Thought Train to Pusan

--> Jasper Jones follows a boy named Charlie, a teenager living in a small Australian town known for it’s gossip and the way stories about people get out of hand into a mythology surrounding them. One such object of the town’s disdain is a young outsider, Jasper Jones, who comes to Charlie’s window one night asking for help. Jasper shows Charlie the discovery he made in the woods of a dead young girl named Laura, and fearing that he will be the one blamed for her death, wants Charlie to help him in discovering who killed her. From this initial concept, a lot of different strands are developed as Charlie comes to learn things about life and about his town in particular; these include Charlie’s own family issues with his angry mother and acquiescent father, racism in the town (particularly shown towards a Vietnamese family, the son of whom is Charlie’s best friend, Jeffrey), finding first love, learning new things about friendship, lies we tell to protect ourselves...

Apparently this book is a little divisive among my circle of friends: some loved it, some really didn’t. And unfortunately I am falling on the side of it not really being for me. Which is not to say I don’t love epic romances ( The Song of Achilles is one of my absolute favourite books, after all!), but the story here wasn’t selling me beyond the initial concept. It’s a shame really, I found the premise to be so intriguing, but the overall experience quite lackluster overall. The Gargoyle is told from the point of view of a nameless protagonist, who is involved in a car accident that leaves him severely burned on the majority of his body. This opening hook immediately drew me in and then left me cringing as the experience and recovery was written in intense detail. As our protagonist recovers, however, and in the midst of wanting to end his own life, he meets a woman from the psych ward of the hospital named Marianne, who tells him that they know each other an...

--> The Foxhole Court is the first novel of Nora Sakavic’s All for the Game, which gives an intriguing beginning for what is to come, but unfortunately does not really stand so well as a book on it’s own: it’s clearly just a buildup, and given it’s slim run of under 300 pages, I wonder if perhaps it would not have work to put the 3 instalments of the series into one novel with parts/books 1-2-3 all together? But that’s not my decision at the end of the day, and I feel like I will continue to see where the series goes, if only out of curiosity from some of the twists thrown in at the end. This novel primarily deals with a teenager named Neil, though it is clear from the beginning that this is not his real name: he has been on the run for years from his father and those who know him, given that his dad is a well-known murderer currently in jail. Neil and his mother have been hiding their identities, yet Neil now finds himself on his own and is trying to just make i...