If ghosts exist, perhaps this is how it happens. The marks of things that happen in a place never really go away, nor do the pieces of us we leave there.
Girls From the County explores dark truths: personal stories and those of young women the author grew up with, as well as rural legends and folklore. It’s about trauma and the illusion of safety. Given the subject matter, this was at times a difficult read.
I had a number of favourite poems but my top five were Drag, Plot, Girls From the County, Education, and Thirty-two Years (Eighteen Years Reprise).
The one that’s probably going to stay with me the longest, though, is Grave. While it’s the shortest poem in the collection, it certainly packs a punch.
She grew up and became a mortician
so that when he finally died
she could make sure.
Thank you so much to Raw Dog Screaming Press for the opportunity to read this book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
This book is merely a record of dark events, the kind that you can sometimes move on from, yet can’t help but see in every old house, high school, or crumbling bridge.
In the county, eerie stillness can be mistaken for stagnation. In the county, rumination on pain and guilt can be confused with omens and curses. In the county, feelings of claustrophobia stem from understanding what the encroaching darkness brings with it.
You’ve heard of country girls, and city girls, but what of the forgotten girls from the in-between space of the county? Confronting the things too wild for urban areas, and too methodically malevolent for the countryside, girls from the county are often dismissed by popular narratives, left to solve riddles of grief and rage for themselves.
Known for weaving folk horror with confessional poetry, unflinching true crime approaches with myth and fable, contemporary appetites with gothic literature, award-winning author Donna Lynch has composed a lyrical reconstruction for readers to navigate the lives – and deaths – of girls from the county.
If you go to Puddletown High Street you’ll find many normal shops. There’s also a “most unusual shop”, the Story Shop.
The Story Shop sells adventures you can BE in. With real characters you’ll actually meet!
Wilbur, the shopkeeper, and Fred Ferret, his assistant, are ready to help facilitate your next story adventure.
Famous explorer Pearl Johnson wants to experience something new. After Wilbur and Fred add story specific items to the Story Pot, including a blank book for her adventures to be recorded on, Pearl sets off on an adventure.
With Fred and Edie the parrot by her side, Pearl is ready to be a pirate. Pearl learns that pirates aren’t all alike when she goes treasure hunting. She attempts to outwit and outcheat other pirates in a competition. Finally, she aims to regale other pirates with her most interesting stories and hunts pirate ghosts.
Anchors Away! has plenty of swashbuckling action. Tony Neal’s illustrations are a lot of fun. I particularly enjoyed seeing Meg’s puffer-fish slippers.
Be on the lookout for the Enchanted Rose from Beauty & the Beast and a Ghostbusters uniform.
I’m looking forward to reading about the next Story Shop customer’s dinosaur adventures.
Thank you so much to NetGalley and Stripes Publishing, an imprint of Little Tiger Group, for the opportunity to read this book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
Looking for adventure?
Want to be a hero?
Step inside the Story Shop!
The Story Shop is packed full of plots, costumes and characters galore. And shopkeepers Wilbur and Fred are ready and waiting to find every customer their perfect adventure!
When famous explorer Pearl stumbles into the shop, she’s certain she’s done everything and been everywhere … until Wilbur and Fred suggest a swashbuckling pirate adventure!
Join Captain Pearl as she embarks on a sneaky mission to steal the priceless Black Pearl, stirs up trouble in a treasure race and has a wail of a time on the hunt for a mysterious pirate ghost…
It’s spring and all Mr Warthog wants to do is pick a bunch of flowers for his son’s mother. This isn’t as easy as it sounds because baby warthog has allergies but Mr Warthog is determined.
In between all of the sneezing, the wonders of spring are also evident. There are surprise butterflies. The kids in the neighbourhood are playing in the sunshine. The flowers are beautiful.
But then I learned why it was so important for Mr Warthog to pick the flowers and, I’ll be honest, a part of me broke at that point. After having seen other characters in the series frustrated and cranky, I’d expected some emotional component to this story but I didn’t expect to feel so sad reading a book about spring.
Despite the sadness, and maybe even partially because of it, I was able to appreciate the efforts of a father doing his best to comfort and take care of his son.
Like the rest of the series, the text is minimal in this book. The majority of the story, especially the emotion, is told through the images.
Being spring, there are plenty of yellows and greens. When the weather and mood change, there’s a darker palette.
Having now made my way through all of the seasons, I’m having trouble picking a favourite. However, I expect this is the story that’s going to stay with me the longest.
