Sunday Summary: 6th January 2019

Title: Dumplin’
Author: Julie Murphy
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 28th January 2016
Pages: 284
Format: Hardback
Source:: Bought
Add It: Amazon UK Goodreads.
Summary:Self-proclaimed fat girl Willowdean Dickson (dubbed “Dumplin’” by her former beauty queen mom) has always been at home in her own skin. Her thoughts on having the ultimate bikini body? Put a bikini on your body.

With her all-American beauty best friend, Ellen, by her side, things have always worked . . . until Will takes a job at Harpy’s, the local fast-food joint. There she meets Private School Bo, a hot former jock. Will isn’t surprised to find herself attracted to Bo. But she is surprised when he seems to like her back.

Instead of finding new heights of self-assurance in her relationship with Bo, Will starts to doubt herself. So she sets out to take back her confidence by doing the most horrifying thing she can imagine: entering the Miss Clover City beauty pageant—along with several other unlikely candidates—to show the world that she deserves to be up there as much as any girl does.

Along the way, she’ll shock the hell out of Clover City—and maybe herself most of all.

Title: Giant Days Volume Six
Author: John Allison
Illustrator: Max Sarin and Liz Fleming
Publisher: Boom! Boom!
Published: 18th October 2017
Pages: 112
Format: ebook
Source: Scribd
Add It: Amazon. Goodreads
Summary:Second year begins and Daisy, Susan, and Esther have taken their friendship commitment to the next level by moving off-campus. But the keys came with a whole new load of responsibilities. Unwanted suitor visits, a robbery, and Susan living only a few blocks apart from her ex-boyfriend, McGraw, has made the dorms feel like a haven. The girls are in for a dose of reality when they learn that there’s more to being an adult than paying your own rent. Eisner Award nominee John Allison (Bad Machinery, Scary Go Round) and illustrator Max Sarin welcome you back to Sophomore year in Giant Days Volume 6, collecting issues #21-24 of the critically-acclaimed series

Title: Giant Days #25
Author: John Allison
Illustrator: Max Sarin and Liz Fleming
Publisher: Boom! Boom!
Published: 5th April 2017
Pages: 31
Format: ebook
Source: Scribd
Add It: Goodreads.
Summary:Special oversized issue celebrating two years of Giant Days! Susan goes home for the holidays and attempts to repair the rift between her parents with the help of her six older siblings!

Title: A Curse So Dark and Lonely
Author: Brigid Kemmerer
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 25th February 2016
Pages: 496
Format: Paperback
Source:: Review Copy from Publisher
Add It: Amazon UK Goodreads.
Summary:Prince Rhen, the heir to Emberfall, is cursed. Forced to repeat the autumn of his eighteenth year over and over, he can only be freed by love. But at the end of each autumn he is transformed into a beast hell-bent on destruction, and after so many failed attempts, his kingdom and its people are barely holding on.

Harper’s life has never been easy, but she’s learned to be tough enough to survive. She won’t let anything hold her back, not her cerebral palsy or her mother’s deteriorating health. But when she is sucked into Rhen’s world, nothing is as it seems. Powerful forces are standing against Emberfalll … and it will take more than a broken curse to save it from utter ruin.

Title: Slay on Tour
Author: Kim Curran
Publisher: Usborne
Published: 10th January 2019
Pages: 304
Format: Paperback
Source:: Review Copy
Add It: Amazon UK Goodreads.
Summary:SLAY are BACK…and this time they’re headed to Tokyo to track down another hell-raising demon. When they’re invited on tour with a super-cool band of holographic girls, SLAY find themselves whisked off around Japan – until strange things start happening on their tour train. Suddenly it seems it’s not just SLAY’s fans following their every move…

Title: All the Lonely People
Author: David Owen
Publisher: Atom
Published: 10th January 2019
Pages: 320
Format: Paperback
Source:: Review Copy
Add It: Amazon UK Goodreads.
Summary:Everyone tells Kat that her online personality – confident, funny, opinionated – isn’t her true self. Kat knows otherwise. The internet is her only way to cope with a bad day, chat with friends who get all her references, make someone laugh. But when she becomes the target of an alt-right trolling campaign, she feels she has no option but to Escape, Delete, Disappear.

With her social media shut down, her website erased, her entire online identity void, Kat feels she has cut away her very core: without her virtual self, who is she?

