There are so many options for this freebie! I considered writing about the best film adaptations, or the worst, but ended up deciding to do something different. Here are my top 10 films or TV shows I’ve seen, but haven’t read the book they’re based on.
Top 10 Tuesday was originally created by The Broke and the Bookish, but has now moved to That Artsy Reader Girl. If you’re interested in taking part click here.
Release date: 25th April 2019
Director: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner
Runtime: 182 minutes
Genre: Science Fiction, Action, Adventure
Watched in: 2D
Rating: 4/5 stars
Avengers: Endgame is what the previous 21 films have been leading up to and makes an epic conclusion to ‘Phase 3’ of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The fact they’ve managed to sustain such a long series of films is in itself a great achievement. It was so ambitious, but they did it. They created a massive number of much-loved characters and amassed a massive fan base.
Infinity War was brilliant, and I was hoping the sequel would live up to expectations. Without spoiling the film, I can say it went beyond what I expected. I couldn’t fathom how they’d solve the dilemma of the snap. Endgame took me on a journey of laughs and tears. There were plenty of twists that kept me hooked. The final battle was very well choreographed and full of suspense.
It is a very long film, clocking in at 3 hours, but it didn’t drag too much. With so many characters, and many of them not returning due to the end of actors’ contracts, there was a lot to fit in. The film focuses on a few of the characters, with many of the others getting smaller parts, almost cameos for some of them to be honest. That just goes to show the scale of what Marvel has achieved that they couldn’t spotlight all the amazing characters in one film.
Read More » I used to have a feature on my blog called Quote Mondays that I uploaded quite regularly, but tailed off a year or so ago. So I’ve decided to throwback and look through my old posts to find 10 inspiring book quotes.
Top 10 Tuesday was originally created by The Broke and the Bookish, but has now moved to That Artsy Reader Girl. If you’re interested in taking part click here.
Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor
Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy, Paranormal, Romance
Publishing Info: Kindle edition September 2011 by Hodder (first published 2011)
Pages: 448
Star Rating: 5/5
Back Cover Summary:
Errand requiring immediate attention. Come.
The note was on vellum, pierced by the talons of the almost-crow that delivered it. Karou read the message. ‘He never says please’, she sighed, but she gathered up her things. When Brimstone called, she always came.
In general, Karou has managed to keep her two lives in balance. On the one hand, she’s a seventeen-year-old art student in Prague; on the other, errand-girl to a monstrous creature who is the closest thing she has to family. Raised half in our world, half in ‘Elsewhere’, she has never understood Brimstone’s dark work – buying teeth from hunters and murderers – nor how she came into his keeping. She is a secret even to herself, plagued by the sensation that she isn’t whole.
Now the doors to Elsewhere are closing, and Karou must choose between the safety of her human life and the dangers of a war-ravaged world that may hold the answers she has always sought.
The first in a trilogy, Daughter of Smoke and Bone is a phenomenal book. The world is so imaginative and captivating, it didn’t take me long to fall in love with it. I very rarely give 5 star ratings, because I usually have something to criticise, even something small, or it just doesn’t blow me away enough to warrant 5 stars. I had no hesitation giving that accolade to Daughter of Smoke and Bone.
I didn’t know what to expect from this book from the rather mysterious summary. It certainly piqued my curiosity. I don’t want to say too much about the plot, because it’s not knowing what’s really going on that kept me hooked, so I don’t want to spoil that for anyone who hasn’t read it yet. Karou lives in the human world, but the only family she has known seem to occupy an ‘Elsewhere’ place that they won’t explain to her, leaving her in the dark as to why Brimstone, her guardian, sends her on missions to buy teeth. Karou is so curious about what he uses these teeth for, and I was compelled to keep reading to find out why too. What’s great is that it wasn’t predictable.
The next collection to be released by the Just-Us League is Fractured Ever After, to be released on 27th April 2019. The collection of fairy tale retellings will be the group’s seventh anthology. Author LB Garrison joins me to discuss his contribution to the anthology – ‘Beauty’.
Have you ever watched the stars on a warm summer night and wondered if someone was looking back? Thoughts of dinosaurs and aliens dominated LB Garrison’s childhood. Adult concerns came later, but never could quite crowd out the wonder.
A microbiologist by profession, and dreamer by choice, LB has always been an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy, and recently a writer of speculative fiction.
This week’s Top 10 Tuesday is a pretty fun topic! There’s a lot of different factors that go into me picking up a book. Sometimes it’s an impulse buy because of a pretty cover and awesome back cover description, other times its because I’ve read lots of really good reviews of it.
