YA from My Youth - Michael Fishwick

Today I'm posting one of two posts that will be my last for awhile. I'm pleased to welcome Michael Fishwick, author of The White Hare onto the blog, to talk about the Young Adult books he read during his teenage years. 

I very vividly remember being given my first book.  We were on holiday in a rather dark hotel on the Isle of Man, and I went into my parents’ room to find, on their dark blue counterpane, the bright red Armada cover of Richmal Crompton’s William the Cannibal;  I adored the William books, and so did my children, listening to Martin Jarvis’s glorious rendition on the car audio. 

I had always been an avid reader; one of my parent’s letters describes me, aged three. marching up to people, book in hand, and plonking it down on their knee and demanding that they read to me.  I was very ill as a child, and reading was a way of escape; I spent a lot of time in bed.  So, later, my habit became to go to bed with a book and a bowl of crisps and a glass of milk and read and read.  Worzel Gummidge was a favourite, as the loveable scarecrow careened about the countryside turning up in the most unexpected places. 

 The Moomins, too; I was spellbound by Comet in Moominland, and was completely in love with Snufkin, that wandering loner, whom I just wanted to be (though I couldn’t play the mouth organ). 

 Often my recollections of discovering authors are very vivid, emotional, almost physical.  When I discovered C.S.Lewis  it was odd.  I had been read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in class when I was about eight, and didn’t really take to it.  I didn’t like the idea of a Christian analogy, it didn’t seem very creative to me.  But when a few years later I read Prince Caspian I almost fell into a swoon; there is such richness in the books, at every level, and I’m still besotted with them (and their author, who was such a brilliant literary critic, among other things).  

Then there was Swallows and Amazons, which when I read them to my boys (I have three sons, all of whom I read to until they were about eleven) I still got swept away in the adventure.  

Another moment of great, almost physical, joy was Molesworth, whom I found in the school bookshop when I was about fourteen; once I worked out what was going on with the language I was completely hooked.  More mysterious was John Masefield’s The Midnight Folk, and the mesmerising world of young Kay Harker and the governess and Sister Pouncer (one and the same of course) and Nibbins the cat and the lost treasure; that book is complete genius, as Masefield weave real life and fantasy and dream into an intoxicating, ever surprising world.

  That’s the kind of book I loved  best, and I found it, too, in Alan Garner (especially what is surely one of the  great YA books of all time, The Owl Service), but also in a book very few people read (and the one my children just didn’t go for, but which I loved), Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill. 

  Puck appears to the children as they rehearse A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Three Cows Field.  When they express surprise, he says that if they want to rehearse Midsummer Night’s Dream three times over, ON Midsummer Night’s Eve, IN a fairy ring, under one of his oldest hills in Old England, what did they expect?  ‘My friends used to set my dish o’cream for me when Stonehenge was new.’   He introduces them to the old Smith of the Gods, Weland;  then, later, they come down to the stream on a summer morning to see a great grey horse reflected in the smooth water, with its rider a Norman knight, one of those who occupied the manor at Pevensey, chatting amiably with Puck.  And later we meet the redoubtable Parnesius, a Centurion of the Seventh Cohort of the Thirtieth Legion - the Ulpia Victrix - with his tales of life on the Wall (Hadrian’s, of course), before the Winged Hats came. At the end Puck says: ‘Weland gave the Sword, the Sword gave the Treasure, and the Treasure gave the Law. It's as natural as an oak growing.’  I think I always loved my fantasy to be accessible; I don’t suppose I’m the only person desperate at a young age to find a new door into Narnia.

Summary

A lost boy. A dead girl, and one who is left behind.

Robbie doesn't want anything more to do with death, but life in a village full of whispers and secrets can't make things the way they were.

When the white hare appears, magical and fleet in the silvery moonlight, she leads them all into a legend, a chase, a hunt. But who is the hunter and who the hunted?

In The White Hare, Michael Fishwick deftly mingles a coming-of-age story with mystery, myth and summer hauntings.

In case you have missed any of the stops on the blog tour, here are all the other blogs. 

#YAShot Blog Tour 2016 - YA from my Youth - Lisa Williamson

In the run up to YA Shot in October, I am pleased to welcome author, Lisa Williamson onto the blog. 
Lisa wrote The Art of Being Normal which went on to be one of the biggest selling books of 2015. The Art Of Being Normal was also nominated and shortlisted for numerous awards, including the YA Prize and the Carnegie, before it went onto win the Waterstones Children's Book Prize in the Older Fiction category.

