"Natacha Tormey was born into the infamous religious cult known as The Children of God. Abused, exploited, and brainwashed by ‘The Family’, Natacha’s childhood was stolen.
Born to French hippy parents attracted to the religious movement by the unusual mix of evangelical Christianity, free love and rejection of the mainstream, from an early age Natacha was brainwashed to believe she had a special destiny – that she was part of an elite children’s army bestowed with superpowers that would one day save the world from the Anti-Christ.
Torn away from their parents, Natacha and her siblings were beaten on a daily basis and forced to sing and dance for entertainment in prisons and malls. Natacha never expected to live to adulthood.
At the age of 18 Natacha escaped, but quickly found herself hurtling through a world she had no understanding of. Alone, and grappling to come to terms with an unbelievable sense of betrayal, she was stuck in a kind of limbo – confused and unable to feel part of either way of life."
Tormey's story is presented in a chronological manner, taking us through her childhood into adulthood. This is one of those books that is hard to read. You will find yourself getting angry that this abuse was allowed to take place and her parents, who should have been protecting her, were seemingly incapable of doing so. Ultimately it is worthwhile to know that The Family still exists and they are still abusing children. It certainly took bravery and fortitude for her to stand up and say publicly what happened to her and others at the hands of adults.
She escapes from the cult, but like many survivors of childhood abuse, that is the first of many small steps that must be taken toward recovery. She may have left the cult, but she finds herself trying to survive in a world that she knows little about and has no experience navigating.
Not an easy read at all. This book was a hideous account of life growing up inside the cult 'The Children of God', later called 'The Family'. It is truly unthinkable that one man could brainwash so many around the world with his sick and depraved ideas and yet he somehow did. Whilst this was not a comfortable read it is an important account to remind us that this is a danger which sadly still remains possible.
Age Rating 15+. Sexual and physical abuse, suicide and drug use.
"Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. He doesn’t lack in fathers to study, chief among them his Black grandfather, Pop. But there are other men who complicate his understanding: his absent White father, Michael, who is being released from prison; his absent White grandfather, Big Joseph, who won’t acknowledge his existence; and the memories of his dead uncle, Given, who died as a teenager."
Sing, Unburied, Sing is a character study of a contemporary African-American family in Mississippi, but it is also a darkly beautiful story about ghosts. In the literal and figurative sense.
Ward creates a really strong sense of place. I could easily picture this rural poor Southern setting with its history of racial tensions that have never quite gone away. From the beginning, I knew this was going to be something special. The writing pulls you into this world, into the minds and lives of the vivid characters.
Into this setting, the author introduces the perspectives of Leonie, a drug addict increasingly haunted by the ghost of her brother, Given, who was shot by a white football player. The other main perspective is Leonie's teen son, Jojo, who is more of a parent to his young sister than Leonie has ever been. They live with Leonie's parents - known throughout as Mam and Pop - the former ravaged by chemo, and the latter haunted by the ghosts of his own dark past.
Many stories from the past emerge through Mam and Pop, including the story of young Richie, a prisoner from Pop's tales of his time in jail. Richie also occasionally takes the narrative in between Pop's revelations about the horrors inside Mississippi State Penitentiary, and the gradually-uncovered truth of Richie's fate.
There was more of a supernatural/ voodoo element then I first suspected but I really enjoyed it and it was a nice twist from the ordinary.
While a good book, I must say unfortunately that I found it slow going for most of the read.
Age Rating 14+. Drugs, swearing, lynching and a graphic goat butchering scene.(Also a lot of vomiting during a car ride.)
"Nick hates it when people call him a genius. Sure, he's going to Cambridge University aged 15, but he says that's just because he works hard. And, secretly, he only works hard to get some kind of attention from his workaholic father.
Not that his strategy is working.
When he arrives at Cambridge, he finds the work hard and socialising even harder. Until, that is, he starts to cox for the college rowing crew and all hell breaks loose..."
House of Windows follows Nick, who is going to Cambridge University at the age of fifteen. Nick is incredibly bright, but doesn’t like to be labelled as a ‘genius’. He just sees himself as hard working! First of all, Nick struggles with the transition to university, especially being so young. He finds the university work harder than he had anticipated and the socialisation is something he’s never really been good at. Nick joins the rowing crew, hoping to eventually make a friend so he doesn’t feel so isolated. To be honest the rowing and its team is a much smaller element then I expected.
Nick’s isolation from his peers is a really strong element to House Of Windows. I don’t think that Nick is a particularly likeable character at the start of the book, but as the book progresses, I started to understand and empathise with him more. I felt like Nick was craving recognition from his father who works really hard often avoiding Nick. At the heart of House Of Windows is a story about the importance of choosing your own family and feeling like you belong.
