing, was very intriguing to follow as I’ve always found it fascinating to learn more about the reasons behind them. I liked how Chastity tries to get into the characters head so that we can see how they might think or act. Fair warning though some of the detail used is quite gruesome and definitely not for the faint hearted. I was quite glad that I wasn’t Chastity and having to see it all first hand as the descriptions on their own were enough to turn my stomach.

Overall I really enjoyed this book and hope there are more books to come in this fabulous series. The book starts off slow but soon picks up to become very hard to put down. There were some amazing twists that took me by surprise and I liked how everything came together at the end. The only downside to this book was that the title had me singing the song by the same name continuously as I read which drove my family mad.

Huge thanks to Anne Cater for inviting me onto the blog tour and to Orenda for my copy of this book.

About The Author:

Simone Buchholz was born in Hanau in 1972. At university, she studied Philosophy and Literature, worked as a waitress and a columnist, and trained to be a journalist at the prestigious Henri-Nannen-School in Hamburg. In 2016, Simone Buchholz was awarded the Crime Cologne Award as well as runner-up in the German Crime Fiction Prize for Blue Night, which was number one on the KrimiZEIT Best of Crime List for months. The critically acclaimed Beton Rouge, Mexico Street, Hotel Cartagena and River Clyde all followed in the Chastity Riley series, with The Acapulco out in 2023. She lives in Sankt Pauli, in the heart of Hamburg, with her husband and son.

Book Synopsis:

Even the greatest love stories end. But what if this one didn’t have to?

_________________________________________________________________

Emma is having the worst day of her life. Frustrating. Chaotic. And the only person who could make it better is gone by the
end of the day.

Yet even worse than all of that: Emma keeps waking up to the same day, over and over again.

But what if this is a sign things could be different? Can Emma change the heartbreaking end to this love story?

My Review:

Maybe Next Time is a beautiful, emotional and thought provoking timeslip book that will stay with me.

Firstly I absolutely loved Emma who I felt was a very realistic character that I had a lot of sympathy for. I find it hard enough to juggle kids and a part time job so I can well imagine how hard things were for Emma with all the extra responsibilities she has. The story is told from Emma’s point of view but interspersed with letters that Dan has written to Emma on their anniversary each year. I really liked this as it gave me a better insight into the couple and their history while also seeing how things had changed for the couple in the present.

I found this book incredibly thought provoking as it made me think about my own life and all the people or things that I take for granted. It was very emotional to watch Emma have to relive the worst day of her life and realise the mistakes she’s made in her own life. I really felt for her as she tried desperately to change the outcome and as she realised what was actually important in her life.

This book starts off a bit slowly as we learn more about Emma and her busy life but soon becomes very gripping. I soon found myself very invested in the story and had to keep reading to find out if Emma manages to change things. The ending was very emotional and I found myself fully sobbing by the end. This was actually the first book I’ve read by this author but I’ll definitely be reading more from her in the future.

Huge thanks to Anne Cater for inviting me onto the blog tour and to Harper Collins for my copy of this book via Netgalley, though as you can see, I did purchase my own copy too.

About The Author:

Cesca Major is a novelist and screenwriter. She has written thirteen novels under different names and her books have been published in more than 10 countries. She has been nominated for both the RNA’s Romantic Comedy Award and the CWA Gold Dagger Award. She has an original TV series in development with the BBC. You can find more info about all her books, and lots of writing tips and videos, at http://www.cescamajor.com.