I'm putting this out there now, this is a very US-heavy list. As a teenager in the nineties with no access to the Internet, my reading choices were largely dictated by what I found in my local library or on the shelves of WHSmith, and for whatever reason these were mostly American titles. At the time this suited me just fine - I was obsessed with the USA. I had a map of the country on my wall, knew all the state capitals by heart and spent my spare time binge-watching video-taped episodes of Saved by the Bell and Out of This World. I was also capable of a pretty nifty American accent. Looking back though, there was often a disconnect between me and the characters in the books I was reading. I didn't necessarily know it at the time, but I would have killed to have more opportunities to read about a teenage experience a bit more like the one I was actually living. 

I don't think there were many bookish teenagers in the eighties or nineties who managed to resist the lure of Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, twin stars of the Sweet Valley High series. Growing up in suburban Nottingham, I had zero in common with their glamorous Californian lives filled with proms, handsome All-American boyfriends and trips to the mall (spiced up with the occasional kidnap attempt), but that didn't stop me from devouring every title I could get my hands on. I mostly relied on the library to indulge my passion but every so often splashed out on a copy to keep, building up a small but treasured collection of titles. I still have them all in a box at my parent's house, each of them slightly yellowed, the spines well and truly broken from dozens of re-reads over the years. They've dated terribly of course (just check out the eighties hair-dos on the covers) and the twins's behaviour is highly questionable throughout, but nostalgia ensures I will always have a place in my heart for the residents of Sweet Valley, California. 

Another series I adored was The Babysitter's Club. Again, my collection had loads of gaps, forcing me to re-read the titles I was lucky enough to own, over and over again, to the point I could probably recite entire passages by heart if the situation demanded it. The series charted the adventures of a group of babysitters living in the idyllic town of Stoneybrook, Connecticut. As a babysitter myself, I was massively jealous of their club and its vast array of clients. My favourite title were always the holiday specials when the babysitters would leave Stoneybrook and, for example, blag a cruise round the Bahamas or go to Disney World, always squeezing in a spot of babysitting along the way. I recently attended a YA Salon event where Ann. M. Martin, creator of the series, spoke about its inception about five feet away from me. It nearly blew my tiny mind. 

Confession. I liked this book so much I stole it from the school library. It's called After the Rain by Norma Fox Mazer and I must have read the kissing scene in it at least one hundred times. It's not even a very hot kissing scene, more sweet and a bit clumsy, but as such it seemed a lot more attainable than the sort of passionate clinches Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield got themselves into. Also, the love interest isn't a total hunk. He's quirky and a bit nerdy and Rachel (the protagonist) isn't even sure if she fancies him that much but somehow this sense of realism just really did it for me. I think the fact that Rachel is a bit of a worrier, just like I was as a teenager, also appealed. It's a quiet book where nothing much happens, in fact I can't even remember how it ends. If I'm totally honest, twenty years on, all I can really remember is the kissing bit.

Reading my first Judy Blume book was a very special experience. I remember getting to the end and thinking, 'finally, someone who gets it!' and making it my mission to read as many of her books as humanly possible. Judy writes kids and teenagers in such an honest, truthful way that, in my opinion anyway, only a few other authors have really come close to nailing. If I had to pick my absolute favourite of her titles, I'd have to go with Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself. There's so much I love about this book - Sally's voice, the period detail (it's set in post-war Miami), the characters, the humour. I got my battered copy signed by Judy herself last year and breathlessly told her it was one of my favourite books in the world. I bet she hears that all the time but it totally made my week to be able to tell her in person. 

Does what I read as a teenager tie in with the sort of YA I write as a thirty-something adult? Most definitely. Although I loved the escapism of Sweet Valley, the reads that really got under my skin were the ones I could imagine slotting myself into in some way or another. There's something hugely powerful about being able to see yourself in a book, which is why I suspect I'll always be attracted to writing about the sorts of characters who typically don't get to be the star of the story. 

Me and Lucy Ivison cosplaying as Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield at last year's YALC

Thank you Lisa, for sharing all the books that got you through your teenage years. I love the cosplay photo! 

Summary

Two boys. Two secrets.

