Hey guys, it's Kirsti. Welcome back to my channel and welcome to another weekly
wrap up. This one is for the 28th of May through the 3rd of June and this week I
read a total of 8 books and 3,149 pages. The first book that I finished this week
is Frankie by Shivaun Plozza. This is an Australian contemporary YA book that
follows the story of a girl named Frankie whose mother abandoned her at a
very young age. She lives with her aunt in Collingwood, which is a grotty inner city
suburb in Melbourne, and it's basically her learning that she has a brother
three years younger than her and then her brother disappearing and her looking
into his disappearance. Frankie is very very angry young woman -
she has a huge chip on her shoulder about the way that her life is and about
her family situation and about the world in general. I know this one has been a
huge favourite with a lot of Australian readers over the past year, but I found
it really really difficult to read. I did not particularly like Frankie as a
character. She's a very very grating character and the fact that she just
kind of goes along with various elements of the story - like, she meets this boy who
breaks into houses and steals cars and she just sort of goes along with
everything that he does because he's cute - like, that kind of stuff I found
incredibly frustrating. And, like, I totally understand why Frankie as a
character is the way that she is. I understand why she is the way that she's
with her aunt, with her brother, with her grandmother, with people at school, with
this boy that she meets. I understand all of that. But the fact that she condones
things time and time again I just found grated for me. Like, at the end of the
day, this book is not for me, this book is for teenagers. And the
teenagers at school who've read this book have related to it quite strongly so,
like, it's probably just a me thing, but I did not love this one and I gave it
3 stars. Book number two this week was a reread and that is Carpe
Jugulum by Terry Pratchett, which is book, like, 19 or something of the
Discworld series. This has always been one of my favourite Terry Pratchett
books. It's a part of the, like, Witches subseries of the Discworld series and
this one is basically Terry Pratchett does vampires. My copy is signed because of
course it is. Anyway it has always been one of my favourite Discworld books
because it features a lot of my favourite characters, I really really like the way
that Terry Pratchett handles vampires and the idea of
vampires trying to bring themselves into the modern era and, like, you know, expose
themselves to sunlight and garlic and religious iconography and just be like
"Oh well, you know, these are just things of the past, we can get over this, we can
modernise our society!" and then that backfiring on them spectacularly, so I
really really like that concept. Rereading this in 2017 - I hadn't read it
since 2012 - rereading it five years on, I struggled with this book a little bit.
Like, I still love it with all of my heart, I still love the characters, I
still love the story. But one of the characters in particular, Agnes, is very
heavily overweight and the number of times that her weight is mentioned in
negative ways really grated on me. That, in particular, just to me showed the book's
age. I think it was written in 1999, so it's now nearly 20 years old and a lot
of the time that stuff is said in humour, and if you just, like, speed through the
book, you probably wouldn't even notice it. But for me on this particular reread,
that stuck out like a sore thumb. So I did still love this book, I did still
give this book 5 stars because it has a special place in my heart forever and
ever. But just be aware that there is some kind of fat shaming shit going on
in this book. The third book that I finished this week is The Royal We by
Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan. This one is another reread. If anybody is not aware
of this book, it is written by the two brilliant women behind gofugyourself.com
and it is essentially Wills and Kate fanfiction. So it is the story of
this girl named Bex who goes off to Oxford to attend university on exchange and she
meets and falls in love with the future King of England, this prince named
Nicholas. She has a twin sister who's a little bit of a fame seeker and he has a
brother named Freddie who basically hogs the spotlight and is a bit of a playboy
prince. So I do love this book, but for me it falls just a little too close to
reality. There are just a few too many similarities between, like, the real world
and the story of Kate and Wills and the fictionalised version that happens in
this book. I just wanted there to be a little more difference between the two
things. So I do love this book, it is very funny a lot of the time. It's just really
enjoyable fluff, basically. So I just wish it wasn't
quite so close to reality. So I like this book a
lot, I gave it 4 stars. Book number four this week is The Creeping Shadow by
Jonathan Stroud, which is the fourth book in the Lockwood & Co series. For those of
you saw my weekly wrap up last week, you will remember that the third book in
this series, The Hollow Boy, is, like, hands-down my least favourite book of the
series, because it contains a lot of like girl-on-girl bitchiness for literally no
reason. So I was a little bit hesitant going into this fourth book, which has
just come out, because I was afraid that there was going to be a lot more of that
stuff and that, you know, all of the ghost hunting mayhem that I love so much would
be pushed to the back burner. However, this was a spectacular return to form.