I found the beginning of this book abit of a slog and difficult to get through but once you do, you find a really strong emotional core. As you get deeper into the book you become more involved with the people Nick meets. There is Tim, Professor Gosswin and Ange.
Many of the other characters become so real you end up getting into emotional knots when something happens to them. I really loved the family dynamics and found them very heart warming. The one person who remains consistent is Nick’s father, who I have reserved a special place for in my ‘loathe-box’. As absentee father he excels and every time he let Nick down (again) a little piece of me broke and raged.
During the course book Nick grows from someone who pushes everyone away to a young man who can see that people helping him doesn’t mean they’re pitying him.
House of Windows doesn’t tie up in a pretty bow ending, it leaves you with reality that's looking upward. Not everything is fixed, people don’t always change but others can surprise you and there are journeys to be had.
Age Rating 12+. Nothing untoward but needs a more mature mind to understand the concepts.
"This is the story of Jeanette, adopted and brought up by her mother as one of God's elect. Zealous and passionate, she seems destined for life as a missionary, but then she falls for one of her converts.
At sixteen, Jeanette decides to leave the church, her home and her family, for the young woman she loves. Innovative, punchy and tender,
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a few days ride into the bizarre outposts of religious excess and human obsession."
The coming-of-age of a lesbian and aspiring preacher in a devout household, rejected by her church and her adoptive mother for her "unnatural passions". It sounds like something I would love, because I adore the shredding of religious hypocrisy, and am fascinated by people raised in such a crazy environment since it is so far removed from my own experience, having been brought up by a religious skeptic and generally sane woman.
But for some reason this book just didn't hit the mark. The writing was very strange, skirting around Jeanette really powerful feelings and watering it down so much I could no longer care. The prose was bizzare with lines such as "It runs right the way through life, though it starts with hyacinth growing, passes through milk monitor, and finishes somewhere at half-blue." Like what?? The book focused too much with the description and made it feel like I was reading a script but didn't have any actors to show me the emotions.
At the same time, we have these little asides where Percival's quest for the grail is told, drawing some comparison where I guess Jeanette is Percival and the grail is, umm, her sexuality or something? Her relationship with god? I wasn't following there, but I admit that bringing myths and the like into your story does make them seem magical and weighty and stuff.
Gripes aside, I was still interested in the story. I enjoyed exploring the character of the mother, the exploration of tight-knit church communities, and all the scenes where Jeanette is an outcast in school for telling bible stories about hellfire and damnation while totally convinced that she's doing a whole heap of good, and not understanding why people are ostracising her for it. I was surprised to find myself happy that Jeanette, unlike her family and congregation, was able to reconcile her beliefs and her emotions so early in life.
In short, I didn't get it, but appreciated what it was trying to do.
Age Rating 14+. There is a forced exorcism though not described and Jeanette is starved by her family for quite a few days.
"When Strato Nyman’s parents decide to relocate themselves – and their arguments- to the countryside, leaving his London school for Gifted and Talented children behind is just one of the new problems he faces. Being a genius, and the only black kid in the school, is going to make fitting in at his new school a real challenge and when the school bully singles Strato out for special attention he just wants to disappear. A strange encounter with a moustachioed man in a dusty bookshop offers a cryptic answer to his troubles, but can the power of invisibility really be useful to a scientist like Strato?"
Strato is a wonderful character: pragmatic and articulate, with a genuine thirst for knowledge, he is a believable, endearing and a quite unique narrator. His thorough explanation of particle physics experiments are told with awe and excitement that never bog the reader down, and his blossoming first romance with fellow science fan Susan Brown is a lovely addition.
Exploring parents on the brink of separation is a common subject for young teen novels but the injection of quiet magic and bright science give this story real energy. The lines between magic, science and reality are blurred together just as they should be, for they are all made of the ‘quantum froth’ on the ‘cosmic cappuccino’ that makes ‘science the magic that is around us all the time’. I loved the bringing together of magic and science, showing how they are not that different; magic merely a science we have yet to understand. The mysterious Dr Ojebande always dressed in black was a wonderful addition to the story, I loved the reveal at the end and his quiet practical type of magic. Overall a quick, light read that leaves a good taste in the mouth.
Age Rating 11+. All above board, does contain the mention of witchcraft if that bothers you.
"The only thing worse than forgetting her past . . . is remembering it.
When Freedom Airlines flight 121 went down over the Pacific Ocean, no one ever expected to find survivors. Which is why the sixteen-year-old girl discovered floating among the wreckage—alive—is making headlines across the globe.