David Piper has always been an outsider. His parents think he’s gay. The school bully thinks he’s a freak. Only his two best friends know the real truth - David wants to be a girl. 

On the first day at his new school Leo Denton has one goal - to be invisible. Attracting the attention of the most beautiful girl in year eleven is definitely not part of that plan. 

When Leo stands up for David in a fight, an unlikely friendship forms. But things are about to get messy. Because at Eden Park School secrets have a funny habit of not staying secret for long…

To find out more about Lisa Williamson:

Website / Twitter / Instagram

Congratulations to all the #YAShot team for creating such a mega blog tour with so many amazing authors. 
Make sure you check out all the other stops on the #YAShot blog tour here.
And you can buy your #YAShot tickets here. 

YA from my Youth by Claire Hennessy

To celebrate the publication of Nothing Tastes As Good which was published by Hot Key Books last week, I'm pleased to welcome author, Claire Hennessy onto the blog to talk about the YA books she grew up with.

My imaginary version of adolescence was incredibly American. Even though there were a handful of Irish and British and Australian YA writers, it was the Americans that called to me. I wanted to be in a high school clique. I wanted to be jealous of the cheerleaders. I wanted to go on dates. I maybe even wanted to be in the chess club (never mind that I couldn’t play chess!).

In my pre-teens I’d discovered the magical world of the Sweet Valley universe, devouring titles from the Twins, High and University series. If you’ve never read a Sweet Valley book, here’s what you need to know: Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield are identical blonde twins with eyes the colour of the Pacific. Jessica’s a sociopath. Elizabeth isn’t much better but disguises it by acting ever-so-caring. They are stalked, kidnapped and proposed to (often by princes or jewel thieves) on a fairly regular basis. Oh, and they’re always falling in love with each other’s boyfriends, and the best way to wake anyone from a coma is to get Jessica to talk to them and tell them they’re allowed on the cheerleading squad. 

Thinking myself too cool for these books as I entered my teens (despite their fabulous ridiculousness), I hunted down creator Francine Pascal’s other projects. One was a set of trilogies about the beautiful, rich Caitlin, featuring much melodrama and implausibility. I adored them. The other was a trilogy she’d actually (gasp!) written herself, rather than relying on ghost writers. The Victoria Martin trilogy begins with ‘My Mother Was Never A Kid’ (also published as ‘Hangin’ Out With Cici’) and follows a troublemaker fall back in time and meet her teen mother, and learn about mistakes and taking responsibility. The following books explore summer jobs - one as a mother’s helper who’s being seriously taken advantage of, the other as a summer camp counsellor who’s fallen for her best friend’s boyfriend - and are both funny and poignant. I may have read them a couple of hundred times. 

Other American writers I turned to had written for kids as well, so it was an easy step up. Beverly Cleary’s ‘Fifteen’ is a very honest and also innocent look at a girl’s first boyfriend and all the hopes that go with that, while Judy Blume’s ‘Here’s To You, Rachel Robinson’ is an incredible look at a thirteen-year-old overachiever struggling with a difficult family situation. I wanted to have a boyfriend who would drive me around! Or one with a chartreuse jacket with a dragon on it. (You had to be there.) I also loved Paula Danziger’s writing - so funny and so good on recognising that kids and teens go through some really difficult stuff, but also inspiring them to stand up for themselves. ‘This Place Has No Atmosphere’ is about a popular girl who moves to a tiny colony on the moon in 2057 and learns a lot about herself - I’ve reread it over and over. I’d love to write something like it one day (there were some bad scribbled imitations in my youth which I think have fortunately vanished into the ether).

And weirdly, now that I think about it, because I am kind of a wimp, I was obsessed with Christopher Pike. ‘The Last Vampire’ series was a firm favourite, but I also loved his standalones - you always knew that a ‘Slumber Party’ would lead to no good, or that a ‘Weekend’ away was doomed (expect angry teenage girls, dark secrets, and murder). I adored the books of his that explored stories - ‘Last Act’, in which a play a group of teenagers are putting on has a sinister echo to their real lives, or ‘Master of Murder’, where a teen horror writer (using a pseudonym so that his classmates have no idea he’s the author) uncovers the secrets of a local murder through his new book. ‘The Midnight Club’, about a group of terminal patients telling stories and fables that reveal their secrets, is absolutely haunting, while ‘The Starlight Crystal’ is basically a look at the entire history of the Earth and the universe and blew my mind a little bit. 

