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 Wodehouses'Love Among the Chickens'recently'I was struck by the narrators curiosity regarding to what extent the work of authors is influenced by their private...

When the doorbell rings at three in the morning, its never good news, begins Stormbreaker, the first in Anthony Horowitzs 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 someones...

My husband Jono and I have pretty divergent reading tastes: his section of the bookshelf is largely business books and non-fiction, whereas mines 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 whos 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, hes possibly an even tougher critic. Hes basically a thirty-year-old teenage boy, and a mere paragraph of extraneous exposition results in him skim-readingor...

Languid, dark and poetic, The Wish House is unlike any young adult novel Ive read recently. In fact, with its rich language and dark undercurrents it exhibits a similar aesthetic to Helen Dunmores'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  EL Konigsburgs'Silent to the Bone is the third book Ive read recently involving a character who has withdrawn from the spoken world. Im fascinated by the idea of voicelessness, particularly as a form of protest: its a world apart from a mere failure to speak up. A deliberate, defiant silence is a removal of oneself from the...