My Latest Obsession…

So today I wanted to do something a little different and share with you guys something I have been loving lately. It is book related so I figured it suited the blog and with so many people starting Uni and are back at school now I thought this might be helpful to some of you. So you may know that I am OBSESSED with bookmarks and actually collect them, and you may also know that I was quite ill recently. And so my lovely friend and fellow blogger Ellie at Musings of a Bookshop Girl actually introduced me to this obsession when she gifted me some mini magnetic travel bookmarks as a get well soon gift! I absolutely loved the idea of having instead of one big bookmark lots of little ones especially as being a book blogger I like to mark off several pages for quotes I want to use in reviews or references that kind of thing and because I found them so useful I went straight on to Amazon and bought some more.

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You can get cute different designs but what I found really useful were the emotion, punctuation and word mini i-clips. I’d never come across this kind of bookmark before and immediately thought how useful they would be. Marking off a sad face with something I didn’t like about the book, a question mark for a word I needed to look up, an @ sign for something I needed to look up about the book online, they are so, so, handy for marking a quick quote or word in a book, selecting why your marking it off instead of actually having to write a note to yourself explaining and ending up having lots of bits of paper that tend to fall out and bulk up the book. And best of all, on the back of each clip is an arrow so you can point exactly to the sentence you’re referring to instead of having to read the whole page again to find the quote you bookmarked.

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On top of being quick and easy to use the little magnets stay put and are nice and secure. They are so tiny that they look really discreet in your book and don’t make it too bulky. I like to store mine in the little plastic holders they come in using one for useful symbols and the other for the cute ones that are just for fun. I usually keep them on my desk so I can quickly grab one when I need it but they’re small enough to carry on the go as well. The i-clip bookmarks featured in this post are by Peter Pauper Press and can be found on Amazon for a mere £2.99 for eight. These little bookmarks really are a book bloggers best friend and have already been so useful to me so I really wanted to share a little post about them with you guys in case you’re a fellow book blogger, if you’re at school or uni and could use them for text books or required reading, or if you simply just love the idea and find them super cute and dinky! I have fallen in love with these little babies and have found them super useful when writing my book reviews, hopefully after reading this post some of you will try them out and fall in love with them too!

Review for Breathe by Sarah Crossan

Breathe by Sarah Crossan
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Release Date: 11th October 2012
Genre: YA, Dystopain, Science Fiction
Rating: 5/5 stars
Source: Received from the publisher for review



Goodreads Summary:
"When oxygen levels plunge in a treeless world, a state lottery decides which lucky few will live inside the Pod. Everyone else will slowly suffocate. Years after the Switch, life inside the Pod has moved on. A poor Auxiliary class cannot afford the oxygen tax which supplies extra air for running, dancing and sports. The rich Premiums, by contrast, are healthy and strong. Anyone who opposes the regime is labelled a terrorist and ejected from the Pod to die. Sixteen-year-old Alina is part of the secret resistance, but when a mission goes wrong she is forced to escape from the Pod. With only two days of oxygen in her tank, she too faces the terrifying prospect of death by suffocation. Her only hope is to find the mythical Grove, a small enclave of trees protected by a hardcore band of rebels. Does it even exist, and if so, what or who are they protecting the trees from? A dystopian thriller about courage and freedom, with a love story at its heart."

Review 
Breathe is a 2012 release that I’d been looking forward to for months so much so that I pushed aside a load of books I was meant to read first because I couldn’t wait to read it! Even though I had high expectations before starting this book Breathe by far passed those expectations so much so that I predict that Breathe will be the next big dystopian and up there with the best of its genre equal to books like The Hunger Games and Divergent, in my opinion, it deserves to be just as successful.

What initially attracted me to Breathe was the idea of a world without trees and therefore a world where society is totally dependent on the government to provide oxygen for them. As an asthmatic I know all too well how scary it is not to be able to breathe properly which is something that plenty of people take for granted and so the concept of a world that is suffocating seemed so terrifying to me. If the premise alone wasn’t intriguing enough there are plenty of exciting twists and turns along the way that make this book even more incredible.

I think what I enjoyed most about Breathe is that this future is highly plausible. There’s definitely a moral to the book of looking after our planet but it’s very subtle and never feels preachy. Sarah Crossan simply lays out a fictional glimpse into a future without the things we take for granted and believe will always be there and that alone is enough to get the message across.