I’m not sure how much any of these books directly fed into my writing but the one thing they did absolutely instil in me was a sense that teen books were awesome. That they could handle tricky issues while still being funny, that they could be dark because teens could handle it. That they were a space where a lot of cool stories and intriguing characters were hanging out. They still are. 

Published by Hot Key Books on July 14th 2016

Summary

What happens when you give in to the voices in your head?

Annabel is dead. And she's not happy about it. Despite having strived to be 'lighter than air' back when she was alive, the consequences of that yearning haven't quite sunk in yet. 

Julia Jacobs is fat. Which Annabel immediately notices when she's assigned as Julia's ghostly helper (don't even think about calling her a guardian angel). And as her helper, Julia's problem seems pretty obvious to Annabel. Fat = problem = unhappy. Sorted. 

The only trouble is that whatever is causing Julia to overeat is hidden deep within her. Annabel will have to get to know Julia to uncover this secret and 'fix' her. Annabel can become the voice of reason, Julia's source of strength. 

Except. . . all this time spent in someone's head has got Annabel thinking. Not just about food, but about her family too. And that maybe happiness can mean more than eradicating all the flesh from your bones.

To find out more about Claire Hennessy

Twitter / Website 

YA from my Youth by Catherine Lowell

I am pleased to welcome author, Catherine Lowell onto the blog. Catherine is author of The Madwoman Upstairs. Today, she is sharing the books that she loved from her youth. 

You can learn a lot about yourself by revisiting the books you read growing up. You start seeing how early on your passions and tastes developed, and which books influenced the way you think today. 

If I look at the books that I re-read over and over as a teenager, they fall into a few key clusters: first, books about bored ladies of leisure who decide to run away and do interesting things (like become knights and live with dragons) and second, books about WWII (Letters from Rifka, The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank). 

The third cluster consists of books that I now realize weren’t technically young adult novels—but they are books I first read as a teenager and remembered forever. These, then, are both my YA recommendations for adults, and the adult books that I’d recommend to teenagers. 

The Sea Wolf 

I remember thinking that this book had everything: adventure at sea, epic fog, good versus evil, psychological drama, romance, and one of the best characters in any book I’d read at the time—Wolf Larson.

Animal Farm

This is one of the most useful books I ever read, one that taught history, psychology, and politics better than any textbook. It’s nice to read it in a non-academic setting, since you can really get invested in the story and feel the full gut-punch of the ending.  

The Odyssey

You can read this book on multiple levels: as a good story, a useful fable, a piece of great literature, or a true historical marvel. Either way, it really gives you a sense for how one story shaped an entire civilization. 

Arsenic and Old Lace

I loved this play! It’s a bizarre, funny exploration of what happens when you realize your family is insane. There’s also an extra bonus here: after you read the play, you can watch Cary Grant play Mortimer in the film adaptation. 

Jane Eyre

What I love about Jane Eyre is its appeal to any age group. It doubles as a terrific chick flick and one of the most brilliant novels of its time. As an adult, it’s fun to pick up on all the subtle and disturbing things you never really noticed as a kid—like Bertha. 

*****

Catherine Lowell is the author of The Madwoman Upstairs, a literary mystery about the Brontës. Published by Quercus this month. 

Summary

Samantha Whipple - a young American woman - is the last remaining descendant of the famous Brontë family, of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre fame. After losing her father, a brilliant author in his own right, Samantha travels to Oxford in search of a mysterious family inheritance, described to her only as 'The Warnings of Experience'.

While at Oxford, Samantha studies under Dr J. Timothy Orville III, a disarmingly handsome tutor who seems nothing but annoyed by her family heritage. With Orville as her tempestuous sidekick, Samantha sets out on a mission to piece together her family's history - which, it turns out, could also be literature's greatest buried secret.

YA From My Youth with Candy Harper

To celebrate the publication of the hilarious book, Have A Little Faith, I am pleased to welcome the author, Candy Harper, onto the blog to discuss the YA books that shaped her youth.

Looking at my teen book collection, a lot of what I enjoyed seems to fall into three main categories: ballet stories, romance and dystopian. Clearly, as a teen I was hoping to find a boyfriend to perform in Swan Lake with me before we died horribly in a nuclear winter.

