Book Rainbow: Yellow Books Part 4

Continuing with the bookshelf tour with Yellow books on my shelves.

Can you spot any that you have read or would like to read?

See Red books, Orange Books or Parts 1, 2 and 3 of the Yellow Book Pile.

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Learn colours in 10 languages with multilingual flashcards.

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We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

From the New York Times–bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club, the story of an American family, middle class in middle America, ordinary in every way but one. But that exception is the beating heart of this extraordinary novel.

Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and our narrator, Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. “I spent the first eighteen years of my life defined by this one fact: that I was raised with a chimpanzee,” she tells us. “It’s never going to be the first thing I share with someone. I tell you Fern was a chimp and already you aren’t thinking of her as my sister. But until Fern’s expulsion, I’d scarcely known a moment alone. She was my twin, my funhouse mirror, my whirlwind other half, and I loved her as a sister.”

Rosemary was not yet six when Fern was removed. Over the years, she’s managed to block a lot of memories. She’s smart, vulnerable, innocent, and culpable. With some guile, she guides us through the darkness, penetrating secrets and unearthing memories, leading us deeper into the mystery she has dangled before us from the start. Stripping off the protective masks that have hidden truths too painful to acknowledge, in the end, “Rosemary” truly is for remembrance.

I haven’t actually read this one yet, but picked it up because I had heard of it and both the cover and blurb were intriguing. It certainly doesn’t sound like anything I have read before – will need to get to it soon!

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Once by Morris Gleitzman

Once by Morris Gleitzman is the story of a young Jewish boy who is determined to escape the orphanage he lives in to save his Jewish parents from the Nazis in the occupied Poland of the Second World War.

Everybody deserves to have something good in their life. At least Once.

Once I escaped from am orphanage to find Mum and Dad.

Once I saved a girl called Zelda from a burning house.

Once I made a Nazi with a toothache laugh.

My name is Felix. This is my story.

Once is the first in a series of children’s novels about Felix, a Jewish orphan caught in the middle of the Holocaust, from Australian author Morris Gleitzman – author of Bumface and Boy Overboard. The next books in the series Then, Now and After are also available from Puffin.

This book and this entire series will take you apart and put you back together in a different way. Felix’s voice is deceptively simple and the story is brutal. As an adult reading it you can see what is happening, even as Felix’s child-like innocence both protects him and leads him into some tricky situations. A must-read!

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Letters from the Lighthouse by Emma Carroll

We weren’t supposed to be going to the pictures that night. We weren’t even meant to be outside, not in a blackout, and definitely not when German bombs had been falling on London all month like pennies from a jar.

*WINNER* BOOKS ARE MY BAG MIDDLE GRADE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017
WATERSTONES CHILDREN’S BOOK OF THE MONTH MAY 2017
THE BOOKSELLER EDITOR’S 9-12 PICK OF THE MONTH
THE TIMES CHILDREN’S BOOK OF THE WEEK

February, 1941. After months of bombing raids in London, twelve-year-old Olive Bradshaw and her little brother Cliff are evacuated to the Devon coast. The only person with two spare beds is Mr Ephraim, the local lighthouse keeper. But he’s not used to company and he certainly doesn’t want any evacuees.

Desperate to be helpful, Olive becomes his post-girl, carrying secret messages (as she likes to think of the letters) to the villagers. But Olive has a secret of her own. Her older sister Sukie went missing in an air raid, and she’s desperate to discover what happened to her. And then she finds a strange coded note which seems to link Sukie to Devon, and to something dark and impossibly dangerous.

Okay, so this isn’t technically yellow, but the spine looked yellowish…

Anyway, this is a fantastic book which you should definitely read if you haven’t already. I picked it up without knowing much about it, other than that lots of people were saying it was a must-read. As you can see from the prizes it has won, those reviewers weren’t alone. I now know of this book being used in several schools. For me, one of the most powerful things about the book was seeing how information from a peer can be so much more effective for a child than hearing it in the news or from an adult. A though-provoking book!

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Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn and David Leviathan

A sexy, funny roller coaster of a story about one date over one very long night in New York. Nick and Norah are both suffering from broken hearts. So when Nick sees the girl who dumped him walk in with a new guy he asks the strange girl next to him to be his girlfriend for the next five minutes. Norah would do anything to avoid conversation with the not-friend girl who dumped Nick, and get over the Evil Ex whom Norah never quite broke up with. And so she agrees. What follows is an epic first date between two people who are just trying to figure out who they want to be – and where the next great band is playing.

I picked this up entirely based on the publisher and knowing that they publish YA. I had never heard of this or realised there was a movie until I looked it up on Goodreads (this came out when I was at the far side of the world so it’s not the only book around that time that I missed!). I’m not sure whether or not this is my kind of book as I am not generally a massive fan of Contemporary YA…but it’s short so I will give it a go.

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Have you read any of these books?

Are there any that you would like to read now?

Which yellow books do you own?

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While you’re here, why not read a review of In My World, Shadow Weaver, The Circus or The Last Tree?

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Thanks for reading!

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