It’s officially candle season

Hi all, I’m super excited to introduce you to my latest project, Chai Lights Co. It’s my new candle shop on Etsy where I’ll be selling my homemade scented soy candles, all designed and inspired by original poetry.

My first summer-inspired candle is available to buy in the shop now (UK buyers only) – it’s called ‘Tropical Summer’ and smells just like a Pina Colada. So if you’re looking for something that will remind you of those sunny beach days amidst all this English rain, or perhaps a thoughtful gift for a friend, please do take a look!

I decided to start up Chai Lights Co because I love the warm cosy feeling of having a candle on when it’s dark and cold outside, and even better I love reading poetry by candlelight. So I thought, why not combine the two?

I also think candles make fantastic gifts, and there’s nothing that feels more authentic than buying a homemade gift with a unique message on it that you know your friend will love.

I’m currently preparing some gorgeous new Autumn candles for the shop, which will be coming later this week! So please do keep an eye out for those too and follow me on insta @chai_lights or facebook for a regular dose of cosy #bookstagram photos and insta poetry!

Book review: Origin by Dan Brown

“Here comes the new Brown, same as the old Brown”.

*Spoilers below*

Origin is the fifth novel featuring the most famous Semiotician in the world, professor Robert Langdon.

The novel is set in Spain, and ranges from the Guggenheim in Bilbao, through Barcelona to the Royal Palace in Madrid.

A former student of Langdon, Edmond Kirsch is now a billionaire Futurist, and is hosting an event at the Guggenheim that will unveil a discovery that will destroy the foundations of the Abrahamic religions. Naturally he invites his old mentor.

Guess what – spoiler alert – Kirsch gets assassinated, and Langdon finds himself on the run with the stunning Ambra Vidal – museum director and fiancée of the prince of Spain.

Cue lots of hidden historical facts, and religious extremists, all related at the layman level, and the template that has brought Brown such success is complete. Clue after clue falls to the intrepid duo, puzzling as they do over Nietzsche, Blake, the artist Miro, and various famous sites in Spain. They get helpful dig-outs from Winston, a super-AI computer with attitude.

The story is typical Brown, building up the tension through potentially plausible historical proofs, enigmatic cryptograms, cliff-hanger moments, and magniloquent prose, while hoping to court controversy on the way. The reader knows what they are going to get, and by and large they get it.

For the fans, they will love Origin. It is an entertaining read, great for an airport terminal, but the potential of the story is, for me, not fully realised. The reveal(s) fell flat, and not as controversy-inducing as his previous outings. Airplane fodder.

Happy new year everyone! This review is a guest post by fellow bookworm Sean. Visit his book blog for more excellent reviews.

Today is also your last chance to download my ebook ‘This Really Happened’ for free on amazon. Please take a look! 

 

5 Biggest Cliches in YA Romance

Recently, I’ve spent some time working my way through the bestseller list of YA romance fiction – everything from John Green to hit debuts such as ‘Everything Everything’ by Nicola Yoon, which was recently made into a movie.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the book. But for now I’m done with YA fiction and going back to my usual genre of world lit, classics and general gritty depressing stories that leave me in existential doubt for days afterwards. As charming as it sometimes is to indulge in the idealistic world of manic pixie dream girls (MPDGs), deep conversations under the stars and passionate, obsessive love affairs, it’s all starting to feel a bit fake. Here are the 5 biggest cliches that I think have been way overdone in YA these days:

1. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She’s beautiful. She’s deep. She’s probably a metaphor. She’s ‘broken’ but ‘strong’ and wants to make cryptic remarks about the meaning of life on a rooftop at 3am. She’s ‘not like the other girls’ because she’s a special snowflake and apparently has the ability to understand life better than everyone else, despite being a teenager with no actual life experience. Most likely she has a mental illness that’s probably being romanticised by the male love interest. Examples: basically anything written by John Green, pretty much ever.
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2. The MPDGs favourite activity? Astronomy of course. Because relating everything in your life to the workings of the universe automatically makes you deep apparently. Sorry, no. It doesn’t make you deep. It makes you sound kind of egotistical and occasionally like a bad science textbook. Example: Everything Everything by Nicola Yoon
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3. The dead parent/sibling/relative trope. Quite often it just seems like a lazy attempt to remove the adults from the story so the author doesn’t have to write them. In reality, family relationships are a pretty damn huge part of teenager’s lives. It’d be nice to see some more YA novels accurately reflect that.
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4. Romanticising mental illness. This one worries me. While I have read some books which have given the topic the gravity it deserves (Laurie Halse Anderson does this excellently) I’ve also read many more that treat it as ‘teenage angst’ or an interesting quirk to make the character seem broody, mysterious and ultimately more attractive. Yeah, no. Just don’t. Being depressed isn’t sexy, it’s just extremely unpleasant and soul-destroying really.
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5. Instalove! Because why spend valuable pages on having the characters actually get to know each other when they could be discussing the stars and their undying love instead.