BALLET

What’s interesting about the ballet stories are the differences between British and American series. The English Sadler’s Wells series is all about the grind of being a dancer, the sacrifices that must be made, the horror of injury, and the importance of discipline and dedication. Whereas, the American Satin Slippers series is all about who looks hottest in a leotard. Veronica in Sadler’s Wells insists that she is wedded to her art, but the good-looking blondes in Satin Slippers still have plenty of energy for what my Auntie Joyce calls ‘shenanigans’, even after a hard days pirouetting.

ROMANCE

I liked my romance American. To teen-me there was nothing more glamorous than a girl clipping back her bangs with a barrette and then heading off down the sidewalk to a date at the mall. I borrowed Ten Boy Summer from my big sister. First published in 1984, it was already a bit dated when I was reading it in the mid-90s. For a hot date, Jenny wears a high-necked floral dress ending mid-calf. I’m going to suggest that my daughter wears something similar when she starts dating. My romance reading led me to believe that any swoony business would happen on a beach with a tanned boy called Chip or Brad, so it was a bit of a shock when I had my first kiss with Pasty Dave round the back of Woolworths.

DYSTOPIAN

Why do teens love dystopias so much? I think teenagers are really good at asking What If? And they’re not afraid to consider the worst possibilities. Adults are less into speculating; they’re always busy and focused on getting things done. When teen-me asked my dad if he thought the world might end tomorrow, he said, ‘I hope not, I’ve booked the car in for a service.’ One of my favourite dystopian books was Brother in the Land, which is about the aftermath of a nuclear bombing and also features a romance (if only Robert Swindells had included a ballet exam, I’d have been in heaven). I particularly loved the fact that it has an unhappy ending. Or at least it did until 2000 when Robert Swindells wrote a new final chapter. Which is a shame because I think it’s really important for young adults to read some stories with unhappy endings. That’s why when I was a teacher I used to occasionally snap shut whatever book we were reading and say, ‘And then they all DIED.’

I’m sure that the books I read as a teen helped to mould be as an author. At the very least they’ve made me grateful that my publisher has never suggested a cover featuring a cartoon pair of ballet shoes. I haven’t yet finished my love-against-the-odds story set in an American ballet school of death, but I promise you I’m working on it.

Have A Little Faith is published by Simon and Schuster and available to buy now. To read my review, please click here.

To find out more about Candy Harper:

Twitter

YA From My Youth by Alexia Casale

As part of The Bone Dragon blog tour, I’m pleased to welcome debut author Alexia Casale.

I am so excited to be part of this brilliant project: so excited I started writing immediately and only then realised how difficult it was going to be. There are just too many books that I want to talk about… and many aren’t YA to anyone except me!

To me, Great Expectations is a YA book, partly because in my head I always compact the timeline as if the adult sections happens when he’s about 17-18 and partly because it was a story I kept coming back to as a teenager. Anne Tyler’s Celestial Navigation was even more important to me as a teenager. It haunted me, opening up my reading and writing horizons: this was the book that made me realise I wanted to write about psychological issues and that, to do so, I needed to study Social Sciences rather than English or Classics at Uni. LP Hartley’s The Go-Between confirmed these thoughts, so those two books changed the course of my life. 

Meanwhile, there were a raft of children’s and YA books that meant a lot to me for a short, intense period of time: The Secret Garden, Ronia the Robber’s Daughter, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, Pullman’s The Ruby in the Smoke, SE Hinton’s The Outsiders, Ursula Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea, the Harry Potter series… There are so many recent books I wish I’d known about as a teenager: somehow YA seemed to pass me by and, like many people, I went straight from children’s classics to adult novels. In any case, I think a lot of adult books could easily be counted as YA and vice versa: many are written for people of a certain minimum level of maturity, rather than for a specific age group. That was certainly the case with The Bone Dragon. 

After a certain point, it all starts to run together, which is what I found so difficult about this post and why I had to mention The Go-Between and Celestial Navigation. Those are the key books of my YA years… Picking books from that period that are actually YA was really hard. In the end I chose books that have stayed with me. I’m a very slow reader so I rarely re-read anything: I would love to but there are so many books I’d never read at all if I did! Anyway, these are a handful of the ones I dip in and out of for comfort or nostalgia. They’re not necessarily my favourites, but they were each important in their own way.

