Scarlet Reads

Last Weeks Book Buys & Borrows

It was a poor week last week, just 4 books bought and only 4 books from the library! This week is shaping up to be much better already :D

The bottom two are obviously for my "Stuff Not Fluff" challenge!

Library books were -

The Ghost's Child - Sonya Hartnett

Fall On Your Knees - Ann-Marie MacDonald

The Other Hand - Chris Cleave

The Owl Killers - Karen Maitland

Eyes Like Stars - Lisa Mantchev

Eyes Like Stars - Lisa Mantchev 5/5

Blurb from FF -

All her world's a stage.

Bertie Shakespeare Smith is not an actress, yet she lives in a theatre. She's not an orphan, but she has no parents. She knows every part, but she has no lines of her own. That is, until now.

Enter Stage Right

NATE. Dashing pirate. Will do anything to protect Bertie.

COBWEB, MOTH, MUSTARD SEED, and PEASEBLOSSOM. Four tiny and incredibly annoying fairies. BERTIE'S sidekicks.

Ariel. Seductive air spirit and Bertie's weakness. The symbol of impending doom.

Bertie. Our heroine.

Welcome to the Theatre Illuminata, where the actors of every play ever written can be found behind the curtain. They were born to play their parts, and are bound to the Theatre by The Book - an ancient and magical tome of scripts. Bertie is not one of them, but they are her family - and she is about to lose them all and the only home she has ever known.

Not much to say except I love this! It's an original idea with some quirky plotlines - I love the occasional passage written as a script rather than prose. The writing sometimes seems a bit simplistic but it is YA. Bertie is a fantastic character, even down to her blue hair and is the star of the show so to speak. We start out with Bertie narrowly averting yet another disaster and being asked to leave the theatre where she has spent her entire life. In order for her to stay she needs to come up with something that proves she is vital to the existence of the theatre. Throw in two love interests - Nate the pirate and Ariel the tempremental element - mayhem & destruction with the fairies, my favourite characters throughout the book, some very bad ideas, Mrs Edith the wardrobe mistress and a very bad situation involving The Book (basically the essence of the theatre) and you have a great story. I've already pre-ordered the next book, Perchance To Dream, which comes out in May

New challenge

Having been rumbled in my currently fluffy reading habits some of my fellow readers over at BCF have taken it upon themselves to find me some more challenging reads. They've started off great, the first 3 books in my Stuff Not Fluff Challenge are -

Running With Scissors - Augusten Burroughs

Fingersmith - Sarah Waters

Reading Lolita In Tehran - Azar Nafisi

Look for more titles coming soon!