Audiobook Review - Starfell: Willow Moss and the Lost Day

• Title And Author: Starfell: Willow Moss and the Lost Day by Dominique Valente
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Physical, eBook or Audiobook: Audiobook & eBook
• Bought, Borrowed or Gifted: eProof Gifted by publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review and Audiobook borrowed from local library via BorrowBox
• Length: 288 Pages or 5 Hours 19 Minutes

I’m not exactly sure how this fell onto my radar, but I’ve known about this title since last year. It came out round the same time as the second book in the Nevermoor series (Another middle-grade series I really need to read as I’ve heard nothing but wonderful things about it!) by Jessica Townsend came out and people were mentioning the two quite closely, though Starfell feels more suited to younger readers compared to Nevermoor. 

In Starfell, magic is slowly coming and Willow Moss, youngest in the Moss family of witches, has the least powerful gift of finding lost things. Like keys, glasses or wooden teeth. Useful, but not exactly exciting compared to her mother and her two older sisters… 

So when the most powerful witch, Moreg Vaine, comes to Willow and ask for her help, Willow can’t say no. For you see, last Tuesday has gone missing. Not from Moreg’s memory but from everyone’s. Last Tuesday has gone and, without it, the universe could unravel.

Book Review - Sweep: Volume Two

• Title And Author: Sweep: Volume Two (Dark Magick, Awakening and Spellbound) by Cate Tiernan
• Publisher: SPEAK
• Physical, eBook or Audiobook: Physical
• Bought, Borrowed or Gifted: Bought
• Length: 576 Pages

Technically, this is the last read of 2019 and my first(ish) read of 2020. And it’s carrying on from one of my rereads (aka re3) and into part of the series I don’t know. So, this is gonna be interesting. 

The second volume of the Sweep series, we follow Morgan, a blood witch from a long line of ancient and powerful witches. And with the help of her boyfriend and fellow witch, Cal, Morgan feels like she can finally start to be herself. But at the end of the last volume, something terrible happened, binding Morgan and Cal together in a dark secret. And not only that, Cal and his mother’s hunger for magick is beginning to unnerve Morgan… 

This is basically the synopsis for the first novella in the bind-up, Dark Magick. The other two - Awakening and Spellbound - are very different and yet, have a slightly similar plot due to the plot thread that carries through and wraps up at the end of Spellbound, but it causes more trouble going forward into the next three volumes (there are 5 bind-ups in this series). 

So… where to start?

Audiobook Review - Murder At The Vicarage

• Title And Author: The Murder At The Vicarage by Agatha Christie
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Physical, eBook or Audiobook: Audiobook
• Bought, Borrowed or Gifted: Bought
• Length: 304 Pages or 8 Hours 12 Minutes

My first Agatha Christie of the Year. And I am planning to read a lot more (I have … hang on, let me check my Goodreads To Be Read list … six.) Hopefully, I will try and read them all this year. I want to read more crime/mystery books this years as well as a few other genres. But getting away from the point, my first Agatha Christie of 2020 and my first, real Miss Marple novel. 

And while I do have one Miss Marple on my kindle - Sleeping Murder - and I do keep wondering about two or three other titles, I keep hearing this is a good place to start with Marple. So, when I saw just before Christmas that this was on a One Day Deal on Audible for 99p, I jumped at it, only to hesitant a little. 

Why, I hear you ask? Because I have tried to read a sampler of the book on my kindle multiply times and I can never seem to get past the first few pages. I just don’t click with it. But I hoped, when I decided to press play, that I would just go with it and hopefully, I would get it as I went. 

“Anyone who murdered Colonel Protheroe would be doing the world at large a service!” Careless remark from the parson to his wife, only his words come back to haunt him when he discovered the Colonel, shot in the head, in the vicarage’s study. The people of St Mary Mead are shocked: who could have done such a thing? The wife? Her lover? The Colonel’s daughter? The newcomer whose past is a mystery? The doctor? The parson himself? 

But living in this picturesque English village lives one Miss Jane Marple, and she has her own thoughts on the murder…

Tweet Cute That Extract!

First extract/blog tour of the year! And it's should give you feels! Yes, it's a rom-com, something that is very outside my comfort zone, but I think you guys are going to devour with a mug of hot chocolate and hot grilled cheese sandwich!

Pepper and Jack can't be more different. Pepper is swim team captain, chronic overarchiever and all round perfectionist. Jack is the class clown and thorn in Pepper's side. Pepper's family might be falling apart. Jack just want to get out of his popular brother's shadow. Pepper's family owns a massive fast-food chain, Big League Burger, and is secretly in charge of their Twitter. Jack has a love/hate relationship with his small family deli and built an anonymous chat app.

But when Big League Burger's steals Jack's grandma's grilled cheese recipe, Jack decide to take the company down, one tweet at a time.

Soon, Pepper and Jack's spat goes Twitter viral, via sneaky memes and retweet battles. All the while, they are chatting to each other via Jack's app and, slowly, they're falling for each other...

All's fair in cheese and war... right?

Yes, I know, this is very sweet (and maybe a tad cheesy for me - see what I did there?), but I saw this and went "yes!" over it when I was asked to be involved in this tour. So, I wanna thank Meghan for asking if I wanted to be involved. Now, before I hand you over to the extract, if you want to know more info about Tweet Cute, you can chat to Emma via her Twitter - @dilemmalord - or you can go to St Martin Press to learn more.

Now, over to the extract!!!