Breathe is told in alternating chapters between three characters. Quinn a Premium boy whose father is high up in society and so he has never had to worry about not having enough oxygen and yet he’s different to other Premiums and doesn’t act like he’s better than anyone else in society. Then there is Bea, Quinn’s best friend, who is an Auxiliary. Her mother and father work hard to the point of illness just so that the three of them have enough air to get by. And then there’s Alina who’s part of a rebel group, and when she meets Quinn and Bea by chance, shows them that life inside and outside of the Pod is not all it seems. I loved having three very different voices narrating the story and it was so interesting to see what life is like for three different members of society.

Although I liked all three main characters my favourite hands down was Bea. Bea works really hard to help her parents and to hopefully one day become a Premium so she’s able to support them in their old age. Bea’s such a genuinely nice person and is really brave, selfless, and strong making her an inspirational heroine. She also happens to be hopelessly in love with Quinn although he’s never seen her as anything more than a friend. My heart really went out to Bea and I enjoyed reading her chapters the most.

Overall Breathe is a wonderfully imagined, highly developed dystopian. I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough and was so sad to reach the end. With a break-neck pace, conspiracy at every turn, and characters you can’t help but love Breathe is a dystopian that fans of the genre won’t want to miss out on!

My October/ Halloween Reading Pile Vlog

This is my very first to be read pile for the month ahead video, so if you like it be sure to let me know if this is something you would like to see every month! I love this time of year and one of the things I love most about it is having a big ol’ pile of scary books to get me excited for Halloween. Hopefully this video will help introduce you to some scary sounding books if you’re looking for the perfect Halloween read, enjoy!

   

If you’ve read any of these books and thought they were scary let me know which one you liked best, I’m looking to save the best one for Halloween itself! What’s on your to be read pile this month? Any plans for Halloween? I’d love to know!

Letterbox Love (11)

Letterbox Love is a new meme hosted by Lynsey @ Narratively Speaking for UK based book bloggers to showcase the books that they’ve received each week.

   

Books Featured in this Video
Tiger Lily by Jodi Lynn Anderson
Noughts and Crosses Series by Malorie Blackman
Dance of Shadows by Yelana Black
Hide and Seek by Sara Shepard
Mystic City by Theo Lawrence
Crewel by Gennifer Albin

For more information on the books featured click on the title of each book and it will take you to the books Goodreads page for a full description and so you can add it to your wishlists! If you’ve read or are looking forward to any of the books I got feel free to let me know what you thought about them or request reviews and such in the comments. And if you decided to do a Letterbox Love, Book Haul, IMM, Showcase Sunday, Mailbox Monday or whatever else featuring the books you got this week leave me a link as I’d love to check out your books too! ^_^

I’m Back!

So even though I’m still not 100% I’m getting there! And today I spent the afternoon updating the blog getting it ready for the Autumn and Winter so I can start posting again and I’m so happy to be getting back into blogging! Because I’m not 100% better yet and I haven’t blogged or written a review properly in months I’m going to be dipping my toe into the blogging waters to start with and taking it slow and steady until I’m caught up. Luckily with my headaches I didn’t read a lot whilst I’ve been away so you guys haven’t been missing out on much. But now I’m getting back into reading I can’t wait to write some reviews again and let you guys know which books I’ve been loving. First things first though, I’m going to be making a couple of Youtube video’s over the weekend simply because they’re quicker and easier to do and me talking to a camera is not as harsh on my head as typing up a post. I’m planning on doing a Halloween TBR Pile video, a Letterbox Love, and possibly trying out a video review for the first time. I’ve also got a guest post with an author planned, some back logged reviews to catch up on and of course I’ll be doing my reading picks for Halloween as I do every year later on in the month.

Anyway this is really just a quick update to let you guys know that you can be expecting some posts from me really soon, and that I’ve missed blogging and reading so much and am so happy to be back in the game. Thank you guys for being so patient whilst I was gone I hope you had a wonderful end to the summer and are looking forward to hearing about some excellent books to snuggle up with under a blanket with a mug of hot chocolate as the nights and the cold start drawing in!