Bonus fun fact: Baby warthogs are called piglets.
Thank you so much to NetGalley, Magnetic Press and Diamond Book Distributors for the opportunity to read this picture book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
Winter has thawed and Spring has sprung! The forest is turning green again and no one is more excited to experience it than Mr Warthog and his brand new baby boy who gets to experience the great big outdoors for the very first time!
I read every Far Out Fairy Tales graphic novel I could get my hands on in 2018. When my library stopped buying them I assumed the series had finished and thought no more of it. Boy, was I wrong. I have so many to catch up on! Woohoo!
Getting the twisted treatment this time around is Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, which I haven’t read. Yet.
We meet best friends, Gabby and Kaden, in the not-too-distant future. They love doing fun things together like building robots, virtual reality (VR) gaming and hoverboarding. Incidentally, Kaden’s hoverboard design isn’t all too dissimilar from Marty McFly’s so we know the kid has good taste.
Feeling insecure because Gabby always wins at gaming, Kaden is on the lookout for something that will level the playing field. Enter the Megabrain 2000!
Unbeknownst to Kaden, he’s about to get trapped inside the game with S.N.O.W., a lonely AI. Now it’s up to Gabby to play the game of her life to rescue her friend before it’s too late!
This is a fun, action packed addition to the series. The story was engaging and the characters were easy to connect with.
I did wonder how “ultra-secret” the VR headset could be if Kaden learned of its existence from a magazine. I don’t remember ever finding out what the acronym S.N.O.W. stood for. These are only quibbles, though.
I adored Omar Lozano’s illustrations. The colours are vibrant, the characters are expressive and the urgency of Gabby’s quest is evident.
The gutters change from white to black whenever the characters are in the VR world. I loved the snow bees and the Rose Boss but the character that delighted me the most was Prince.
I always enjoy the bonus material at the end of Far Out Fairy Tales: a summary of the original story, some of the differences between the original and Far Out versions, questions to encourage the reader to think about what they’ve read and a glossary that explains potentially tricky words.
I can’t wait to catch up on the stories I’ve missed.
Thank you so much to NetGalley and Stone Arch Books, an imprint of Capstone, for the opportunity to read this graphic novel.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4.5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
Best friends Gabby and Kaden do everything together: hoverboarding, robot-building, and virtual reality gaming. Then one day Kaden goes off alone and gets his hands on experimental VR tech. When he powers on the headset, a rogue AI called S.N.O.W. takes hold of his mind and locks the boy deep in her digital realm! But Gabby isn’t about to abandon her best bud. Can she enter the game, fight through the levels, and solve the final puzzle to save Kaden before he’s lost to S.N.O.W. forever?
Enjoy a modern twist on the Hans Christian Andersen classic “The Snow Queen” as it’s retold for kids in this exciting Far Out Fairy Tales graphic novel.
“All women are magic. Literally all of us. It’s in our nature. It’s best you learn that now.”
Sometimes a cover image is enough to reel me in. Sometimes I only need to read the blurb to know for sure that a book is destined to become a favourite. Sometimes, just sometimes, I’ll only make it to the third page before I buy the ebook so I can highlight passages to my heart’s content. This is that book.
Marya Tilman’s transformation on 18 September 1898 was the “earliest scientifically confirmed case of spontaneous dragoning within the United States” but there were records of dragoning occurring centuries prior. You might believe that it was all over after the Mass Dragoning of 1955 but you’d be wrong. So very wrong.
For those whose feet remained firmly on the ground on 25 April 1955, life went on. People still went to work. Children still went to school. It was business as usual. But this new normal came at a cost.
Dragoning is unmentionable. Don’t talk about what happened.
Forget those who dragoned. They never existed in the first place.
Keep your eyes on the ground. You don’t want any dangerous ideas.
Perhaps this is how we learn silence – an absence of words, an absence of context, a hole in the universe where the truth should be.
This is Alex’s memoir (of sorts). Alex saw her first dragon when she was four. She was still a child when the Mass Dragoning happened. Through her eyes, we not only see how the Mass Dragoning changed society as a whole but also how it impacted upon Alex’s own family.
Through dragoning, this book explores trauma and the silencing that often takes place in its aftermath. It’s about how women diminish themselves to fit into the shape that society prescribes and the toxicity of secrets. It’s the power of women taking up space and refusing to be gaslit anymore.
