Mini Readathon Wrap up Post

I'm doing the wrap up post for this readathon, even though I barely participated. I do really love the button for it though - so cute and summery and BEES! My sisters and I had this thing for a while where we threw bees at each other whenever we were pretending to be annoyed... I think it was from one of the Robin Hood movies. I can never remember the full stories behind these things, though, and just end up looking mad...Anyway! Moving along, here are the wrap up questions!

1. How many books and/or pages were you able to read? 

Pathetically, I read about 50 pages of The Taste of Sorrow, and 10 of Yes Man by Danny Wallace. Even after I said I was going to start reading, I got distracted by Olympic swimming (yay, Rebecca Adlington!), so I really didn't get as much done as I wanted, but such is life.

2. About how many hours were you able to read for? (Were there many distractions, breaks, etc?)

I would say that in the end I only really read for approximately 4 hours. There were ALL THE DISTRACTIONS.. house cleaning, Olympics watching, dinner making, sleeping....

3. Do you have any likes/dislikes about the 12-hour readathon, compared to a 24-hour readathon?

If I'd remembered to start earlier in the day 12 hours would have been perfect I think. I really struggle with the 24 hour one although it is great, I would love to try the 12 hours again, hopefully with more success next time!

4. Favorite and least favorite books that you read today? Favorite / least favorite challenges? (Not that there were many, but if you want to comment about any of the ones from past mini-readathons feel free to do so).

I really like The Taste of Sorrow. I did have to stop reading it last night because it was depressing me, but in its' defence, it is about the Bronte's, and their story is pretty sad which I knew before I started. I'm having a bit of a hard time with Yes Man, which is weird because I love Danny Wallace but this one just isn't grabbing me like some of his others have. 

5. Do you have any suggestions for things you’d like me to do differently for the next mini-readathon?

It all seemed pretty great to me! :-) 

Despite my enormous failure in this readathon, it has had the great effect of making me inspired to participate in more readathons, which is something I'm always meaning to do but then I feel bad about neglecting my husband (who says he doesn't mind, especially at the moment, because it means he gets to watch more football/play Fifa on the Wii without anybody whinging at him that it's boring...), so I don't. BUT Ellie tweeted about the Bout of Books Readathon this morning, which is a week long, so I'm going to give that one a go I think!

Summer Mini Readathon!

So, today is the day of Sarah's mini Readathon, for which all we have to do is read for a 12 hour block at some point starting today... I will be honest, I forgot about this until about 3pm, mostly due to being awake since 6am entirely against my will due to baby related kicking. Then we went to some car boot sales, and then I got home and thought, 'oh yeah, readathon!'. And so here I am. I am starting now, which means that I would be finishing approx 7.30 am tomorrow morning. Obviously due to pregnant (30 weeks today!) tiredness, I will not be reading the whole 12 hours, but I will be attempting as much as I possibly can! I've just started The Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan, about the Bronte's and so far it's really great, so I'm hoping to make a bit of progress with that. 

For fun, and to set me up, here are my answers to the first mini-challenge questions!

1. Tell everyone three random things about yourself:
- I am obsessed with Mars Ice Creams and KitKat Chunkies
- I really, really hate coffee
- I go through very obsessive foody phases. This is one of them.

2. Is this your first readathon?

No, but I don't do anywhere near as many of them as I'd like! And so far I've only participated in Dewey's 24 hr Readathon twice, and never any longer ones. 

3. Do you have any specific goals for today? (# of books or pages to read?) No. I'm starting so late that if I get anything read at all it will be a huge bonus!! 

4. Do you have any specific snacks, drinks, or books planned? Books - The Taste of Sorrow (as mentioned above), and if I don't feel like that, Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties by Lucy Moore, which is great and which I've been reading for weeks, so it would be good to get closer to finishing that! No specific snacks, but I'm about to have roast dinner, and there are also Mars ice creams in the freezer... And then there's biscuits. Always biscuits. 

5. What hours do you plan on reading during? 7.30pm GMT - 7.30 am GMT. Not continuously, but at various points between... Next time I promise to start earlier!

Catch Up: Mini Reviews!

I'm soooo bad at keeping up with reviews at the moment, so I thought I'd do another post with a few mini reviews to keep up to date with a few books that I enjoyed but don't have too much to say about. So, here goes....

French Lessons by Ellen Sussman

Set in Paris and divided into three stories, French Lessons is the story of three French tutors and their pupils. Over the course of a day it follows three characters whose lives seem very separate; Josie, an American French teacher mourning the death of her lover, ex-pat Riley, feeling isolated from her husband and with very limited French skills, and Jeremy, the husband of a wealthy film star. 