What tropes and cliches do you hate in YA fiction? 

On a side note, if you want to make me super happy please go download my new novel ‘This Really Happened’ here. It’s FREE for the next four days!

Book Review: This Really Happened by Annmarie McQueen -No Spoilers-

Thank you Katelyn for the lovely review!

This Really Happened by Annmarie McQueen

Published: February 25th, 2017

Source: Kindle Edition, 250 pages

Summary:

I felt like I was seeing it all in slow motion; the car, sleek and black, careening around the corner, the sound of wheels skidding. Headlights illuminating her dazed expression like a spotlight as it made contact. Then I heard screaming, distant and muffled, as if I was underwater. It took me a long time to realise that I was the one screaming.

Six University flatmates.
A girl learning what freedom feels like.
A boy with a past that won’t stay buried.
One night, one mistake, that changes everything.
Let’s play a guessing game. Two truths and a lie.
Which is which?

Rating: I gave this 4/5 stars on Goodreads!

Thoughts:

**I received a digital copy of this book for free from the author in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are…

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Top 5 Halloween Reads

Happy Halloween! To celebrate my favourite time of year, I’ve compiled a list of my favourite creepy, hair-raising, spooktacular reads that will give you chills and get you into the holiday spirit.

1. We have always lived in the castle by Shirley Jackson
   
   Merricat lives with her sister in the house where her entire family was poisoned. When their uncle visits, their fragile peace is shattered and revelations that will change everything come to the surface. Isolation, superstition and witchcraft are major themes of this horror classic. While not heavy on action, this creepy novel is all about atmosphere, creating tension and leaving just enough hints to let your imagination do the rest.

 

 

2. The Wasp Factory by Ian Banks 

A first-person narrative told from the point of view of a boy who murdered three people, including his own brother, and then stopped. Psychologically shocking and terrifying, with a great twist at the end. Definitely worth a read.

 

 

 

 

 

3. Dark Places by Gillian Flynn

From the author of ‘Gone girl’ comes an even more gruesome psychological thriller and murder mystery, as Abbie Day confronts her past and tries to solve the murder of her family to prove her brother innocent. Like Flynn’s other novels, this had a well-structured plot, well-developed characters and a surprising twist at the end that I didn’t see coming.

 

 

 

 

 

4. Angel blood by John Singleton

A massively under-appreciated YA dystopian novel with some really interesting ideas about how disability and outcasts are treated in society. It follows four children, who are failed biological experiments and suffering strange physical disabilities because of it, and their lives in a type of Asylum called ‘The bin’. Creepy but also incredibly sad, this one is definitely one of the most well-written and unique dystopians I’ve read.

 

 

 

 

5. Birdy by Jess Vallance

This one’s not that well known, but I thought it was a great YA example of the unreliable narrator. I really liked how most of it seemed like pretty normal high school stuff, but with sinister undertones that gradually became more obvious towards the end. They always say that the key ingredient of horror is turning the mundane into something scary, which this book does very effectively.

 

 

 

 

What’s your favourite spooky read? Let me know in the comments!

Book Review: Stick Out Your Tongue by Ma Jian

I don’t know where to start. This book is fascinating, perverse, gritty and realistic, though it  probably falls more into the magical realism genre. I don’t really know how to classify it or describe it other than ‘strange’ but in a good way.

The book is essentially a short memoir of Ma Jian’s travels through Tibet, with a fictional twist. He dives into the stories of the locals he meets on the way, infusing his charismatic writing style with a stunning insight into human nature.