When I started this book I thought it was going to be about an alternate 1950’s, one where women got pissed off with the patriarchy and turned into dragons. And it is. Sort of. But it’s so much more. There’s rage in this book but there’s also joy.
It is joy that burns me now, and joy that makes my back ache for wings, and it is joy that makes me long to be more than myself.
I fell in love with auntie Marla and Beatrice. I met the best librarian ever. I felt rage and helplessness alongside determination and hope and love. I ugly cried. Oh, did I ugly cry.
I felt a kinship with the characters who dragoned and a fire inside that I fully expected to result in my own dragoning. I love this book so much!
“Today’s the day!”
Thank you so much to Allen & Unwin for the opportunity to read this book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
In a world where girls and women are taught to be quiet, the dragons inside them are about to be set free …
In this timely and timeless speculative novel, set in 1950’s America, Kelly Barnhill exposes a world that wants to keep girls and women small – and examines what happens when they rise up.
Alex Green is four years old when she first sees a dragon. In her next-door neighbour’s garden, in the spot where the old lady usually sits, is a huge dragon, an astonished expression on its face before it opens its wings and soars away across the rooftops.
And Alex doesn’t see the little old lady after that. No one mentions her. It’s as if she’s never existed.
Then Alex’s mother disappears, and reappears a week later, one quiet Tuesday, with no explanation whatsoever as to where she has been. But she is a ghostly shadow of her former self, and with scars across her body – wide, deep burns, as though she had been attacked by a monster who breathed fire.
Alex, growing from young girl to fiercely independent teenager, is desperate for answers, but doesn’t get any.
Whether anyone likes it or not, the Mass Dragoning is coming. And nothing will be the same after that. Everything is about to change, forever.
And when it does, this, too, will be unmentionable…
You’re returning to your childhood home for the first time in twelve years. Your job is to watch your mother die and then clean out the house. There’s a stranger living in the shed because your mother’s been cashing in on the fact that your father, who built the house, was a serial killer. Everyone in town hates you because of who your father was.
Welcome to Vera’s world.
The house was the same, but everything everything everything was different.
This is my first Sarah Gailey book and it was amazing! It was unsettling in the best way possible.
I know what it is to love a ‘monster’. Some of Vera’s responses to hers were scarily familiar. Others were (thankfully) more foreign. The ritual she completed to ensure her safety as a child made complete sense to me, as did its reappearance when she returned to Crowder House.
They remembered what they were supposed to do to keep her safe, remembered from when she was young enough to develop a superstition without reasoning herself out of it.
This book introduced me to a mother-daughter relationship that has been twisted and contaminated by their shared history. This is a story that explores the power of secrets to change you and a past that no longer wants to remain in the shadows.
It’s about loneliness and belonging, what makes a house a home and the inexplicable loudness of the things have been left unsaid in our lives.
Lemonade will never be the same.
I want to see.
Thank you so much to NetGalley and Hodder & Stoughton for the opportunity to read this book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
“Come home.” Vera’s mother called and Vera obeyed. In spite of their long estrangement, in spite of the memories – she’s come back to the home of a serial killer. Back to face the love she had for her father and the bodies he buried there.
Coming home is hard enough for Vera, and to make things worse, she and her mother aren’t alone. A parasitic artist has moved into the guest house out back, and is slowly stripping Vera’s childhood for spare parts. He insists that he isn’t the one leaving notes around the house in her father’s handwriting… but who else could it possibly be?
There are secrets yet undiscovered in the foundations of the notorious Crowder House. Vera must face them, and find out for herself just how deep the rot goes.
It’s spring cleaning time and Little Wombat has decided he doesn’t want to live in a burrow anymore.
Determined to find somewhere better to live, Little Wombat sets off on an adventure.
“Can I live with you?”
Little Wombat enthusiastically tries out the homes of his friends, only to discover that there really is no place like home.
As I’ve come to expect from Charles Fuge’s picture books, the illustrations are absolutely gorgeous. The colours are beautiful, the characters are expressive and the little details are always worth paying attention to.
I loved the faces of the critters who were being flung from the burrow by Little Wombat’s mother as she cleaned. I chuckled as Little Wombat discovered that the homes of each of his friends were not quite suitable for a wombat.
Although Charles Fuge is one of my favourite illustrators, this was my first Little Wombat book. I’m more convinced than ever that I need to read every Charles Fuge book.
Thank you so much to Walker Books for the opportunity to read this picture book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
Do Little Wombat’s friends live in more exciting places than him? Little Wombat is determined to find out! But it’s not long before he realises that for little wombats, burrows are simply the best!