Audiobook Review - The Long Call

• Title And Author: The Long Call by Ann Cleeves
• Publisher: MacMillian
• Physical, eBook or Audiobook: Audiobook & eBook
• Bought, Borrowed or Gifted: eProof Gifted by publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review and Audiobook borrowed from local library via BorrowBox
• Length: 384 Pages or 10 Hours 23 Minutes

This wasn’t meant to be my first review on the Pewter Wolf in 2020. I had planned to keep this back for a possible Audiobook Month later in the year, celebrating audiobooks. I still have plans for that, but I was listening to this over the Christmas/New Year period and I changed my mind. I thought this would make a nice start to 2020, trying to show off my plans for the year. 

The Long Call is the first book in Ann Cleeves new series, Two Rivers. We know Ann Cleeves for writing the Shetland series (starting with Raven Black - which I do own, I think) and the Vera Stanhope series (starting with The Crow Trap). Both series adapted to television (Vera on ITV and Shetland on BBC) and The Long Call has already been bought for TV adaptation. So, a new series is both exciting and scary for Cleeves fans. 

In North Devon, where the river Taw meets the river Torridge and run into the sea, Detective Matthew Venn is standing outside a church. It’s his father’s funeral, but he can’t attend. His family are members of a strict evangelical community, the Barum Brethren, and, when he was younger, he turned his back on the faith, his family disowned him and when he met and married a man… well, you can guess the rest...

But it’s on this day that Matthew is thrown into his first major case. A body has been found on the beach, very close to Matthew’s house. A man who was stabbed with a tattoo of an albatross on his neck. 

Slowly, Matthew and his team are pulled into the case, with connections not only to the family and  religious friends who turned their backs on Matthew but to the Woodyard Centre, a safe place for disabled and mentally impaired people and a community centre that provides counselling serves, classes, charity services. The centre is managed by Matthew’s husband, Jonathan, and Matthew can’t help but wonder if he’s far too close to the investigation to solve it.

TEN YEARS OF THE PEWTER WOLF!!!

HAPPY 2020!!! And, if I’ve done my mental maths right, HAPPY TEN YEARS TO THE PEWTER WOLF!

TEN YEARS?! Can you believe it?! TEN YEARS!!! 

Ok, let me correct self before some of you guys point out I’ve made a mistake. The Pewter Wolf start life as a small blog in 2009, where I could show off my writing and me finding my voice as a young, possibly, maybe gay man (I was 95% sure but wasn’t 100% confident in self). But the Pewter Wolf took a detour into book blogging in Summer 2010 and in October 2010, I went to first book blogger event at publisher, Atom!

So, I class 2010 as the year I took my book blogging seriously and, here we are, ten years later! And we’ve had good times (making some wonderful friends, meet some ace authors, nominated and winning blogger awards [only the one]) and we’ve had some bad times (self doubt, several occasions where I have been this close to quitting blogging as what’s the ****ing point?!). 

But here we are! Ten years later! And I’m shocked over what this blog has done and how book blogging has changed over the years.

So, Ten Years of the Pewter Wolf. What’s gonna happen this? 

Well, this year is going to be the same as before. Reading books/ebooks/audiobooks from all over the genre and age range. As you might have noticed if you watch me carefully, my reading seems to be more adult, more grown-up (though my love will always be with Young Adult and children’s). So, you might see me trying to take bigger reading risks. 

But what you should see, if I get myself all together, I shall be trying to reread some books from ye olde days of Pewter Wolf’s blogging early days. I want to celebrate my past and reread some reads to see if my enjoyment of them stands the test of time… 

So, this year is going to be a mixed-bag for the Pewter Wolf. Brace yourselves and I hope you enjoy the ride!

Book Review - A Throne of Swans

• Title And Author: A Throne of Swans by Elizabeth and Katherine Corr
• Publisher: Hot Key Books
• Physical, eBook or Audiobook: Physical
• Bought, Borrowed or Gifted: Gifted by the publisher in exchange for an honest review/reaction
• Length: 352 Pages

SURPRISE! Ok, am meant to be back properly for book blogging duties next week (I just want a little time longer to read and get my back into my real life job before I got back into her), but when I was asked to be involved in the Throne of Swans tour, I jumped at it. Plus, I had (for once) read and wrote up my review several weeks before so, TECHNICALLY, this was one of my last reads of 2019, but this is going to be my write-ups of 2020! 

This took me a while to read. I feel like I should explain this right now before we go any further into the post. I started reading this early in December, the same day some bloggers went to Hot Key HQ to chat to both authors and launch the book at a bloggers’s event. Normally, I would write these events up but this event (as well as a Walker Books Blogger Event that happened several days later) but I didn’t write as I didn’t have time! Sorry, December was a mad month. I think we all can agree to that! 

And it took me a while to read and review. Why, I hear you ask. December is a mad, busy month. I just couldn’t seem to find the time to read and then write this! Plus, I kept putting it off (I liked the Witch's Kiss trilogy, so what if I hated this?). All of which explains why I wrote this post up now, literally days before Christmas (when I am on blogging holiday and as far away from my laptop as possible, FYI!) and posting it now.

Inspired by Swan Lake, Throne of Swans follows Aderyn who inherits the role of Protector to Atratys after her father dies. Atratys is a dominion in a kingdom where nobles can transform into birds that represent their family bloodline. Aderyn’s is a swan. But she hasn’t transformed for years after witnessing the brutal murder of her mother, ripped apart by hawks who are supposedly extinct sing the great War of the Raptors. 

Aderyn wants revenge, she must venture into the heart of the royal court, ruled by her cruel uncle, the King, to seek the truth. But how far is she willing to go…?