#5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook and you can learn more about it here. It occurs every Monday when we post about 5 books on our TBR.
This wasn’t the easiest, but it was fun! ‘Child’ feels like such a flexible word – I’m a grown adult, in my 30s, but I’m still my dad’s “child”! Teens don’t feel like a child but to me they really still are. So finding books that fit ‘child’ in some way was kind of hard, but I tried to focus on books that centred around children in some way.
#5OnMyTBR August 28th: Child
His Dark Materials: The Complete BBC Radio Collection Full-Cast Dramatization by Philip Pullman
Format: Audio
Genre: Fantasy
Age: Middle Grade – Young Adult
All three BBC radio dramatisations of the best-selling fantasy trilogy – plus bonus material.
A breathtaking epic spanning multiple worlds, His Dark Materials follows the adventures of Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry, two children catapulted into a life-or-death struggle to save the future of the Cosmos.
In Northern Lights, 11-year-old Lyra discovers dark forces at work involving kidnapped children and a mysterious substance called ‘Dust’. With her shape-shifting daemon, Pantalaimon, she leaves her Oxford college home and embarks on a dangerous journey to the frozen North, aided by armoured bears, Gyptians and a witch-queen….
The Subtle Knife sees 12-year-old Will finding an opening into the haunted world of Cittàgazze, where daemon-destroying Spectres roam. There he meets Lyra, and together they acquire the most powerful weapon in all the universes – an object many would kill to possess.
In The Amber Spyglass, a colossal war is brewing in Heaven, and Lyra and Will have been separated. They must find each other and journey onward – even into the World of the Dead….
The Old One and the Sea by Lex H. Jones
Format: Paperback
Genre: Horror
Age: Childrens
Sinister Horror Company presents a children’s book about the secret childhood of a young boy called Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
Howard is a lonely, isolated boy who lives in the run-down seaside town of Innsmouth. Most of the town’s men left to fight the Great War and didn’t come back, and those that did, like Howard’s neighbour Mr Derleth, brought their own scars and strange stories with them. None quite so strange as what is about to happen to Howard, however.
An undersea earthquake brings a strange black reef to the surface just off the coast of Innsmouth, and with it something else. Something old, and forgotten, and every bit as lonely as the young boy who discovers it. What follows is a unique and secret friendship that will change the life of both Howard and his bizarre new friend forever.
All Fall Down by Sally Nicholls
Format: ebook
Genre: Historical
Age: Young Adult
A deadly contagion races through England…
Isabel and her family have nowhere to run from a disease that has killed half of Europe. When the world she knows and loves ends forever, her only weapon is courage.
The Black Death of 1349 was the deadliest plague in human history. All Fall Down is a powerful and inspiring story of survival in the face of real life horror.
Girls of Little Hope by Dale Halvorsen, Sam Beckbessinger
Format: ebook
Genre: Horror
Age: Young Adult
A chilling and eerie tale of monsters, teen angst and small-town America for fans of Stranger Things, The Thing, and the 1990s
Three girls went into the woods. Only two came back, covered in blood and with no memory of what happened. Or did they?
Being fifteen is tough, tougher when you live in a boring-ass small town like Little Hope, California (population 8,302) in 1996. Donna, Rae and Kat keep each other sane with the fervour of teen girl friendships, zine-making and some amateur sleuthing into the town’s most enduring mysteries: a lost gold mine, and why little Ronnie Gaskins burned his parents alive a decade ago.
Their hunt will lead them to a hidden cave from which only two of them return alive. Donna the troublemaker can’t remember anything. Rae seems to be trying to escape her memories of what happened, while her close-minded religious family presses her for answers. And Kat? Sweet, wannabe writer Kat who rebelled against her mom’s beauty pageant dreams by getting fat? She’s missing. Dead. Or terribly traumatised, out there in the woods, alone.
As the police circle and Kat’s frantic mother Marybeth starts doing some investigating of her own, Rae and Donna will have to return to the cave where they discover a secret so shattering that no-one who encounters it will ever be the same.
Hazel Hill is Gonna Win This One by Maggie Horne
Format: ebook
Genre: Contemporary
Age: Middle Grade
A funny, feminist, and queer contemporary middle grade debut that follows twelve-year-old loner Hazel Hill, who, after one of her classmates is harassed online, devises a plan to catch the school’s golden boy in the act.
Seventh-grader Hazel Hill is too busy for friends. No, really. She needs to focus on beating her nemesis, the gorgeous and smart Ella Quinn, in order to win the school-wide speech competition after last year’s embarrassing hyperbole/hyperbowl mishap that cost her first place. But when Hazel discovers Ella is being harassed by popular golden boy, Tyler Harris, she has to choose between winning and doing the right thing. No one would believe that a nice boy like Tyler would harass and intimidate a nice girl like Ella, but Hazel knows the truth—and she’s determined to prove it.
In this deeply relatable, surprisingly humorous, and wonderfully empowering middle grade about friendship, finding your voice, and standing up for what you believe in, sometimes you have to lose in order to win.
As always if you’ve read any of these, I’d love to know what you thought!
Unwrapping Words 