A fun-filled tale about being happy with the things you have.
“Horror films don’t create fear. They release it.”
Wes Craven
As a kid, my approach for all things scary looked very much like ‘if my hands are over my eyes, it doesn’t exist’. I was sure that Gremlins were going to invade the car when my parents decided that taking me to the drive-in to watch it for the first time would be fun. I knew with absolute certainty that Bruce the shark had the ability to magically pixelate himself so he’d be able to come through the shower head in teensy tiny pieces, only to reform and attack me where I stood. Don’t even get me started on the library ghost from Ghostbusters.
I’ve always wondered how some of the movies that terrified me as a kid have become some of my all time favourites, how a kid whose imagination was able to make every scary scene so much worse than it really was grew up to love horror.
This book, conveniently combining the many subgenres of horror that I love (I’m an Enthusiastic Horror User with some Supernatural Horror User thrown in there) with neuroscience, which I always want to learn more about.
I learned how we “collaborate with horror films to create tension and build our own fear”. There were examples of how characters attempt to defend themselves against the threat of monsters, human and non-human, through fight, flight, freeze and fawn.
Humans are also extra receptive to things appearing in our peripheral vision. In fact, we may even be faster at reacting to threats that appear in our peripheral vision than to threats that appear right front of our faces.
The author takes on jump scares, why we wind up laughing after a scene scares us, how what has scared us over time has changed what horror looks like on the screen, the role sound (and its absence) plays in freaking us out and why rewatches don’t pack the punch of the first time.
I’m still not overly clear how a self proclaimed scaredy cat transformed into someone who can’t get enough horror but I now know why my go to method for surviving scary scenes as a kid made everything scarier.
Studies have concluded that closing your eyes against a scary scene is ineffective, because you can still hear what’s going on – and whatever images your brain conjures up will probably be even scarier than the scene you’re avoiding.
I loved how all of the science and the discussion surrounding studies and experiments was brought back to examples of specific characters or scenes in specific horror movies. There’s a seriously bingeworthy list of movies mentioned throughout the book at the end. I need to rewatch some of these after reading about them and, happily, I learned of some movies I’ve never seen that I now absolutely have to.
There are some pretty major spoilers revealed throughout the course of the book but, let’s face it, if you haven’t already seen a fairly large percentage of the movies mentioned, you probably wouldn’t be picking up this book in the first place.
Whether you’re into a specific subgenre of horror, including slashers, creature features, body horror, transformation horror, torture horror, revenge films and psychological horror, of if you’re an all rounder like me, there’s something here for you.
Thank you so much to NetGalley and Tor Nightfire for the opportunity to read this book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4.5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
Nightmare Fuel by Nina Nesseth is a pop-science look at fear, how and why horror films get under our skin, and why we keep coming back for more.
Do you like scary movies? Have you ever wondered why?
Nina Nesseth knows what scares you. She also knows why.
In Nightmare Fuel, Nesseth explores the strange and often unexpected science of fear through the lenses of psychology and physiology. How do horror films get under our skin? What about them keeps us up at night, even days later? And why do we keep coming back for more?
Horror films promise an experience: fear. From monsters that hide in plain sight to tension-building scores, every aspect of a horror film is crafted to make your skin crawl. But how exactly do filmmakers pull this off? The truth is, there’s more to it than just loud noises and creepy images.
With the affection of a true horror fan and the critical analysis of a scientist, Nesseth explains how audiences engage horror with both their brains and bodies, and teases apart the elements that make horror films tick. Nightmare Fuel covers everything from jump scares to creature features, serial killers to the undead, and the fears that stick around to those that fade over time.
With in-depth discussions and spotlight features of some of horror’s most popular films – from classics like The Exorcist to modern hits like Hereditary – and interviews with directors, film editors, composers, and horror academics, Nightmare Fuel is a deep dive into the science of fear, a celebration of the genre, and a survival guide for going to bed after the credits roll.
Any day that includes me being able to say that I’ve found a new favourite author is a good day. Today is a good day!
I’m a tad embarrassed to admit that this is my first Ronald Malfi read. On the flip side, because I’m late to the party, I’ve got so many books to catch up on and new favourites to find. Did I mention today is a very good day?
