I grabbed a copy of Carve the Mark last week, before I’d read or heard a single thing about it. The Divergent series was something I read with my teenage girls, with all of us appreciating the fierce, flawed female lead character.
It wasn’t a perfect series by any means, but we all love a bit of dystopian fiction. That was enough reason for me to trust that Veronia Roth would deliver in this new duology.
It was with great excitement that I placed my pre-order for the sequel to Maria Lewis’ debut novel, Who’s Afraid?
When ‘Who’s Afraid?’ came out, I was lucky enough to get to interview Maria Lewis alongside my review. To summarise, I came away from the first book with a total girl-crush on the fierce main character, Tommi Grayson. Tommi, a blue-haired Scot with Maori heritage, goes seeking answers about her biological father’s side of the family and unwittingly bites off far more than she can chew. She has to come to terms with her own emerging werewolf status, helped out by her supernatural custodian, a 400+ year old hottie called Lorcan. Not to mention all the family dramas she faces and what it costs her.
I first started reading Joe Hill based on the promise of genetics.
My love of Stephen King’s work is no secret, so finding out that Joe Hill was following in his father’s footsteps was a foregone conclusion for me. For those not in the know, his full name is Joseph Hillstrom King. I don’t blame him for writing under Hill; the Grand Master of horror, among other things, must cast a long shadow.
Having read a lot of Joe Hill’s work, though, I can confirm he has definitely earned his stripes in his own right. I see hints of Stephen King here and there; a little nod of acknowledgment and a bit of a warm, fuzzy feeling for us King fans. More on that later. Hill is a hell of a story-teller in his own right and The Fireman may be his best yet.
Have you ever started a book that you know is going to be hard on you? One that you know you’ll identify with but you know is going to make old hurts into fresh wounds again? That’s how I felt about Without My Mother. I also knew I very much wanted to read it because knowing I would identify with it seemed more important than how much it might hurt. I was also lucky enough to catch up with the author, Leigh Van Der Horst, who told me a bit about her process in writing this book.