She brought it on herself. Or so Wesley keeps telling himself as he dismantles Kat’s world. It’s different, seeing one of his victims in real life and not inside a computer screen – but he’s in too far to back out now.

As soon as Kat disappears from the online world, her physical body begins to fade and while everybody else forgets that she exists, Wesley realises he is the only one left who remembers her. Overcome by remorse for what he has done, Wesley resolves to stop her disappearing completely. It might just be the only way to save himself.

All the Lonely People is a timely story about online culture – both good and bad – that explores the experience of loneliness in a connected world, and the power of kindness and empathy over hatred.

Title: Truly Devious
Author: Maureen Johnson
Publisher: Katherine Tegan Books
Published: 16th January 2018
Format: ebook
Source:: Gifted
Add It: Amazon UK Goodreads.
Summary: Ellingham Academy is a famous private school in Vermont for the brightest thinkers, inventors, and artists. It was founded by Albert Ellingham, an early twentieth century tycoon, who wanted to make a wonderful place full of riddles, twisting pathways, and gardens. “A place,” he said, “where learning is a game.”

Shortly after the school opened, his wife and daughter were kidnapped. The only real clue was a mocking riddle listing methods of murder, signed with the frightening pseudonym “Truly, Devious.” It became one of the great unsolved crimes of American history.

True-crime aficionado Stevie Bell is set to begin her first year at Ellingham Academy, and she has an ambitious plan: She will solve this cold case. That is, she will solve the case when she gets a grip on her demanding new school life and her housemates: the inventor, the novelist, the actor, the artist, and the jokester. But something strange is happening. Truly Devious makes a surprise return, and death revisits Ellingham Academy. The past has crawled out of its grave. Someone has gotten away with murder.

The two interwoven mysteries of this first book in the Truly Devious series dovetail brilliantly, and Stevie Bell will continue her relentless quest for the murderers in books two and three.

Title: Missing, Presumed
Author: Susie Steiner
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 25th February 2016
Listening Length: 13 hours and 15 minutes
Format: audiobook
Source:: Bought
Add It: Amazon UK Goodreads.
Summary:Mid-December, and Cambridgeshire is blanketed with snow. Detective Sergeant Manon Bradshaw tries to sleep after yet another soul-destroying Internet date – the low murmuring of her police radio her only solace.

Over the airwaves come reports of a missing woman – door ajar, keys and phone left behind, a spatter of blood on the kitchen floor. Manon knows the first 72 hours are critical: you find her, or you look for a body. And as soon as she sees a picture of Edith Hind, a Cambridge post-graduate from a well-connected family, she knows this case will be big.

Is Edith alive or dead? Was her ‘complex love life’ at the heart of her disappearance, as a senior officer tells the increasingly hungry press? And when a body is found, is it the end or only the beginning?

Black is male, Black is female, Black is straight, Black is gay, Black is urban, Black is rural, Black is rich. And poor. Black is mixed-race, Black is immigrants, Black is more.

There are countless ways to be BLACK ENOUGH.

Featuring some of the most acclaimed bestselling American black authors writing for teens today, Black Enough is an essential collection of captivating stories about what it’s like to be young and black. Whether you are in America, the UK, or anywhere across the globe, this powerful collection of stories will remind you of our shared humanity.

With an Introduction by June Sarpong, author of DIVERSIFY
Stories from: Renee Watson, Varian Johnson, Leah Henderson, Lamar Giles, Kekla Magoon, Jason Reynolds, Brandy Colbert, Tochi Onyebuchi, Liara Tamani, Jay Coles, Rita Williams-Garcia, Tracey Baptiste, Dhonielle Clayton, Justina Ireland, Coe Booth, Nic Stone and Ibi Zoboi

Eve is like any other teenage girl . . .

Except that the fate of the entire world lies on her shoulders.

She’s the first girl born in fifty years.

She’s the answer to their prayers.

She’s the final hope.

Which means she has one function alone . . .

At sixteen, Eve must face her destiny and make a choice.

She will choose a man, one out of three carefully selected suitors.

But what about Bram?

The future of the planet hangs on Eve making the right choice.

Will she?

COULD YOU CHOOSE BETWEEN LOVE, AND THE FUTURE OF THE HUMAN RACE?