New Book: Ultraviolet, by R. J. Anderson

Once upon a time there was a girl who was special. 
This is not her story.
Unless you count the part where I killed her.


Normally I'm not one for Sci-Fi - unless it's The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, of course - but this is more like paranormal romance for people with brains.  Alison Jeffries is a sixteen-year-old with synesthesia - her senses are cross-wired so that she sees sound and tastes words, giving the author a chance to show off her insanely awesome descriptive prose.  Alison has been institutionalised for claiming that she saw Tori Beaugrand, the most popular girl at her school, disintegrate into a million pieces.  Surely that can't be possible, but Tori's been missing ever since and Alison will soon be charged with her murder.  Unless she can discover what really happened... 



Reviewed by Laura Hulme

Summer reading competition: The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold

From Amazon.com:

"My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973."  

Watching from heaven, Susie sees her happy, suburban family devastated by her death, isolated even from one another as they each try to cope with their terrible loss alone. Over the years, her friends and siblings grow up, fall in love, do all the things she never had the chance to do herself. But life is not quite finished with Susie yet . . . The Lovely Bones is a luminous and astonishing novel about life and death, forgiveness and vengeance, memory and forgetting - but, above all, about finding light in the darkest of places.