The Overflowing Library

I must admit this month just gone as been a rubbish one for me reading wise. I've struggled to read much of anything because I've been so tired and busy at work so you might find next month is a bit thin on the ground review wise. I'm planning to cut my loses a little bit in April and spend my easter break trying to get myself ahead and back to a normal fullish schedule for May. (Update: Since writing this I got to my half term holiday and finished another 6 books in two days. Just show how much work slows my reading down!) Books Read 40) Etiquette and Espionage by Gail Carriger 41) The Devil in No Man's Land by Will Hill (British Books Challenge) 42) The Bunker Diary by Kevin Brooks (British Books Challenge) 43) Wild Boy by Rob Lloyd Jones (British Books Challenge) 44) Undead in the Eternal City by Will Hill (British Books Challenge) 45)  The secret history of a secret teenage vampire by Will Hill (British Books Challenge) 46) The boys of Summer by CJ Duggan ...

Hello and thank you to Kirsty for having me. I’m Anya from An Awful Lot of Reading (http://anawfullotofreading.blogspot.co.uk) and these are my bookshelves! I quite like showing off my bookshelves and my books, having grown up in a home where books line the walls in nearly every room. I still live at home – poor student, you know – so my books are confined to my bedroom, limiting the amount I can buy and keep. So, firstly right next to my bed is this little bookshelf I was gifted by my grandmother which houses my currently reading and my immediate to-read list based on what I’ve got to read next, either review or university books. It sits on the cupboard next to my bed. Next up is the lovely Myaka bookshelf that my parents bought for me a few years ago. It holds my university books, sorted by year and module. It also has my radio/CD player and my TV on top. And, based on how messy I’m feeling, it also has my wallet, phone, ipod, bunch of crap and whatever I chuck th...

It's one thing to learn to curtsy properly. It's quite another to learn to curtsy and throw a knife at the same time. Welcome to Finishing School. Fourteen-year-old Sophronia is a great trial to her poor mother. Sophronia is more interested in dismantling clocks and climbing trees than proper manners—and the family can only hope that company never sees her atrocious curtsy. Mrs. Temminick is desperate for her daughter to become a proper lady. So she enrolls Sophronia in Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality. But Sophronia soon realizes the school is not quite what her mother might have hoped. At Mademoiselle Geraldine's, young ladies learn to finish...everything. Certainly, they learn the fine arts of dance, dress, and etiquette, but they also learn to deal out death, diversion, and espionage—in the politest possible ways, of course. Sophronia and her friends are in for a rousing first year's education. Set in the sa...

It's always darkest before dawn. Secret government unit Department 19 is recovering from evil vampire Valeri Rusmanov's deadly attack on their base. The Department’s newest member, teenage operator Jamie Carpenter, is tasked with training up a new squad, as his friends and colleagues desperately search for ways to try to stop what is coming. The timing couldn’t be worse for a coordinated, global attack on a number of maximum security prisons and hospitals—with the already-dangerous inmates now on the loose and turned into vampires. One of the escapees has a deep connection to one of the darkest moments in the history of Department 19 and embarks on a quest that threatens to expose the existence of vampires to the public. And with each day that passes, the regenerated Dracula gets stronger, bringing Zero Hour closer. In this third installment of the epic Department 19 series, Will Hill delivers higher—and sharper—stakes than ever before. My Thoughts This is ...

  Rose's mother and Joshua's father have disappeared. Police inquiries have gone nowhere and the case, it seems, is closed: Rose and Joshua have been told that the police believe their parents are dead. But Rose and Joshua still hold out hope that they are alive. Joshua is determined to follow up his own inquiries, which includes working out the meaning of the cryptic notebooks - the murder notebooks - they have discovered. Then Rose is distracted by odd, desperate messages she receives from Rachel, a former best friend from her school, followed by the terrible news that Rachel is dead. But perhaps Rachel's death will provide one more piece of the puzzle about what has happened to Rose and Joshua's parents . . . My thoughts Another interesting read in the murder notebooks series from Anne Cassidy. The main plot for this series revolves about the death of Rachel, a girl whom Rose had previously been at boarding school with as well as spending...

Today as part of the Wildwood Blog Tour I have 3 sets of the first two books in the wildwood trilogy to giveaway Prue McKeel's life is ordinary. That is, until her brother is abducted by a murder of crows and taken to the Impassable Wilderness, a dense, tangled forest on the edge of Portland. No one's ever gone in--or at least returned to tell of it. So begins an adventure that will take Prue and her friend Curtis deep into the Impassable Wilderness. There they uncover a secret world in the midst of violent upheaval--a world full of warring creatures, peaceable mystics, and powerful figures with the darkest intentions. And what begins as a rescue mission becomes something much greater as the two friends find themselves entwined in a struggle for the very freedom of this wilderness. A wilderness the locals call Wildwood. Ever since Prue McKeel returned home from the Impassable Wilderness after rescuing her brother from the malevolent Dowager Governess,...

Dear all, After two years of doing Bookcase Showcase I found this morning that I had no one to showcase. It's partly my own fault as I've been so busy I haven't been out author and blogger hunting for someone earlier in the week to do a guest post as work has been all kinds of crazy of late. So please see this as my official plea for contributors. If you fancy doing a Bookcase Showcase guest post either as an author as a one off or as part of a blog tour or as a blogger / publicist / editor etc please do contact me by either leaving an email address I can reach you on in the comments or by tweeting me at @overflowingklc so today I thought I would do a brief update of my shelves as last time they were featured was in the first bookcase showcase post on 5th March 2011 ( see here ) As the name of my blog suggests we have a lot of books currently residing in my little bungalow. We have bookcases in every room and those cases are regularly added to despite the fact I hav...

