Middle Grade on Monday: The House at the Edge of Magic – Amy Sparkes

Nine is an orphan pickpocket determined to escape her life in the Nest of a Thousand Treasures. When she steals a house-shaped ornament from a mysterious woman’s purse, she knocks on its tiny door and watches it grow into a huge, higgledy-piggeldy house. Inside she finds a host of magical and brilliantly funny characters, including……

Review Dracula’s Child – J.S. Barnes

Dracula returns… It has been some years since Jonathan and Mina Harker survived their ordeal in Transylvania and, vanquishing Count Dracula, returned to England to try and live ordinary lives. But shadows linger long in this world of blood feud and superstition – and, the older their son Quincy gets, the deeper the shadows that……

Middle Grade on Monday: Glassheart – Katharine Orton

Through the glass, the magic is waiting… Nona and her uncle travel everywhere together, replacing stained-glass windows in war-torn buildings. When a mysterious commission takes them to the lonely moors of Dartmoor, Nona discovers a wild and powerful magic which threatens everything. Can Nona protect those she loves – even if it means fighting darkness……

Review The Journals of a Victorian Traveller – Martin Laurie

The Journals of a Victorian Traveller contains the transcribed and edited journals of Julia Biddulph who travelled the world with her husband during the last two decades of the 19th Century. The journals had remained unread since being rescued from the ruins of a bombed house in Canterbury during the Second World War. This book……

What I ate… (#Vegan)

So… this has been a while. The last ‘What I ate’ post was just before I went into two months of eating at work so I was planning to do a meal prep version. And then I didn’t. And now it is 4 months later and I have got all these pictures of food I……

Middle Grade on Monday: The Undadoptables – Hana Tooke

In all the years that Elinora Gassbeek has been matron of the Little Tulip Orphanage, not once have the Rules for Baby Abandonment been broken. Until the autumn of 1886, when five babies are left in outrageous circumstances: one in a tin toolbox, one in a coal bucket, one in a picnic hamper, one in……

Review Bringing Back the Beaver – Derek Gow

Bringing Back the Beaver is farmer-turned-ecologist Derek Gow’s inspirational and often riotously funny firsthand account of how the movement to rewild the British landscape with beavers has become the single most dramatic and subversive nature conservation act of the modern era. Since the early 1990s – in the face of outright opposition from government, landowning elites……

Goodbye October – Hello November

October was a weird month for me. The Halloween decorations came out, and many of the spooky books I’d saved up were read. We went on a little trip to the beach for my dad’s 65th… though only days before that the country went into semi-lockdown again so we couldn’t really do anything. The semi-lockdown……

Happy Halloween 🎃 👻

Review The Once and Future Witches – Alix E. Harrow

In 1893, there’s no such thing as witches. There used to be, in the wild, dark days before the burnings began, but now witching is nothing but tidy charms and nursery rhymes. If the modern woman wants any measure of power, she must find it at the ballot box. But when the Eastwood sisters –……