Black Mouth is essentially a big melting pot of the types of characters and themes I will always want to read about. You’ve got your group of outcasts who experienced something scary, traumatic and potentially supernatural when they were kids. The ghosts of the past, possibly even the literal kind, haunt said kids well into adulthood. Adults who have been trying to outrun their childhood trauma can’t run anymore, and it just keeps getting better and better.
The things that happened down in the heart of Black Mouth that summer had been inexplicable, magical, and ultimately deadly things – things I still can’t fully comprehend or even care to dwell on.
There’s a carnival. Magic. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. A group of friends I want to join. And best of all? There’s Dennis, who is now one of my all time favourite characters. I adore Dennis!
I loved this book so much! The characters, the location, the atmosphere, the way the past bled into the present, even the surprise misty eyed moment. I loved it all!
I can’t wait to read more books by this author.
As usual, I sent test emails to the email addresses listed for two characters in this book. As usual, they were undeliverable. Yes, I’m going to keep sending random emails to book characters until one finally responds.
“Do you want to see a magic trick?”
Thank you so much to NetGalley and Titan Books for the opportunity to read this book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
For nearly two decades, Jamie Warren has been running from darkness. He’s haunted by a traumatic childhood and the guilt at having disappeared from his disabled brother’s life. But then a series of unusual events reunites him with his estranged brother and their childhood friends, and none of them can deny the sense of fate that has seemingly drawn them back together.
Nor can they deny the memories of that summer, so long ago – the strange magic taught to them by an even stranger man, and the terrible act that has followed them all into adulthood. In the light of new danger, they must confront their past by facing their futures, and hunting down a man who may very well be a monster.
To know Nick, Seth, Gibby, and Jazz is to love them and, three books later, it’s hard to let them go. I couldn’t wait to see what was next for Lighthouse but … there are no new Extraordinaries books for me to look forward to, so the only way I get to spend time with these kindred spirits again is to stalk them reread style.
“Extraordinary groupies are weird and don’t understand boundaries.”
Touché.
I’d been desperately holding on after being practically thrown off a cliff at the end of the second book and for much of the first half of this one I sharpened my ability to gaslight myself. Meanwhile, it’s business as usual for Nick which, these days, means superhero training, although he’s keen to ditch the training wheels.
“What’s the point of being an Extraordinary if I don’t get to be extraordinary?”
This book was everything I hoped it would be. It made my heart go all melty. The ante was upped on mortifying teenage moments. My need to adopt Nick’s father skyrocketed. There were a couple of misty-eyed moments of the ‘that’s so beautiful’ variety.
This book is bow ties, watermelon flavoured Skwinkles Salsagheti, code words and stabby forks. It’s also college applications, “Backflip of Chaos!”, relationship goals and villains from the past becoming villains of the present.
“You’re the bad guy. Blah, blah, blah. Heard it all before. Get some new material.”
Nick is as adorable as usual, his mouth still kicking into gear before he has time to think. Things are heating up with Seth, AKA “Sexy Sex Beast Who Looks Good in Pretty Much Everything.”
“Oh my god, what is wrong with me? I’m trying to get laid while also trying to talk you out of it? No wonder I’m a virgin.”
Gibby and Jazz are as badass as ever. And don’t get me started on Dad Squad. Hello, spin-off potential! Bonus points if Burrito Jerry is there too.
I’m having trouble coming up with sentences to tell you how much I love this series but if you’d seen how often I smiled while I was reading each book, you’d have a pretty good idea. These characters have taken up residence in my heart and it’s been an absolute joy getting to tag along as they make their world a better place. I’m more convinced than ever that I need a catchphrase.
“It’s time to take out the trash.”
Thank you so much to NetGalley and Hodder & Stoughton for the opportunity to read this book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
School’s out for the summer and a raging heat wave has blanketed Nova City. Still, Nick’s life is pretty much perfect, as he finally gets to team up with his superhero boyfriend to bring justice, protection, and disaster energy to the world.
Meanwhile, Seth, Jazz, and Gibby are setting up headquarters for Lighthouse, their hero team, Nick’s dad’s private investigation agency is taking off, and Nick’s mother, the superhero known as TK, is right there at Nick’s side. Where she’s always been. Hasn’t she?
But something’s off. It’s not just Simon Burke campaigning to ‘cure’ Extraordinaries. And it’s not the rumours of Nick’s ex-boyfriend and villain-in-the-making’s escape. Something isn’t right and Nick will need all his loved ones together to uncover the truth – a truth that will reveal a traitor in their midst and burn through their lives like a wild fire.
Schizanthus Nerd 