Adult Fiction for YA Readers!

I've met quite a lot of readers in the past who read only YA and want to read a little bit of adult fiction, but don't know where to start. So today I thought I'd recommend some adult fiction for YA lovers by selecting a few adult books that share some similar themes to certain YA books!

The Gargoyle is Andrew Davidson's debut, and so far only, novel, and I fell in love with it when I first read it. I'll admit it's nothing like A Thousand Nights, really; the main character is a severely burned and suicidal pornographer. So why do I recommend it to fans of A Thousand Nights? Well, it's another book with a nameless protagonist and one that is heavily reliant on oral storytelling. While in the hospital, the protagonist of The Gargoyle meets another patient who claims they were lovers in a past life, and she continues to visit him to tell him love stories from throughout history. In some ways she is his Scheherazade. It's a stunning book, and I highly recommend it!

I only discovered Robin Talley this year and I think she's such an important voice in the world of YA. I thoroughly enjoyed Lies We Tell Ourselves - you can check out my review here! - and when it comes to adult historical LGBT+ fiction then I can't recommend Sarah Waters enough. Waters has written six novels, all historical fiction, and five of those six have a queer female protagonist. Fingersmith is a wonderful place to start with Waters' work; it's a fantastically twisty and turny novel, highly inspired by the Victorian sensation novels that Waters loves to read, and like Lies We Tell Ourselves it has a wonderful LGBT+ couple at its centre. You can check out my review here!

It's been years since I read Things I Want My Daughters to Know, but I absolutely loved it when I first read it. The Year of the Rat and Things I Want My Daughters to Know are very different novels, but at their heart they're both stories that tackle grief, and in particular the grief that comes with losing a mother.

I admit these two may in fact have more dissimilarities than similarities; one main protagonist is a teenage girl while the other is a grown man, and one focuses on travelling through space while the other barely focuses on the travel at all. That being said, I do think fans of Across the Universe, and any other YA sci-fi like it, should give The Book of Strange New Things a chance. There is a lot about Christianity in it, but it isn't a Christian book; the main character, Peter, is travelling to a new planet to preach the Bible - the 'Book of Strange New Things' - to the natives there while, back on earth, his wife Bea begins to struggle with her faith. It's quite a slow-moving book, but it's fascinating.

Which adult books would you recommend to YA readers? Alternatively, which YA books would you recommend to people who don't read much YA?

Bout of Books 13 | Bookish Survey Challenge!

It's the first day of Bout of Books 13, and Lori @ Writing My Own Fairy Tale is hosting the very first challenge, complete with a giveaway! I've never taken part in any of the Bout of Books challenges before, but this survey seemed like too much fun to pass up - I love getting the chance to talk about books I love and recommend them to people!

Thanks, Lori, for hosting this challenge!

The Questions

1) How do you organise your shelves?

I don't, really. I try to have some semblance of organisation, but as I'm pretty much entirely out of room I stick my books where there's room for them, although I do have spaces of organisation. I have one shelf dedicated entirely to my classics, and I always keep my series together, and, if I can, I'll keep books written by the same author together, too. One day I'd love to have a big house with a huge library room where I can organise them to my heart's content, either alphabetically or by genre.

2) What is one of your favourite books that's not in one of your favourite genres?

This is a great question. I think I'll have to go with Things I Want My Daughters to Know by Elizabeth Noble, which I really, really enjoyed when I read it a couple of years ago. I don't dislike contemporary, but it's certainly not a genre I tend to read a lot of.

3) What is the last 5 star book you read?

Well-Read Women: Portraits of Fiction's Most Beloved Heroines by Samantha Hahn. It's a beautiful book, and I'm really glad to have it on my shelf.

4) What book are you most excited to read during the read-a-thon?

Probably Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner, which is a modern classic from the mid '2os about a spinster who dabbles in witchcraft.

5) What book do you recommend the most?

It has to be my favourite book of 2015 so far, and one of my all-time favourites now, Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. It's exquisite and you should read it. You can check out my review here!

Happy reading!

Books I Want Adaptations Of!

Book adaptations have been everywhere over the past few years, and this year has seen plenty; from Hannibal to Outlander to The Maze Runner.

I love adaptations, I'm always fascinated by what different directors and actors and screenwriters do with the stories we know and love; I can't wait to see Francis Lawrence's adaptations of Mockingjay and I was ecstatic when I learned that Bryan Fuller is involved with the adaptation of Neil Gaiman's American Gods.

That being said, there are still a few books out there that I would love to see adaptations of, and today I thought I'd share them with you!

