What I Like About Me by Jenna Guillaume Maisie Martin is being forced to keep a journal over the summer by a tyrannical teacher. What she'd rather do is spend summer the same way she always does: hanging out on the usual family holiday, pining away over Sebastian, running away from her problems and definitely not entering a beauty pageant.
Okay. All caps time. WHERE THE HELL WAS THIS BOOK WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER? Well, obviously I couldn't obtain it through wibbly wobbly timey wimey means. But you know what I mean! Jenna Guillaume writes YA books that I can really relate to. Her characters feel like people I know in Real Life - and they all speak like people I know. But Guillaume's real strength is in how she tackles teen issues (eg. body image) without it feeling forced or heavy-handed. I really would have loved Maisie and learned a lot from her when I was younger. And here I was thinking that nothing could best You Were Made For Me...
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Songs That Sound Like Blood by Jared Thomas Roxy has music in her blood and her soul, but she won't make it very far in her small town. She moves to Adelaide to attend university and starts to figure out who she is and what her place in the world might be.
A lot of YA titles are about The Big Goal, with fantastic and dramatic journeys to get there. It's so nice to find a book that is instead grounded in reality, especially one where the character is allowed to grow at a rate that younger readers would be familiar with. Roxy is very relatable. And this isn't just a story - it's a roadmap, with advice for readers who may not hear it elsewhere. Bottlebrush Creek by Maya Linnell Angie McIntyre and Rob Jones have finally found the perfect fixer-upper for their small family, but soon after buying it the cons seem to outweigh the pros. Spiralling costs, an overbearing mother-in-law next door, a twin brother who Rob would rather never see again, and miscommunications may just be the end of what Angie and Rob have been trying to build together.
Well, this must be the first time anyone's ever managed to make me feel sympathy for an overbearing MIL! But that's what I like about Linnell's characters - they're complex and realistic and even the worst of them aren't reduced to caricatures. Another excellent piece of rural fiction. It's so easy to fall into the rhythm of the country towns that Linnell creates for us and it's always so hard to leave them after the last page is turned. (PS: I'm still tickled pink by my review of Wildflower Ridge being quoted in the front of Bottlebrush Creek! I could say that I bought a paperback over an ebook for another reason, but I'd be lying...) We Are Family by Nicola Gill  I received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Laura and Jess are sisters. They are also polar opposites who have always been divided by their differences and the favour of their mother. Now orphans, Laura and Jess have an opportunity to repair things - or to let their insecurities continue to drive them apart. Gill has created very sympathetic characters who feel very real, like the type of women you'd run into on your way to the shops. This books shows how tangled and complex female relationships can be, no matter if they're with siblings, parents, friends or the mother of a schoolyard bully. Grief is also dealt with every well here and I'd easily have given this five stars without the last couple of chapters. The ending comes across as rushed and the fallout of a large revelation occurs "off-screen". We don't get to see it ourselves (or the various other "events" that we're told about rather rapidly), which is disappointing. You Were Made For Me by Jenna Guillaume I received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Katie and Libby accidentally create a hot guy (with science! and clay and a kiss) and his purpose in life is to dote on Katie and be the perfect boyfriend. While this should solve Katie's never-been-kissed problem, it threatens to tear apart her life and her friendships. Well, I loved this. It's like Weird Science for girls in the 21st century! And thankfully this is a much more progressive tale than a 1980s iteration - diversity, ace representation, dealing with the fact that both parties must have agency in a relationship, etc. Libby and Kate acting as dual storytellers was inspired and it made the story feel hilariously self-aware. It was also nice to read a YA novel peppered with Australianisms. I'm a huge YA fan but most of them are foreign titles. This is definitely the kind of novel I wish I could have read when I was a teenager. |
AboutAlyce Caswell, when she isn't buried in a book or drinking her way through a giant pot of tea, is a keen writer of science fiction and romance. She has published two novels and four novellas in her space opera family saga, The Galactic Pantheon Series. 
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