I loved Lucy kind of going off on her own and working on her own away from
George and Lockwood for a while. That worked really really effectively when
they were then brought back into the story. It just worked so much better than
that third book. The team all works together really well, the overarching
story works really well, the skull that Lucy, you know, has conversations with
because she can hear ghosts and shit - the skull actually serves a purpose in this
book rather than just being there to, like, sow seeds of doubt in her mind.
Basically, this book was great and I did not expect to enjoy it as much as I did
based on, you know, book three in the series so this one's great. I do wish it
didn't have a cliffhanger ending because Jonathan Stroud just needs to stop with
the cliffhanger endings, they're getting really annoying, because there's a
cliffhanger ending at the end of the third book as well. Anyway, I really
really enjoyed this one and I gave it 4.25 stars. Next up this
week is Words in Deep Blue by Cath Crowley, which is another one that is nominated
for the CBCA book of the year for older readers, and I enjoyed this one so
much more than I enjoyed Frankie. So I would actually call this one new adult.
Like, it's on the borderline of young adult and new adult, and new adult isn't
really a thing in Australia so it gets classed as young adult. But I would say
that this one is more slightly on the new adult end of things. The main
characters have finished high school, they're trying to work out what to do
with the rest of their lives, they have slightly more adult problems to deal
with. Anyway, this one is the story of Rachel and Henry who grew up as best
friends. About three years prior to the beginning of the book, Rachel and her
family moved away. In the aftermath of her brother's death by drowning, they are
now moving back to the city and she has come into contact with
Henry again, and it's the story of them kind of rekindling their friendship, learning
to be friends and dealing with, you know, real-world problems and what to do after
year 12. So I really really liked the two voices. Henry did annoy me at times
because he's kind of, like, a bit of a typical teenage boy. But the thing that I
loved most about this book is how unapologetically bookish it is. This one
is set predominantly in the secondhand bookshop that Henry's family own and
operate, and the really unique thing about this secondhand bookshop is that
they have a collection of books at the back of the shop that are not to be sold,
ever. And basically people can write notes about what they loved about the
book, so they scribble in the margins, they draw a little pictures, they, you
know, leave letters to each other. It's just a really really cool concept and I
loved that idea of this kind of enormous library that is open to anybody and for
people to talk about the books that they love. Henry's family is obviously
incredibly bookish and they're constantly discussing the books that
they've read and loved, and I love that even though this is a young adult/
new adult book, a lot of the books that they're talking about are, like, adult
reads. So I thoroughly enjoyed this one. I kind of wish it hadn't had the whole dead
brother thing going on, because this is, like, the third? I think it's the third book
that I've read this year that deals with a teenage girl dealing with the
aftermath of her brother's death by drowning and, like, I don't want that to
become a young adult trope. I ended up giving it 4 stars. Book number six
this week was another reread, and that is Looking for Alibrandi by Melina
Marchetta. So this was first published in 1992 and I think it won the CBCA book
of the year for older readers in 1993. If you don't know anything about this book,
it is about Josephine Alibrandi in her final year of high school, navigating
life, love and family dramas. It is the year that she gets a boyfriend for the
first time, it is the year that she discovers a whole bunch of family
secrets about her mother and her grandmother, it is the year that she
meets her father. And it's just a wonderful story. For me, the pacing is at
times very slightly off. Like, this book is not very long and it covers an entire
year, so sometimes you'll skip several weeks ahead in the story and it seems
like no time at all has passed but, you know, a month has gone by or whatever. So
there were times from the pace felt a little bit off and as a result of
Josie's relationship with Jacob Coote does feel a little bit rushed at times. I
also had a couple of issues with Jacob Coote's character this time around. Like, I