The Tibet he introduces us to is a dark place, a region ravaged by conflict and the Chinese government’s brutal campaign against it’s unique way of life. He completely destroys the fantasy that Tibet is a spiritual haven, free of corruption and sin. In his short stories men sleep with their mothers and daughters, a woman who died in childbirth is hacked to pieces and fed to vultures in a sky burial, and a young girl dies in a frozen river during a Buddhist initiation rite.

His stories are not pleasant to read, nor do they end happily. There is no satisfying conclusion at the end of them; they’re just a mosaic of different lives, all connected by the physical and cultural setting of Tibet. Ma Jian is a brave writer. He’s unafraid of shying away from the truth, no matter how gruesome and horrid it may be. Through his vivid descriptions he recreates his own authentic experience of Tibet as a region being suffocated by the tight grip of religion, corruption and political upheaval.

As he explains in the afterward, “westerners idealise Tibetans as gentle, godly people untainted by base desires and greed. But in my experience, Tibetans can be as corrupt and as brutal as the rest of us. To idealise them is to deny their humanity.” Perhaps that is the most important lesson of this book. To romanticise another culture and its people is a form of self-delusion, one that leads to stereotyping and wrong assumptions.

Another interesting fact about this book is that it was actually banned in China, which of course led to it becoming incredibly popular on the black market as it had the appeal of the forbidden! Ma Jian later moved to the U.K and currently lives in London with his wife who is also the translator of his books.

I would highly recommend this book, and Ma Jian’s other travel memoir ‘Red Dust’. He writes about China with a chilling honesty that makes him, in my opinion at least, one of the most interesting Chinese writers alive today.

Who’s your favourite Chinese writer? Comment below!

Announcing A Writer’s Path Writers Club: Creating Benefits For Writers

Happy October! Autumn photoshoots

Happy October! Only 30 days to go until Halloween! Ah I’m so excited, this is definitely my favourite time of year. I love the bittersweet nostalgia of autumn, how serene and calm and beautiful it is. The trees are all Gryffindor colours, the evenings are dusky and spooky, the cafes are selling pumpkin spice lattes. There’s nothing better than crawling into bed and getting cozy with a good book and a scented candle. What could be more hygge than that?

To celebrate this beautiful season, here are some favourites from a recent autumn-themed photoshoot I did with my gorgeous friend Emily.  You can see my full portfolio here. 

 

What’s your favourite thing about autumn? Let me know in the comments! 

River Currents

Sometimes I think of what we could

Have been

And in my fantasy it’s always

beautiful

But in reality

It may not have been

And the most beautiful thing of all about this

Is that you can be whatever you want

But my love for you is mine alone

Impervious to change

And it’s something I can hold onto

Because fantasies can never be broken

In the same way reality can

So my love can stay pure and innocent

In the same blossoming form it started out as

And I will never learn to hate you

Because a love that never truly happened can never truly die.

 

Tried out a new style of poetry today inspired by some of the instapoetry accounts I’m following at the moment. The fluid, undulating structure is meant to represent river currents and the fantasy, dream-like atmosphere of the poem. What do you think? Let me know!

On a side note, my novel ‘This Really Happened’ is free on amazon until 30/09. Would love it if you could download it! Thanks!

This Really Happened: Kindle countdown deal

I felt like I was seeing it all in slow motion; the car, sleek and black, careening around the corner, the sound of wheels skidding. Headlights illuminating her dazed expression like a spotlight as it made contact. Then I heard screaming, distant and muffled, as if I was underwater. It took me a long time to realise that I was the one screaming.

Erin has never really known who she is or what she wants. That is, until she meets her new University flatmate Allen.

Reckless, eccentric and creative, Allen is everything Erin doesn’t have the courage to be and she’s immediately drawn to him. She’s sure he feels it too, until he starts dating their mutual friend Charlotte.

Then one night changes everything.

When a drunken mistake leaves Charlotte fighting for her life, the victim of a hit-and-run, there’s only one question everyone’s asking: what really happened? Erin has an answer to that, more than one in fact, but running from the truth is far easier than facing up to it…

 

My latest New Adult novel ‘This Really Happened’ will be available at the special reduced price of $0.99 for the next 7 days on the Kindle countdown deal! Get it now while it’s cheap!