Those of you who have been following my blog for a while will know that back in May I read Mira Grant's Feed, the first book in her Newsflesh trilogy, and loved it. It broke my heart, but I loved it, and I think it would make a brilliant television show. I wouldn't want to squeeze this story into a 90 minute film, and considering each section of the book starts with a quote from Georgia or Shaun's blog I think they'd be great episode openers. I know I'd watch it!

C. J. Sansom's Dissolution, the first in his Shardlake series, is another book I think would make a great television drama. I love a good historical drama, and historical crime is especially fun! Considering this particular book takes place in the creepy, confined space of a monastery I think it'd be a lot of fun to watch. Dissolution was in fact adapted for BBC Radio 4 in 2012, but sadly I hadn't read the book then and had no idea it had been dramatised - I wish the BBC would make it available to listen to again!


I had to read Haroun and the Sea of Stories during my first year of university, and I highly recommend it if you're a lover of stories - this book is so much fun! It's bizarre, but it's brilliant, and I think it would make a fantastic Studio Ghibli film. Sadly Studio Ghibli has recently said that they are taking a break from animated films, but hopefully that break won't be a long one because their animation is just stunning. When they decide to return to animation, I'd love to see an adaptation of Haroun and the Sea of the Stories; they did a wonderful job with Howl's Moving Castle, so I'd love to see them interpret this book!

Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey is one of my favourite classics. I'm not entirely sure why I love it so much, I just do, and yet it doesn't have a single adaptation aside from another by BBC Radio 4 which I did manage to listen to. It was only an hour long, which I can understand because the book itself isn't long at all when we compare it to other Victorian novels, and while I did enjoy it I'd love to see Agnes come to life on my screen. I love a good period drama, and I think Agnes Grey would make a lovely one!


All of us are guilty of a good old chick flick every now and then, those feel good, comfort films that we put on when we need cheering up, we feel ill or we just want to have a laugh, and I'd love to see someone make a chick flick out of Elizabeth Noble's Things I Want My Daughters to Know. I don't know what it is about this book exactly, I just loved it a lot when I first read it. It's the kind of book that can make you both laugh and cry in the space of a few minutes, and it handles quite a sensitive storyline in a really lovely way. With the right director I think this book would make a very sweet film.

Are there any books you'd like to see adaptations of, or do you prefer your stories to stay on the page?

J.

TBR | Contemporary

Last month I shared with you the Classics I'd most like to try and cross off my TBR shelf this year. This month I thought I'd share with you some of the lighter reads I'd like to read this year, because Spring is on the way!

There are less books on this list than my previous one because I don't tend to read an awful lot of Contemporary, but whenever I do read it I always find I've stumbled across it at a time that I've really needed to read something fun and heart-warming. You tend to find books when you're ready for them, don't you?

Fangirl

by Rainbow Rowell

Cath is a Simon Snow fan.

Okay, the whole world is a Simon Snow fan . . .

But for Cath, being a fan is her life — and she’s really good at it. She and her twin sister, Wren, ensconced themselves in the Simon Snow series when they were just kids; it’s what got them through their mother leaving.

Reading. Rereading. Hanging out in Simon Snow forums, writing Simon Snow fan fiction, dressing up like the characters for every movie premiere.

Cath’s sister has mostly grown away from fandom, but Cath can’t let go. She doesn’t want to.

Now that they’re going to college, Wren has told Cath she doesn’t want to be roommates. Cath is on her own, completely outside of her comfort zone. She’s got a surly roommate with a charming, always-around boyfriend, a fiction-writing professor who thinks fan fiction is the end of the civilized world, a handsome classmate who only wants to talk about words . . . And she can’t stop worrying about her dad, who’s loving and fragile and has never really been alone.

For Cath, the question is: Can she do this?

Can she make it without Wren holding her hand? Is she ready to start living her own life? Writing her own stories?

And does she even want to move on if it means leaving Simon Snow behind?

Last month I mentioned this book in my Booket List as the Contemporary novel I'd most like to read this year. I've heard nothing but good things about Rainbow Rowell's novels so it's really about time I got around to reading one of them - Fangirl is my novel of choice simply because it sounds more cheerful than Eleanor and Park. I've heard wonderful things about the latter, but when it comes to Contemporary I usually prefer the books that are going to make me smile to the ones that are going to make me cry.

Then again maybe there's something huge and emotional waiting for me in Fangirl that I don't know anything about...

Alphabet Weekends

by Elizabeth Noble

Natalie and Tom have been best friends forever, but Tom wants them to be much more. When Natalie's longtime boyfriend walks out on her just when she thinks he's going to propose, Tom offers her a different and wildly romantic proposition. He suggests that they spend twenty-six weekends together, indulging in twenty-six different activities from A to Z, and at the end of that time Tom's convinced they'll be madly in love. Natalie, however, is not so sure.