The cover makes it appear light-hearted and to an extent it is, but it also goes deeper. By the end of the novel, the stories have become intertwined, and it really is about the power that people have to help other people, even if they are strangers. French Lessons is fluid and well written and pretty absorbing - I read it straight through in pretty much one sitting and it made me happy because it was really about love, and I'm a bit sappy and secretly adore love stories, especially the ones with happy endings. 

A copy of the novel was sent to me by the lovely publishers, Canvas.  

The Patchwork Marriage by Jane Green

Jane Green is one of my favourite authors of the 'chick lit' variety. Her last novel, The Love Verb, had me in absolute floods of tears by the end, and while The Patchwork Marriage wasn't quite on the same level, it was still pretty great. Green's novels always have a great atmosphere of family about them, and this is particularly interesting due to the subject matter. 

When Andi meets Ethan, she thinks that she has met the man of her dreams but although his younger daughter, Sophia, is prepared to let her play happy families, his elder daughter Emily makes things very difficult. Just when Andi thinks she has had enough, a huge event shatters all of their lives and makes them all question what is really important to them.

The thing I enjoyed most in The Patchwork Marriage was the dynamic between the characters; all of the relationships, even the upsetting way in which Emily sometimes treated Andi, felt real to me, and throughout it seemed to be about people fighting for the things they loved and believed in, and Jane Green does passion very convincingly. She also portrays annoying, self obsessed teenagers in a wonderful way, which makes me think that she probably has some experience... Although hopefully not with any as awful as Emily is at various points! The book was pretty much what I expected, and I will definitely continue to be excited about everything she publishes!

I bought a copy of this book.

One Moment, One Morning by Sarah Rayner

I know you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but the cover of this made it seem like it was going to be much lighter than it was. Basically it is centered around the events which take place one morning on a train; a man collapses and the novel deals with the fall-out of this on three characters; his wife, her best friend, and the girl who was sitting next to the couple on the train. Through the events that take place, they become involved in each others lives, and basically, it's about the importance of friendship, and about letting people in.

Sounds a bit schmaltzy, I know, but it really wasn't. Although the novel hangs around  a horrible event, it really isn't as dark as it should be, and it is a pretty good depiction of people's reactions in an extreme situation. Sarah Rayner is also pretty good at showing how one event can have a ripple effect on various other people's situations, and how something pretty unrelated to your own situation can make you rethink your own life.

I was given this book as a birthday gift.

We Bought a Zoo by Benjamin Mee

The film of this recently came out. I haven't seen it yet, but I do plan to at some point. I like this kind of memoir - where people do something other people see as being crazy and then write about it, and I like zoos, and I like Devon (where the zoo is), so it seemed like it would all be good from the get go, and it was.

The book pretty much does what it says in the title; Benjamin Mee and his family bought a zoo. A totally run down, failing zoo which was in tons of debt. The book is the story of how they turned to zoo from a failing wreck into a successful business. Also, it has tigers and escaping jaguars and wolves, so that's great. I really like animals, and Mee's writing style is very relaxing while still being quite immersive. I read the book pretty quickly and it's definitely staying on my shelves!

Thank you Hanna, first for reviewing it and making me want to read it, and secondly for sending it to me! :-)

Apologies for the awful book pictures (and total lack of picture for One Moment One Morning), I've done too much today and should be having a nap but just really wanted to get this finished and posted, as it's been far too long between reviews!!

The Sunday Salon - Books for Baby #3

Yay it's finally sunny! This week's been pretty awful, as I've been stuck inside since Friday morning pretty much due to some dizziness/baby related problems. Hopefully it's all fine now, but I've been ordered to rest lots, which I hate because as soon as somebody tells me I have to do something, I immediately want to go out and do the opposite. Today I've finally managed to get out for a bit though and we went for a wander around shops and suchlike (bought shoes for the hubby, maternity clothes for me, all the fun stuff!), but it did inspire me to do another Books for Baby post, as it's been a while since I've done one! There are more books that I've been given but I haven't got the energy to find them at the moment, so I'll do another post at some point, catching up on all the books I've missed! 