Diana Wynne Jones: especially Howl’s Moving Castle & Deep Secret

Howl’s Moving Castle is about a fire demon, a cursed witch-in-denial, and a wizard who is just impossible. Deep Secret is largely set at a sci-fi/fantasy convention and is peopled by characters who are thoroughly difficult. It’s so hard to pick only two of DWJ’s books: almost all are wonderful and she remains one of my favourite writers. She’s funny, imaginative, and she can ‘draw’ a believable, complex character with amazingly few words. It’s so easy to love the people in her books: I am still amazed at how effortlessly she engages me. As a writer, I would love to learn this trick. Part of it is that she plays very skilfully with stereotypes and archetypes… something I’m hoping to write an article on later this year.

Georgette Heyer: The Reluctant Widow

Historical mystery romance, often unfairly dismissed merely as ‘period romance’ when the historical detail is actually very well done. Out of all of Heyer’s books, this has my favourite cast of characters. The ‘villain’ is particularly fine. But there’s also murder, a treasure hunt, espionage, a secret passage, sibling rivalry and a crumbling estate. I first read this during a particularly miserable bit of my teens and it was just what I needed. Sometimes that is as important as the content of a book. 

Ellis Peters: Death Mask

When his father is killed in an accident at an archeological site, Crispin is set to live with the mother he hardly remembers. Some of this light murder mystery is very dated, but I never had a problem looking past that to the fact that the teenage protagonist was very like me in many ways: occupied with very different concerns from his peers. An isolated, independent, only child, Crispin spends much of his time reading and disappearing off on his own affairs. But most importantly, with Crispin what’s on the outside doesn’t match what’s was on the inside at all… some of which is purposeful and some of which isn’t. I a lot of my teens trying to figure out why no one seemed to see who I was and why people were always misunderstanding me. It took me ages to work out that often my behaviour didn’t match up to emotions in quite the same way as most other people’s. Once I twigged, I started learning how to ‘translate’ myself so people could get to know me. In the meantime, it was huge comfort to see that I wasn’t the only person in the world to have that problem. Plus I loved that Crispin could read Greek and Latin classics in the original: I figured I would know how to talk to a boy like that, whereas I still don’t know how to talk to boys who like football and fast cars.

Violet Needham: The Black Riders series & The Woods of Windri

I loved the independence of Needham’s characters: children and teenagers managing their own lives and taking responsibility for their choices on the adult stage. Although the books have dated in many ways, her wonderful stories haven’t, particularly as regards the complexities of loyalty and conviction. 

Tolkein: The Lord of the Rings & The Silmarillion

I went through a huge classic epics phase in the middle of my teens, and coming to The Silmarillion felt like looking at a blueprint for using character and narrative archetypes myself. Whatever you think of The Lord of The Rings as a complete work, the world-building is fantastic. As a writer, it made me think about what I did want to build in my imagination and what I wanted to talk to readers about. For a while, I thought I might want to do my own Tolkien thing, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised I wasn’t interested in putting such a vast creation down on paper: I wanted to leave more space for readers to world-build. That was such an important realisation about my own goals as a writer. The other thing I love about Tolkien’s work is the scope of the narrative. Learning to recognise and admire it while recognising that my work was going to be very different helped shape my understanding of how to go about fulfilling my writing ambitions. My favourite aspect is what Tolkien has to stay about civilisations changing and, sometimes, fading: for me, these bits are especially powerful considering his experiences as a young man during WWI. Plus the story of the Black Riders and the Gollum and the Ring are just terrifying: so brilliantly done. It may well be these stories that first showed me how important the history behind the story you want to tell is.

Geoffrey Trease: Cue for Treason

The start of my love of historical fiction, cemented by Georgette Heyer’s books and Josephine Tey’s wonderful Daughter of Time. How can you not love a book about a Shakespearean theatre company where what happens on stage mirrors the lives of the characters? Full of drama, plots, secrets and romance, it’s a great story that brings many aspects of the period brilliantly to life. And it has a fantastic heroine who is more than equal to the boys (as it should be).

Thank you Alexia for adding even more books to my TBR list!

The Bone Dragon is published this month by Faber and Faber.

To find out more about Alexia Casale:

Website / Twitter / Facebook