As Natalie's touring the alphabet with Tom, her mother's going through her own romantic crisis—while Tom's unhappily married sister-in-law, Lucy, struggles with temptation. And over the course of six amazing months, three generations of passionate dreamers are going to discover that, no matter how clever they are, love—and life—is never as easy as A, B, C . . .

Contrary to what I was just saying about books that won't make me cry, one of my favourite Contemporary reads is Elizabeth Noble's Things I Want My Daughters to Know, which follows a family of four daughters after their mother passes away. Since then I've been eager to read something else of Noble's and Alphabet Weekends has been waiting on my shelf for a while now.

I don't read an awful lot of Chick Fiction, but I've enjoyed most of what I've read and I think it's a strand of Contemporary that often gets looked down upon by readers who think they're above it, and that's a real shame. Like any genre some of it can be trashy and awful, but there's a lot of Chick Fiction out there that's fun to read and just nice.

Amy and Roger's Epic Detour

by Morgan Matson

Amy Curry thinks her life sucks. Her mom decides to move from California to Connecticut to start anew--just in time for Amy's senior year. Her dad recently died in a car accident. So Amy embarks on a road trip to escape from it all, driving cross-country from the home she's always known toward her new life. Joining Amy on the road trip is Roger, the son of Amy's mother's old friend. Amy hasn't seen him in years, and she is less than thrilled to be driving across the country with a guy she barely knows. So she's surprised to find that she is developing a crush on him. At the same time, she's coming to terms with her father's death and how to put her own life back together after the accident. Told in traditional narrative as well as scraps from the road--diner napkins, motel receipts, postcards--this is the story of one girl's journey to find herself.

You can't go wrong with a road trip story. Usually this wouldn't be my kind of thing at all, but since the release of Amy and Roger's Epic Detour I've heard nothing but good things about it, so I might just see if my local library has it and read it this summer - summer's always the best time of year for a road trip, after all!

The Little Women Letters

by Gabrielle Donnelly

With her older sister, Emma, planning a wedding and her younger sister, Sophie, preparing to launch a career on the London stage, Lulu can’t help but feel like the failure of the Atwater family. Lulu loves her sisters dearly and wants nothing but the best for them, but she finds herself stuck in a rut, working dead-end jobs with no romantic prospects in sight. When her mother asks her to find a cache of old family recipes in the attic of her childhood home, Lulu stumbles across a collection of letters written by her great-great-grandmother Josephine March. In her letters, Jo writes in detail about every aspect of her life: her older sister, Meg’s, new home and family; her younger sister Amy’s many admirers; Beth’s illness and the family’s shared grief over losing her too soon; and the butterflies she feels when she meets a handsome young German. As Lulu delves deeper into the lives and secrets of the March sisters, she finds solace and guidance, but can the words of her great-great-grandmother help Lulu find a place for herself in a world so different from the one Jo knew?

Little Women is one of my favourite Classics, and one of the only American Classics, aside from Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and Edgar Allen Poe's works, that I've actually liked. No offence to the American Classic, but there's only so many times I can read about the futility of the American Dream.

When I first came across The Little Women Letters on Goodreads I was a little worried that someone had taken one of my favourite Classics and ruined it, so I was actually relieved to discover that this story is about Jo March's descendents rather than the original "Little Women" themselves. I'm a sucker for stories about sisters, so hopefully I'll read this book this year!

Brownies and Broomsticks

by Bailey Cates

Katie Lightfoot's tired of loafing around as the assistant manager of an Ohio bakery. So when her aunt Lucy and uncle Ben open a bakery in Savannah's quaint downtown district and ask Katie to join them, she enthusiastically agrees.

While working at the Honeybee Bakery—named after Lucy's cat—Katie notices that her aunt is adding mysterious herbs to her recipes. Turns out these herbal enhancements aren't just tasty—Aunt Lucy is a witch and her recipes are actually spells!

When a curmudgeonly customer is murdered outside the Honeybee Bakery, Uncle Ben becomes the prime suspect. With the help of handsome journalist Steve Dawes, charming firefighter Declan McCarthy, and a few spells, Katie and Aunt Lucy stir up some toil and trouble to clear Ben's name and find the real killer...

Okay so technically this book might fall more into the Fantasy or Mystery genre, but it just sounds adorable, doesn't it?

I love an epic Fantasy or Crime story just as much as the next person - nothing gets me excited like The Lunar Chronicles or one of the Shardlake novels - but sometimes it's nice to sit down and enjoy something cute too, and nothing sounds cuter to me than a Cozy Mystery set in a bakery that's run by witches. I'm going to have to get my hands on a copy of this in time for summer, I think!

What Contemporary books are on your TBR shelf? Are there any in particular you'd like to read this year? Feel free to let me know down below!