Anyway! The books in the picture:


The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson was sent to me by the lovely Laura of Devouring Texts. She sent me a book for RAK and really kindly included one for bump! Thanks again! :-) 


We're Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen & Helen Oxenbury. I got this today from Waterstone's as I still had some money left on giftcards and I figured I'm not the only one who should benefit from having lovely relatives! Also, it's a board book, and so actually suitable for him from pretty much straight away! Rhys has never read the book, so I think he'll have a great time doing the actions and making all the noises :-p 


I know that a cardigan is not a book, but this is my first proper knitted garment. I've been making it over the course of the past week or so and I'm really quite proud of it. It isn't perfect, but for a first attempt from somebody who can't sew at all it's not at all bad I think! Also I love the elephant buttons - we discovered an awesome haberdashery lately which has just aisles and aisles of cool buttons and I fell in love with these!


I've not read too much this week, probably because of the feeling horrible. I'm still in the middle of Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties, which continues to be great and really informative, and I'm reading Danny Wallace's Yes Man, because I wanted something to cheer me up. Also today I'm going to start The Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan, which is about the Bronte sisters. Lots of non-fiction, and lots of jumping from book to book, but I'm not feeling too settled at the moment (terrified of the imminent having of baby over 100 miles away from all family members and most friends!), and I think my reading is reflective of that!


In other news, all the silly Goodreads drama this week has made me want to switch to LibraryThing, and I'm currently in the middle of uploading all my books to it. If you've not heard about the drama, I'm not going to reiterate it as it's just generally ridiculous, but it was stressing me, so I've removed myself from the situation, and so far LibraryThing seems much more relaxed so I'm happy! 


Hopefully the wonderful weather will stick this week - it would be nice to be able to have a barbecue on the beach one evening, but that's probably wishful thinking! Hope everybody's Sunday is going great!

Review:- Maine by Courtney Sullivan

I am (sigh) at home, again. Resting, again. Waiting to see a doctor later today about my continual dizziness, which will undoubtedly be due to the way that the baby is growing or something, but we shall see. Anyway, in the mean time it seems like a good opportunity to actually get to reviewing the awesome that is Maine.

Maine is a book I bought for a couple of reasons; primarily that I had Waterstone's vouchers burning a hole in my pocket, but also because they were talking about it on Bookrageous a while back and it sounded like exactly the kind of thing I needed to read at the moment!

Basically it's about three generations of women in the Kelleher family spending the summer at their beach house in Maine. Currently, we are having pretty much no summer here in my part of the UK (yesterday, it was a bit hot and a bit sunny, and every single person I saw was wearing shorts and either eating ice cream or wearing a sun hat. I kid you not), so I loved the chance to sun myself vicariously which this book afforded me. I'm a bit annoyed because I'd already half-written this review once, but I did it on little scraps of paper and inevitably lost it and had to start again. Not happy, but there we go, turns out there is a reason not to write stuff on tiny scraps of paper!

Courtney Sullivan (published in the U.S & who is also on Twitter as J. Courtney Sullivan. Why?) is really, really good at writing characters and relationships. Really, this book didnt particularly need anything else. It pretty much just sticks a bunch of women from the same (fairly dysfunctional) family in a house together and leaves them to fight it out. I'm sure that a huge amount of effort went into making the story and characters seem so effortless, but they really do.

There are four central characters. Firstly Alice, the matriarch, an (ex?) alcoholic still attempting to recover from the death of her husband, a family tragedy from the past which she has never recovered from, and the fact that she never really wanted to be a mother. She spends the entire summer at the house in Maine, and is joined for various periods by various family members. Her granddaughter Maggie is the first to arrive; newly single and pregnant, trying to decide what she is capable of. Then there is Alice's eldest daughter, Maggie's mother, Kathleen, struggling to reconcile the raging alcoholic she used to be with the person she now is, and trying to come to terms with being back in the house which she swore she would never return to. Finally there is Ann-Marie, married to Alice's idolised son, Patrick, she has invested huge amounts of time and energy on being 'the daughter Alice never had' and fitting in to the Kelleher family.

There is another major player in the background of the novel, which almost deserves to be mentioned as much as any of the characters, and that is alcohol. Alice's children's childhood was pretty impacted by her drinking. To an extent, Kathleen's own children then ended up in a similar situation. Maggie doesn't allow herself to really drink, in case it has the effect on her that it does on her mother and grandmother. I was going to say that Maine asks us to question how much we actually have control over our actions and personalities, but the more I think about it, the more it seems that the issue really is not that but how difficult it can be for people to cope with situations and to control themselves. Is the way that we are as human beings - the way that we react to things, the way we interact with each other - purely dependent on how we allow ourselves to be?

