Bogormen

Title: What Alice Forgot
Author: Liane Moriarty
Genre: Fiction
Rating: 4/5
# pages: 528
Date read: June, 2016

Alice is twenty-nine. She adores sleep, chocolate, and her ramshackle new house. She's newly engaged to the wonderful Nick and is pregnant with her first baby.

There's just one problem. All of that was ten years ago...

Alice has slipped in a step-aerobics class, hit her head and lost a decade. Now she's a grown-up, bossy mother of three in the middle of a nasty divorce and her beloved sister Elisabeth isn't speaking to her. This is her life but not as she knows it.

Clearly Alice has made some terrible mistakes. Just how much can happen in a decade?

Can she ever get back to the woman she used to be?


I really wanted to give this book 5 stars. For most of it I lived the book, in a way that I haven't done for a long time. I loved seeing people react to "young Alice" and was fascinated by the idea of having lost all memory of the last 10 years (how would I react if I thought it was 2006 and woke up to 2016? Probably wouldn't be quite as big a shock as for Alice, as there haven't been quite as many changes in my life - but still!).

Unfortunately the end was a bit of a let-down. Once Alice gets her memory back, everything is just resolved far too quickly. I did like the way it was resolved, but would have appreciated being shown rather than told that that was what happened.

But otherwise a brilliant book! I definitely need to read more of Liane Moriarty's work.

Title: The Yearbook Committee
Author: Sarah Ayoub
Genre: YA
Rating: 4/5
# pages: 268
Date read: June, 2016

Five teenagers. Five lives. One final year.

The school captain: Ryan has it all... or at least he did, until an accident snatched his dreams away. How will he rebuild his life and what does the future hold for him now?

The newcomer: Charlie's just moved interstate and she's determined not to fit in. She's just biding her time until Year 12 is over and she can head back to her real life and her real friends ...

The loner: At school, nobody really notices Matty. But at home, Matty is everything. He's been single-handedly holding things together since his mum's breakdown, and he's never felt so alone.

The popular girl: Well, the popular girl's best friend ... cool by association. Tammi's always bowed to peer pressure, but when the expectations become too much to handle, will she finally stand up for herself?

The politician's daughter: Gillian's dad is one of the most recognisable people in the state and she's learning the hard way that life in the spotlight comes at a very heavy price.

Five unlikely teammates thrust together against their will. Can they find a way to make their final year a memorable one or will their differences tear their world apart?


Awesome book, with a suckerpunch ending, that left me reeling.

This was basically "The Breakfast Club" for the 21st Century. 5 students are thrown together for a school activity, bicker and annoy each other at first, but slowly become friends (or at least friendly).

I had a hard time putting it down, and it could have been a straight 5 star book (even though I didn't like the twist... it was still believable) if Sarah Ayoub had added just a few more chapters. There were a few too many threads left hanging, and though people appeared to be heading in the right directions, I'd like to have it confirmed before the book ended.

Title: Star Stories (KarmaCorp Tales)
Author: Audrey Faye
Genre: Short stories, Sci-fi
Rating: 4/5
# pages: 165
Date read: June, 2016

A Seer in a spaceport fleamarket and a StarReader in his ivory tower - both with messages for Yesenia Mayes. The first days on Stardust Prime for a very special assistant and a very important class of tadpoles. The birth of two daughters - and the terrible sacrifices of the mothers who love them.


A collection of really charming short stories, set in the KarmaCorp universe.

As a general rule, I'm not fond of short stories, but that rule goes flying out of the window when it's short stories set in a universe I'm already familiar with, revolving around characters I'm already fond of (or at least know), so I guess my beef with short stories is mostly because I think they give too few pages to set the scene, so when the scene is already set (so to speak), I'm free to love them just as much as I would any other book by that author.

If anything, I thought some of these short stories were far too short. I'd have loved to read more about Kish, Tee, Raven and Iggy's introduction to KarmaCorp and how their friendship (and talents) grew, and the stories about Yesenia and Bean were heartbreaking in their lack of closure (although we did get a bit more of that in "Grower's Omen", so more may still come).

I devoured the book, and wouldn't have complained if it had been twice as long.

Title: Deadline (Newsflesh #2)
Author: Mira Grant
Genre: Dystopian
Rating: 4/5
# pages: Audiobook ~15hrs
Date read: June 2013, June 2016, October 2020, June 2024

DO NOT READ THE SUMMARY OF "DEADLINE" ON GOODREADS UNLESS YOU'VE READ "FEED"!!! HUGE SPOILERS!!!

... trying to make this a spoiler-free review though, so I'll leave out the summary for this one...

Very obviously the middle book of a trilogy and therefore really cannot stand on its own. It had me totally hooked from the very beginning, and was as action-packed as I could have wished, but the story was definitely action-driven and character-driven rather than plot-driven... some major twists were thrown at us, but nothing resolved.

I'm still really impressed by the world-building, and how Mira Grant so effortlessly switches between Shaun and George's voices - making both equally believable. I thought the revelations about their relationship more than a little unnecessary though... it makes sense, but I'm not sure that it was necessary for the story... but perhaps that will be revealed in the next book.