Lucas and Glory are hard at work in WICA (Witchkind Intelligence and Covert Affairs). As part of their training, they learn more about the witch-terrorist organization Endor. It is believed that Endor has infiltrated a boarding school for young witches in Switzerland, so WICA sends their two youngest agents—Lucas and Glory—to the school undercover. There, they learn more about an experimental brain implant that blocks the power of the fae. It’s a dangerous procedure . . . more so than they could ever have imagined. My Thoughts I got really excited when I finally got a copy of this book as I loved the first one in the series and actually found time to reread book one in preparedness. This instalment is just as good as the first and whilst very different in its feel it had all the elements I loved about the first book and added to it. The story picks up shortly after book one ends with Lucas and Glory training to prepare for a mission for WICA the organisation they h...

Kitty is living a happy, carefree life as a dairymaid in the countryside. The grand family she is employed by looks after her well, and she loves her trade, caring for the gentle cows and working in the cool, calm dairy. And then, of course, there is Will, the river man who she thinks is very fond of her, and indeed she is of him. Surely he will ask her to marry him soon? Then one day disaster strikes: Will disappears. Kitty is first worried and then furious. She fears that Will has only been leading her on all this time, and has now gone to London to make his fortune, forgetting about her completely. So when Kitty is asked to go to London to pick up a copy of Pride and Prejudice, the latest novel by the very fashionable Jane Austen, Kitty leaps at the chance to track down Will. But Kitty has no idea how vast London is, and how careful she must be. It is barely a moment before eagle-eyed pickpockets have spotted the country-born-and-bred Kitty and relieved her of her m...

His lips touched mine and for one split second the whole world stopped. Then every cell in my body fizzed into life . . . When I decided to write a book about my life I thought I'd have to make loads of stuff up. I mean, who wants to read about someone like me? But as soon as I started writing, the weirdest thing happened. I found out I wasn't who I thought I was. And I stopped being scared. Then everything went crazy! Best of all, I discovered that when you finally decide to be brave it's like waving a wand over your life - the most magical things can happen . .  My Thoughts I really enjoyed this book For me this book was about two things Firstly it was about family and knowing where you come from. At the start of this book Claire finds out that she isn't who she thought she was. Instead of being called Claire Weeks she was actually born Cherokee Brown and her absent father isn't in the USA like she thought but living in London not all that far aw...

How do you hold on to a love that is slowly slipping away from you? Can you let go of the past when you know what is in the future? And how do you cope when you know that every kiss is a countdown to goodbye? This is the story of a love affair, of Ryan and Molly and how they fell in love and were torn apart. The first time Molly kissed Ryan, she knew they'd be together forever. Six years and thousands of kisses later she's married to the man she loves. But today, when Ryan kisses her, Molly realises how many of them she wasted because the future holds something which neither of them could have ever predicted… My thoughts An interesting book which was a really heartfelt read. The story is told by Molly as she packs up her house to move away telling the story of the love affair between her and Ryan the boy she loved since she was a teenager but is no longer with her. It is told in flashbacks which flit back and forth and slowly build up the whole story over the c...

Our house has a lot of books - books in cupboards, books on the floor, books in the kitchen (cookbooks, mostly) and even a few books on shelves. The photo above is one of six actual proper bookcases in our house, and probably the neatest, but still, "Bookcase Showcase" seems a rather hopeful title. As you can tell from the photo, my bookcases are sadly nowhere near showcases; this one is more a sort of mix of stationary cupboard, games compendium and whatnot. I was tempted to tidy up before photographing but I heroically resisted, so this is the unvarnished version. The books are crammed in a bit too tightly to allow much clutter on the shelves themselves, so it has all congregated on the top of the bookcase. On the left is a stack of boardgames, plus a bingo set I got given for Christmas, a sword and a top hat (what self-respecting household doesn't have a sword and a top hat on their bookcase?) and a box of firelighters. On the right is a wooden boat ...

Kicked out of yet another boarding school, Archie couldn't be happier to find himself back in London with old friends and an exciting social life. But he's worried about his cousin Ty, who is facing a sentence in a Young Offender Institution and doesn't seem to be coping. And he's finding that his old friends have moved on and it's a struggle to keep up with their new lives. When he begins to learn surprising things about Ty, Archie goes on a mission to discover the truth about his cousin's past. But who is the real Ty? The thrilling follow-up to When I Was Joe and Almost True takes readers on a terrifying adventure through London's gangland. My Thoughts Another life is the final book in the When I was Joe series. For me this book was my least favourite of the series. Yes it has all the elements of the previous books but for me I didn't like the fact that the Point of Iew the story was told from for the majority of the book was Archi...

Who is the real Marcus “Oz” Osbourne in Waiting for Gonzo ? We have gathered here today, three people who know Oz pretty well, or so it would seem. We have asked each of them the same four questions, in an attempt to better understand the boy behind the moustache and the D-tags … Meg, Oz’s sister, has known him all her life; Ryan and Isobel (AKA Psycho) Skinner have only known him since he arrived at Crawdale High School. Let’s see who has the juice on this slippery character … QUESTION 1: If Oz were an animal, what would he be? MEG: A mosquito, no question. He’s noisy, annoying and can bring you out in a rash! Oz can spoil anybody’s sunny day. RYAN: A chimpanzee – because he thinks everything is funny and can’t stop causing trouble. Then he runs away and tries to look all innocent. ISOBEL: A dumb puppy. He needs a firm hand and some proper training. You can always tell where he’s been by the trail of destruction he leaves behind! QUESTION 2: If O...