At the moment I like to write about books that I have an emotional response to, and i definitely responded emotionally to Maine. Probably because it is pretty much about mothers and their daughters, and obviously motherhood is something I spend quite a bit of time thinking about lately, but even outside of that the characters are just brilliantly created. None of them are simple; not even Ann-Marie, who seems like she should be. They are all very complex and driven by some very involved motivations. People harbour resentements and hold grudges over events which happened 20,30,40 years previously in a way that they only can in families, but equally there is a stage for every character in the story, where they realise that there are lots of things they don't know about the people they are supposed to know better than anybody.

I don't want to talk too much about specifics, as I don't want to ruin it for when you read it (which you should, becaue it's awesome), but it is kind of a redemption story in a lot of ways. All of the characters are, at the beginning o f the story, trapped, either by something from their past or by aspects of their lives in the present, which crushes them in some way. Throughout the novel they are, in their various ways, trying to work through their issues and become liberated.

I loved the complexity of the characters; how much of a bitch Alice could be, how entirely impossible and inappropriate Kathleen was at times, Ann-Marie's obsession with posessions... They were like people I know, who are brilliant and lovely and fun and awesome, except when something happens which they react to in an entirely unexpected way and you sit there thinking 'is this really x?' (x being the person in question). They were just the right amount of annoying that it didn't get in the way of the enjoyment of the story.

I could go on about Maine forever,but instead I will just say that it is definitely going on the list of favourite books of this year. It was both relaxing and stimulating and I really didn't want it to end!

Giveaway Winners!

I couldn't think of a way to draw winners for this giveaway, so in the end I resorted to literally writing people's names on scraps of paper various amounts of times according to how many extra entries they had, and then pulling names out of a hat! Some people have won things, some people haven't, but do not despair because I'm still not done with the book sorting, so I am SURE there will be another extravaganza soon. (Mostly just because I like the word extravaganza, although it's difficult to type. I always have to double and triple check myself...)

Anyway! Winners!

Prize #1 - Lone Wolf by Jodi Picoult has been won by Judith

Prize #2 - The End of Mr Y and Popco by Scarlett Thomas has been won by Tanja

Prize #3 - The Other Boleyn Girl and The White Queen by Philippa Gregory has been won by Hanna 


The winners have been contacted by email and have until the weekend to respond so that I can send their books out! :-)

The Amazing Baby - Clearout Book Giveaway Extravaganza!

As many of you may know, we're expecting our first baby in October (woo! Yay! Awesomesauce! etc), and this means that I *sob* am having to finally bite the bullet and actually clear out some books. During the process of doing this I discovered that I have a few duplicates of books which I adore, so I thought I'd pass them on to some of you lovely lot! 


None of them are new, but all are in good condition, and they are all brilliant books!

The first book I have up for grabs (awful expression, always brings to mind crabs and their big scary pincers for some reason...), is a hardback copy of Lone Wolf by Jodi Picoult. I bought this because I love Jodi Picoult and just couldn't wait, and it was brilliant. You can read my review of it here, but I don't like to keep hardbacks as they take up too much space, so there you go! It has only been read once and is in great condition. Unfortunately this available for UK entrants only, as last time I posted a hardback to America it cost me about £12. That was way back last year, postage has gone way up since then, and I am just not that rich, sorry! Don't despair though, the next two prizes are open internationally!


The next two prizes are pairs of books by two authors that I love. 

People may have heard me going on (and on, and on , and on) about my love for Scarlett Thomas' books, and I have a habit of just buying her books wherever I see them. Currently we have three copies of The End of Mr Y  in our house, and so I am donating one of them, along with a copy of her codebreaking, anti-capitalist novel of awesome, Popco to one lucky person. They are both seriously worth reading - if you want a synopsis, titles link up to Goodreads!

Finally, people keep giving me Philippa Gregory novels that I already own, and so I'm sharing the love. The third prize I have available to everybody (ignore the terrible edge-of-table picture) is two of Philippa Gregory's novels; The Other Boleyn Girl, and The White Queen. I loved them both!


The Rules

• To win Lone Wolf you must live in the UK. For the other two prizes you can live anywhere in the world
• You can enter to win any or all of the prizes
• Enter by leaving a comment on this post including your email, which country you are visiting from, and which prizes (1,2 and/or 3) you want to win.
• You can get an extra entry by following me (@fairybookgirl) on Twitter. Include your Twitter handle in your comment!
• You can get another extra entry by tweeting about the giveaway. If you do this, please include my Twitter handle in your tweet so that I know you've done it!
• I will contact the winners by email on Thursday 19th July. They will have until Saturday evening to respond, when I will pick a new winner. 

Spread the word! Tell your friends! I really need the space!