Even more strange is that her body is miraculously unharmed and she has no memories of boarding the plane. She has no memories of her life before the crash. She has no memories period. No one knows how she survived. No one knows why she wasn’t on the passenger manifest. And no one can explain why her DNA and fingerprints can’t be found in a single database in the world.
Crippled by a world she doesn’t know, plagued by abilities she doesn’t understand, and haunted by a looming threat she can’t remember, Seraphina struggles to piece together her forgotten past and discover who she really is. But with every clue only comes more questions. And she’s running out of time to answer them.
Her only hope is a strangely alluring boy who claims to know her from before the crash. Who claims they were in love. But can she really trust him? And will he be able to protect her from the people who have been making her forget?"
I wanted to enjoy this book, to be honest I didn't have high hopes, but my eyes nearly fell out from rolling them so hard. You want me to believe that this girl loves this guy even though they barely know each other and most of their time spent together is in brief flashbacks.... NO. These are teenagers claiming their love transcends all things a la Romeo and Juliet. It's the whole, "They won't let us be together, let's run away" plot, when what you think you're getting is a novel that is more than just a tragic love story. Zen is very literally, the only boy Seraphina meets or has ever met for that matter and her life experiences are severely limited. This made it really hard for me to believe in their love and connect on that level.
The premise is what really drew me in. Seraphina is found at the scene of a plane crash with no memory of how she got there or anything from her past, including her name. As the novel wears on, the reader and Seraphina learn more and more about her past thanks mostly to the Mysterious Boy that she feels drawn to. In the beginning, I was really enjoying it because it was intriguing. However, once the romance manifested and consumed the plot, the original excitement I had began to die off. There is a scene where the love interest, Zen, is more focused on her remembering him instead of other memories I felt were a bit more important given her situation (AKA, bad guys are after her and she doesn't know why). Apparently, he didn't feel that was important, which struck me as odd. Sure, he told her the basics, but his main priority was her remembering their love. Yes, this is me rolling my eyes.
The time travel, ooops spoiler, is a really silly badly formulated idea which had me nearly laughing and her being an AI could have been interesting if handled with more delicacy. That also led to the question could she even love Zen. I mean had she been programmed to feel that emotion, and if so, why? Overall a slightly hot mess of a book that could have been okay with a few different plot devices.
Age Rating 12+. Nothing untoward that I can remember.
"It's the first thing they teach you when you start school. But they don't need to; your parents tell you when you're first learning how to say your name. It's drummed into you whilst you're taking your first stumbling steps. It's your lullaby. From the moment it first appears, you don't tell anyone the name on your wrist.
In Corin's world, your carpinomen - the name of your soul mate, marked indelibly on your wrist from the age of two or three - is everything. It's your most preciously guarded secret; a piece of knowledge that can give another person ultimate power over you. People spend years, even decades, searching for the one they're supposed to be with.
But what if you never find that person? Or you do, but you just don't love them? What if you fall for someone else - someone other than the name on your wrist?
And what if - like Corin - the last thing in the world you want is to be found?"
This was an okay story, but there were loads of plot holes, and I got bored, which was really disappointing cause I was really looking forward to this book!
Corin was a character that was difficult to really connect with. She dated boys with a certain name to fool people into thinking that that was the name on her wrist. For no reason but emo edge factor. She claimed not to have a problem with the whole ‘soul-mate’ thing but was really shocked when she learned that a married couple weren’t really soul mates, but then at other times totally disparaged the whole idea of soulmates. I really wished that even if she couldn’t tell anyone, the reader could have had more of a clue as to her direction, as she was so hot and cold on her own beliefs that just started to annoy me.
The two sister felt more broken then they should, logically, be. I understood Jacinta's story (Corin's sister) after it come out later in the book but Corin was so aggressive and mean for a reason I couldn't fathom. Of course losing a father must be awful but that doesn't make you a complete cynical bitch to everyone about everything.
Then there was the ending. I’m still not 100% sure exactly what happened, but by that point I was seriously annoyed and bored, but I do know that I didn’t like it. SPOILER. If the whole soulmate thing was just a rouse by the government to keep people in their place and make things easily controlled, wouldn't they have just killed Corin to keep their secret. That would have been a much better story, have Corin find out it was all a rouse earlier in the book, the government hunting her down and her with the aid of her sister team up with the anit-soulmate organisation and try to inform the world. (And end the ban on books because that was awful)
Corin however takes the easy way out, and side steps any world changing or interesting endings. I really wasn’t impressed, and it totally cemented how much I didn’t enjoy this book.
Age Rating 15+. Sex references, suicide attempts, bad language and a seriously dysfunctional family.
"Natacha Tormey was born into the infamous religious cult known as The Children of God. Abused, exploited, and brainwashed by ‘The Family’, Natacha’s childhood was stolen.