do love Jacob Coote to death. He's one of the great book boyfriends in Australian
YA. However, given that this was written in the early 90s, it is slightly
misogynistic at times. He gets very "No, I don't want you to talk to other boys
because you're dating me. Like, you shouldn't want to talk to other boys" and
I'm like "Dude, can you fucking stop because no" So there are a few little
niggling things like that, but on the whole I really really loved this one and
I gave it 4 stars. The seventh book I finished this week is When Dimple
Met Rishi by Sondhya Menon. There's been a lot of hype about this book this year,
and it was on my most anticipated books of 2017 list, so I was super excited when
this book finally got delivered to my Kindle this week and I dived into it
pretty much straight away. Again, to me it kind of falls into that borderline
territory between young adult and new adult. It is the story of - obviously -
Dimple and Rishi, both of whom have just finished high school and they're about
go off to university. But in the summer between high school and university,
Dimple is going to this basically, like, coding camp type thing at a university
in San Francisco. Unbeknownst to her, her parents and Rishi's parents have
arranged a marriage between the two of them. He knows all about it, he's totally
on board with it, he's a very traditional Indian boy. And so he, in cahoots with his
parents, decide that he's going to also go to this coding camp to kind of get to
know her and to see if the two of them are compatible. I was initially a little
bit hesitant about this book because I wasn't thrilled about the whole arranged
marriage "he knows about it, she doesn't" kind of concept and I was kind of scared
that it was going to be, like, the entire book would be him not saying anything
about the arranged marriage and then her finding out kind of towards the end of
the book and being like "Oh well, I love him now so, like, whatever." But the whole
arranged marriage thing comes to the forefront very very early in the story,
she finds out exactly what's going on, she is not pleased about it at all and
the story kind of goes from there. I loved both of these characters so so
much. I loved that, like, STEM is included in the story, because so much of the time
we see like arty girls or we see kids who are really into theatre, and we don't
really see kids who are interested in STEM,
particularly in coding. So that was great to see, particularly having a woman of
colour who is interested in coding and I just loved it so much. I love that both
of their characters are so well developed over the course of this book, I
love the family dynamic that both of them have, I love the friendship and the
relationship that develops between the two of them and I just... This book was
just cute and fluffy and adorable and diverse and wonderful and I loved
everything about it. It was great and I gave it 4.5 stars. And the final book
that I finished this week is Scoundrel by Zoe
Archer, which is the second book in the Blades of the Rose series, I think it's
called? I read the first book, Warrior, a couple of weeks ago for the
AroundtheWorldAThon. Warrior was set in Mongolia, this one was set in the Greek islands and
the series is kind of hard to describe. It's often referred to as steampunk but
really it's more fantasy than steampunk. It's kind of some... it's just a weird
series that doesn't really fit into any one particular genre. It's a little bit
paranormal romance, it's a little bit steampunk, it's a little bit fantasy. It's
all of those things kind of mushed up together and yeah... I really really like
this series. I love the magic and the world-building.
I love the settings of these books, I love that they're not set in the US or
the UK they're set in, you know, farflung parts of the world in the 19th century, I
love the characters. What I don't like about these books is the sex scenes and
the way that the romances are written, because a lot of the time it's just
really fucking cheesy and cringe-worthy. I like this series, I like this world, I
like the magic, I like - a lot - the way that the story plays out. Like, I really really
enjoyed the story but the sex scenes are so fucking bad. Like just... Just really bad.
I liked this book, hated the sex scenes, gave it 3.5 stars. So there you have it, friends.
That is all the books that I finished this week. If you have read any of these
and have thoughts on them, please let me know down in the comments, I would love
to talk about them with you. Thank you guys so much for watching, I love all your faces
and I will see you on Wednesday. Bye guys.
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