Eilidh Reads

  I have loved reading books set in Scotland for years as someone who lives here and over the past year I have started to really look for books with neurodivergent representation, and in many ways particularly autistic representation and this is a book that has both so I was extremely excited to read it when I first saw it announced.  Truthfully, Yours follows Charlie who has found herself working in a bookshop in Scotland after going viral for publicly calling out an actor, on a show she loves, for being ableist, where she discovers Page who is a fellow actor on the show and she is going to need to share an apartment with. I really really loved reading and annotating this book for so many different reasons and it did everything I wanted it to do and more and I’m so grateful for that.  The representation was clearly done from personal experience which I really liked to see and helped it be authentic and something that I could connect with. I also really liked how this lead to many othe

  Last year I read This Christmas by Emma Heatherington and really enjoyed it, I found it to be a really fun Christmas romance so when I heard Emma Heatherington was releasing another Christmas book this year I knew that I definitely wanted to read it and see if she is an author who becomes one I turn to for every Christmas.  Maybe Next Christmas follows Bea and Ollie who meet when their plane back home to Ireland for Christmas is delayed but after the flight they leave as strangers until they bump into each other in London months later sparking a chain of events that neither could have predicted last Christmas.  As I’ve already mentioned I have previously read an Emma Heatherington Christmas book so kind of knew what to expect from this with the writing and characters going into it and it didn’t disappoint. I really enjoyed the writing and getting to know these two characters with their different points of views and past experiences. Emma creates a really magical cosy setting that you

 The Coast is Clear follows Izzy, a 26 year old widow with two young boys, who is ready for a new start so moves to live near her brother Luke. With Luke's help she finds the ideal house for her and her young boys, the owner, Zander, being her brother best friend and she finds that she begins to fall for as they spend more time together.  This was a quick read that I couldn't put down and found to be really heartwarming. I couldn't put it down and wanted to continue to read about these characters who I really loved reading about.  Izzy and Zander were both well developed and complex characters who understood each other really well and were characters that I wanted to learn more and more about and found their backstories to be well built into the plot and not just there for the sake of the characters having some dramatic backstory. Izzy clearly always looked out for the boys best interests and doing her best to create the best environment she could for them. Her grief was al

  This was my first Christmas read of the Year and it was a great one to kick off with. Once I was hooked I couldn't stop reading and ending up binging almost 200 pages in one day. I loved so many of the characters and the setting was so cosy, and ideal for a book lover.  The Tanglewood Bookshop follows Kazz who on the same day learns she has lost her job, is being evicted and her mum is moving to Spain so she decides to visit her best friend who owns a Tea Shop in the small Welsh village of Tanglewood. Where she is given the chance to open a Bookshop and meets Saul who is happy to show her around but she has been told doesn't have the best reputation.  This was a fantastic cosy Christmas read and it included so many things I love about festive books. The characters were the ideal book lovers to follow and as a book lover reading about book lovers is always a great experience. It was also nice that compared to many other book lovers whose lives revolve around books (which there

  The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman is the second book in The Thursday Murder Club series in which Elizabeth receives a letter from someone she has a long history with and needs help from her. Together the Thursday Murder Club go on the hunt for a killer and hope to find diamonds on the way too.  I really enjoyed book 1 in the series and since reading it I have been looking forward to continuing on with the series and reading about these characters solving more mysteries. I don’t necessarily read them for absolutely thrilling mysteries, instead to follow the characters and enjoy my time with them along with the writing which I have been really enjoying.  Over the course of the book we get to spend significantly more time with characters who we have already met and get to know them better, this included Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim from the Thursday Murder Club and Chris, Donna and Bogdan who were all involved in the first mystery that we saw in book 1. I enjoyed getting to l

  I found myself enjoying this read however the more I think about the more that I'm sure that there were things I think could have worked better for me and I find a 3/3.5 star rating is the right place to sit with my thoughts.  I really enjoyed reading about the characters and seeing what they were going to do along with watching their romance develop as the story went on. I don't think I've really read anything like this before in a really positive way and there were so many scenes I had a great time reading but there were also parts that I wasn't so taken by and definitely wished had been done differently, and found to be sat in the middle of two different directions I would potentially have enjoyed more.  I thought the con part would be good fun but in many ways I found that it and the romance were competing for page space with neither really winning. The parts of the con that we saw definitely weren't the parts that interested me and I would have either liked a

 As someome who has been a Karen M. McManus fan for around 4 years now, 4 books binged when I first discovered her and 4 highly anticipated and read upon release, I always get excited when I see she has a new book out and Such Charming Liars was no exception.  Such Charming Liars follows Kat and Liam, whose parents were briefly married for 48 hours and realise that may not be the only thing they have in common when things go wrong and someone dies at billionaire Ross Sutherland's birthday party.  This definitely had a different feel to Karen M. McManus's previous books which have felt a lot more contemporary with characters who you feel like you could meet on the street, and while Kat does have the same realness to her nobody is bumping into her the same way they are Bronwyn and Nate. Saying this though it still had the other key elements I have come to associate with her books - characters you can't trust nor rule out, a plot that keeps you on the edge of your seat and twi