Top 10 Tuesday was originally created by The Broke and the Bookish, but has now moved to That Artsy Reader Girl. If you’re interested in taking part click here.
This week we have an interesting topic, as I often find my opinions on a book can change dramatically over the course of the story. I can go from loving it to hating it, or from hating it to loving it. Sometimes books start out strong, but sometimes you nearly give up on them but then they end up surprising you in the end. T5W is a group hosted on Goodreads, if you’d like to participate check it out here.
Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon
Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary, Romance
Publishing Info: September 2015 by Corgi (first published 2015)
Pages: 308
Star Rating: 3/5
Back Cover Summary:
My disease is as rare as it is famous. Basically, I’m allergic to the world. I don’t leave my house, have not left my house in seventeen years. The only people I ever see are my mom and my nurse, Carla.
But then one day, a moving truck arrives next door. I look out my window, and I see him. He’s tall, lean and wearing all black—black T-shirt, black jeans, black sneakers, and a black knit cap that covers his hair completely. He catches me looking and stares at me. I stare right back. His name is Olly.
Maybe we can’t predict the future, but we can predict some things. For example, I am certainly going to fall in love with Olly. It’s almost certainly going to be a disaster.
I have very conflicted feelings about this book. On the one hand, it was really interesting to see the world from a different perspective in YA, but on the other I’m not sure about how Yoon handled the subject matter. The novel is told from the perspective of Maddy, who has SCID and has not been able to leave her house since she was a tiny baby. The house is adapted with air filters and she has a nurse stay with her all day.
In the first section of the book I really felt connected to Maddy’s character and got a real sense of her isolation from the rest of the world. Despite this isolation, she wasn’t unhappy. She gets on well with her nurse, Carla, and has a great relationship with her mother. I liked seeing her interactions with these two characters in the first half.
The Rose Society by Marie Lu
Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy
Publishing Info: 2015 by Penguin (first published 2015)
Pages: 397
Star Rating: 4/5
Back Cover Summary:
Once upon a time, a girl had a father, a prince, a society of friends.
Then they betrayed her, and she destroyed them all …
Adelina Amouteru’s heart is set on revenge. Now known and feared as the White Wolf, she flees Kenettra to find other Young Elites in the hopes of building her own army.
Her goal: to strike down the Inquisition Axis, the white-cloaked soldiers who nearly killed her.
But Adelina is no heroine. The leader of the Inquisition, wants her dead, and her former friends at the Dagger Society want to stop her thirst for vengeance. Adelina struggles to cling to the good within her. But how can someone be good, when her very existence depends on darkness?
The Rose Society is the second book in Marie Lu’s Young Elites trilogy. Having loved the first book, I was glad to find The Rose Society was just as dark and addictive. As the series doesn’t follow your typical protagonist, it makes the story so much fresher. It makes such a change from the hero-centric plotlines I am used to reading. Adelina is such a complex character, inhabiting neither the space of hero or villain. What makes the book so interesting is that Lu makes me sympathise with her. I understand exactly why she is doing what she’s doing, and it makes me think, is she really bad? Are the others really good? It makes it so exciting not really knowing if any of the sides are truly ‘good’ or ‘evil’.
Once again Adelina is really and truly the focus of the book. Told from her point of view, her internal conflict is such a big driving force for the story. Lu does such a good job of portraying what’s going on in Adelina’s mind. I truly understand her character and feel completely wrapped up in her wild emotions, in a deep way I don’t often find in young adult books.
You can read part 1 of my writing journey here, or dive straight in with part 2.
In my last post, I told you about my early writings and how my writing developed over my teenage years. Finishing the novella was a significant moment and gave me so much more confidence. In 2013 I started work on a new book for the Extended Project Qualification. The project was alongside my second year of A-levels, so it was a very busy time. Most other people wrote essays, I could have written a short story. For some reason I decided to write a whole novel for a qualification I’d get an actual mark for, when I’d not yet finished a whole novel. Perhaps it was over-ambitious, but I had the belief that I could do it.
This was the first novel I planned out chapter by chapter, in the hopes it would keep me on track. And it worked. I finished it in three months. At the age of 17 I finished my first novel. Inspired by studying psychology, the book was about a girl who develops schizophrenia and her journey. It was more serious than anything I’d written before, although it was still in the young adult genre. I wrote it almost in a trance. The words just poured out of me. I’d never had a feeling quite like it before. It all came together, and somehow it just felt right. That book will always have a special place in my heart, and I would like to see it published some day. I haven’t touched it since then, because I knew I would need to develop my writing skills more and come back to it to be able to make it the best it could be.
The Last Book On The Left 