  I read Guided earlier in the year and really loved it so when she announced her latest YA book I knew I really needed to read it and it also did not disappoint. Once I was hooked by this story I could not put it down and needed to know who the killer was and just how close to the characters they were.  Mirage follows Georgia who lives on a small island off the coast of Northumberland and when her cousin Cindy from the US comes to stay over Halloween, she doesn’t expect anything to be all that different from normal until the teens on the island start dying one after the other.  As I already mentioned once I was hooked I could not put this book down which is a sign of a good mystery and well done plotting. The more I read from Emma the more I see how skilled she is as a writer with how many different books she can write and how the tone can always be so well done but so different. I suspected so many different characters to be the killer at different points, and the reasons why Georgia

  At the end of last year and the start of this year I read The Letters of Enchantment duology by Rebecca Ross so when I saw this duology and it’s new covers in Waterstones recently I knew without even reading the blurb I had to pick it up and read it, and I was right. Now after finishing book 1, I have ordered book 2 and cannot wait to see where the story is going to go.  I don’t want to say too much about what this book is about because I went in without knowing what it was about and that worked really well for me and I would recommend doing that too. What I will say though is if you like unique fantasy worlds, well developed characters with depth, books surrounding knowledge and family then I would definitely recommend picking it up and seeing what you think, it is slow but it also worth it.  The story is split into four parts all of which are named after the place in which Brienna is staying in for the majority of that part which I found to be really cool and liked seeing the name

  This is such a nostalgic, cute read that I couldn't put down and loved flying through. It reminded me of so many books and films I loved growing up and it is one I will definitely be gifting to young girls I know that can love it in the way I loved Rainbow Magic growing up.  The Dolls House at Winfell Farm follows Laura’s dolls after she moves away to university and the dolls get moved to the attic, where they meet one of Laura’s other old toys and have to learn the importance of friendship, working together and standing up for what they believe is important.  While this is written for a certain audience of children around the age of 7 I think that it can be read and enjoyed by those of all ages that enjoy a good story and want to be taken back to the magic of their childhood.  I was hooked from early on wanting to know where Dani would take everything and how it would all end. I grew to really love the dolls and all of their different characters and personalities, I never got th

A Girl Can Dream follows Hazel who has gone on holiday with her brother and best friend to Venice after getting out of a bad relationship with an older boyfriend to celebrate becoming herself again. Until it seems like Venice isn’t all it seems and more could be going on than what meets the eye.  I’m not so sure about this book, I was confused for much of it as we jumped timelines frequently and a lot was going on in our ‘current’ timeline. I understand why it was written the way it was and how many could love it but I don’t think it worked for me. I didn’t understand what was happening in Venice and where the story was trying to go. I didn’t feel invested until the last 100 pages and couldn’t really care about where the story was going, nor was I particularly invested in Hazel’s overall story.  Saying this I do understand what message was trying to be told by Emily Barr and I do think it was done in a very powerful way. Books like this share powerful messages and I think they are impo

Why did it take me so long to read this? I loved it and it brought a great reading experience with it. Tilly in Technicolor is Mazey Edding’s YA debut that follows two neurodivergent teens who are travelling around Europe and fall for each other as doing so.  I had a great time following Tilly and Oliver across Europe, seeing how they see the world and their relationship develop. These two neurodivergent characters brought me so much joy and I would just keep reading about them for books and books. It was great to see both of these characters grow throughout the story and see who they were at the end of the book compared to the start of the book.  I also really liked travelling through Europe with these characters and seeing how they struggled with the environments around them, and the descriptions of those moments were really well done and it truly did seem like Mazey knew what she was talking about and understood what it feels like to be in these situations.  While I didn’t love all

  I am a massive My Mechanical Romance fan and have persuaded so many of my friends to read it since I first read it I want to say two years ago so when Alexene Farol Follmuth announced she would be coming out with a new Young Adult nerdy romance book I was honestly so excited and while I don't love it as much as I do My Mechanical Romance it as still a great Young Adult nerdy romance that I had a good time with.  Twelfth Knight follows Viola who is tired of being told she should try and be more likeable just because she's a girl so she escapes into the world of her favourite online game Twelfth Knight where with her male character she can just play as herself. Along with Jack who discovers the game after an injury and they find that they make a surprisingly good team together.  As I've already mentioned this wasn't the same five star read that My Mechanical Romance was, however I still loved my experience of reading it and couldn't put the book down, wanting to kno

  I wasn't really certain what to expect going into this other than it being a Young Adult Contemporary Romance with a chess aspect but I found the characters to have much depth and loved following them. The First Move follows Juliet and Ronan who both play online chess and struggle with their own things in their lives that make these chess games their escapes. All the characters in this book, Juliet, Roman, and all of our side characters were really strong characters with well-developed backgrounds and lots going on in their lives.  We also had great representation in this story with some characters having more difficult home lives and Juliet's arthritis that she finds particularly challenging to deal with at school. Something about this I also particularly liked was it wasn't just Juliet and Ronan who had developed characters and backgrounds many of our key side characters did too, not all of them as that would have been far too much information, but the ones we saw frequ

  Yours from the Tower by Sally Nicholls is a young adult historical fiction book that follows three friends who have recently left school and are sharing their lives that are now becoming vastly different in letters to one another.  I really liked how this book was written, the entire story is written as letters which isn’t a style I have read before in a book but it is now a style I want to read more of because of how much I enjoyed it and found it worked to tell the story. Even with it being in letters I felt like I got to know the all three of the girls really well and understand almost all parts of them even if they were hiding things from those they were writing too.  We follow three girls as I have previously mentioned, Tirzah, Sophia and Polly who are all living in different parts of the country and writing letters to each other. I liked cycling between each of their lives and seeing what all of them were doing and what their struggles were. I felt like I got to understand them