Review- The Paper&Hearts Society by Lucy Powrie (Contains Spoilers)|CarenzaOnBooks

Title- The Paper&Hearts Society
Author- Lucy Powrie
Series- The Paper&Hearts Society (Book One of Three)
Published- 2019
Page Count- 355
Publishing House- Hodder's Children Books
Genre- YA Contemporary
Rating- 4/5 Stars

About the Author

Lucy Powrie is a blogger, YouTuber and author from the UK. Lucy is the creator of #ukyachat on Twitter. In 2015 Lucy won a UK Young Adult Blogger Award for Champion of YA. When she's not reading, she enjoys cuddling guinea pigs and eating Oreo chocolate, but let's be real: she's mostly always reading. Her debut novel, The Paper & Hearts Society, will be published in June 2019 from Hodder Children’s Books.

Taken from Goodreads

Plot

Tabby Brown is tired of trying to fit in. She doesn't want to go to parties - in fact, she would much rather snuggle up on the sofa with her favourite book.
It's like she hasn't found her people ...
Then Tabby joins a club that promises to celebrate books. What could go wrong? EVERYTHING - especially when making new friends brings out an AWKWARD BUZZING feeling all over her body.
But Olivia, Cassie, Henry and Ed have something that makes Tabby come back. Maybe it's the Austen-themed fancy-dress parties or Ed's fluffy cat Mrs Simpkins, or could it be Henry himself ...
Can Tabby let her weird out AND live THE BEST BOOKISH LIFE POSSIBLE?

Taken from Goodreads

Opinions

I have never watched any of Lucy's videos before and to be honest, I bought this on a bit of a whim. Probably the main reason I bought it was because Lucy is a similar age to me and I wanted to read a book written by someone who was like me. I knew very little about it going into it and I was a tad sceptical because of the whole "YouTuber writes a book" problem. I assumed this was going to be another YouTuber hopping on the book bandwagon and releasing something that was good, but it wasn't great. It was nice to be pleasantly surprised and found wrong.

Contemporary is a genre I rarely read as I prefer Urban Fantasy. I wasn't expecting to enjoy it that much, but upon picking it up, I couldn't put it down. Or rather, I didn't want to put it down. I was invested in the story from the first chapter. To me, the best way to describe this book is as a fun and fluffy Contemporary that you'll fly through. I read this in a day. In fact, I read this within a few hours. It was one of the best reading experiences I've had in a while.

The characters were well-developed and had room for development. I liked them all as they all had their own unique characteristics. The only character that rubbed me up the wrong way was Olivia because at times she came across the tiniest bit pushy and as an introvert myself, she was a very extroverted introvert. It was a minor fault I found and it is totally a personal preference and no fault of the authors. 

The LGBT representation in this book was great. Olivia is revealed to be demisexual and it is unclear what sexuality Cassie is, but she and Oliva start a relationship in this book. It has been revealed that the second book is going to be much more LBGT heavy than the first and I am here for it. I really enjoyed the development of their relationship as it wasn't instalove (which is something I'm not the biggest fan of). I enjoyed the conflict at the start of their relationship as to me it felt realistic.   

Another great bit of representation was the mental health representation. Tabby has anxiety and suffers from panic attacks throughout the book. I felt it was well handled and didn't trivialise the issue at all. It was also nice to see a group of friends being supportive when one of them is clearly suffering. All of Tabby's friends were able to be there for her when she wasn't feeling great and to me that was a heartwarming part of the book.

I loved the bookish road trip that they went on. It made me really want to go travelling with my friends and do something impulsive like that. The underlying plot of the book was very emotional. It felt relevant to today's audience as cyberbullying is still a huge issue and needs to be tackled more. 

The only reason I knocked off a star was that I felt that the way the characters were written as though they were much older. Until the ages of the characters were actually stated, I had assumed that the group was between the age of 16-18. However, they were between the ages of 15-17. I would have liked for them to have been a tiny bit older as once I knew how old they were, I found it a tiny bit harder to connect with them as they weren't a similar age to me anymore.

Ian McKellen on Stage Review| CarenzaOnBooks

From Ian McKellen's Website

In May, I had the privilege of seeing Sir Ian McKellen on his 80th Birthday Tour in my home town. As soon as I found out about this tour, I was desperate to see it. McKellen is such a well-known actor, I wanted to see what he was like in person rather than through a screen.

The premise of the show is all about McKellen's life and his journey to becoming the actor he is today. It took you through all of his famous roles from Gandalf to the many Shakespearian parts he has played in his life. You also learned more about him as a person from his upbringing in Bolton to his time at Cambridge. 

An important part of the show was McKellen's sexuality and his involvement in LBGT activism. He was the second ever gay man to be knighted. He told us tales of how he rebelled against society and was openly gay from a young age. It was heartwarming to see him talking about something that he was clearly passionate about.   

The show overall was captivating from beginning to end, with all the money raised going to charity. I knew very little about Ian McKellen before seeing this show, but afterwards, I had a newfound appreciation for him. I look forward to seeing what he does next and wish him the best of luck on the rest of his tour.

The set

A blurry photo of the Programme

  

Review-Beautiful Boy by David Sheff (Contains Spoilers)|CarenzaOnBooks

Title- Beautiful Boy- A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction
Author- David Sheff
Series- N/A
Published- 2008, republished in 2018
Page Count- 390
Publishing House- Simon&Schuster (Scribner)
Rating- 5/5 stars
Note- this book focuses heavily around drugs, specifically meth. It also deals with heavy topics such as being an addict, mental health and near death experiences.

About the Author

David Sheff is an American author of the books Clean: Overcoming Addiction and Ending America's Greatest Tragedy and Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction.

Taken from Wikipedia 

Plot

What had happened to my beautiful boy? To our family? What did I do wrong? Those are the wrenching questions that haunted every moment of David Sheff’s journey through his son Nic’s addiction to drugs and tentative steps toward recovery. Before Nic Sheff became addicted to crystal meth, he was a charming boy, joyous and funny, a varsity athlete and honour student adored by his two younger siblings. After meth, he was a trembling wraith who lied, stole, and lived on the streets. 

David Sheff traces the first subtle warning signs: the denial, the 3 A.M. phone calls (is it Nic? The police? The hospital?), the rehabs. His preoccupation with Nic became an addiction in itself, and the obsessive worry and stress took a tremendous toll, but as a journalist, he instinctively researched every avenue of treatment that might save his son and refused to give up on him. Beautiful Boy is a fiercely candid memoir that brings immediacy to the emotional roller coaster of loving a child who seems beyond help.

Taken from Goodreads

Opinions

I had never heard of David or Nic Sheff before I saw the trailer for the movie adaptation, which came out earlier this year. I had planned on seeing it, but life got in the way (as it does). So, when I saw the book in The Works for £3, I couldn't resist. I'm not one to normally agree with front cover blurbs, but the blurb (by the Daily Mail of all people) is accurate. It should be "mandatory reading for every teenager and every parent of one". I have to admit I knew next to nothing about being a drug addict and the recovery process. The things I did know came from various TV shows such as Patrick Melrose and Sherlock, both which feature drug addicts as central characters. Bizarrely, both star Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role.

Non-fiction is not normally a genre I gravitate towards. In the years since I have started my blog, I've only read three non-fiction books. As a reader, I think that knowing what you are reading about has happened makes it harder to read. Despite the fact that I wanted to know what was happening, at times the subject matter was upsetting and I had to stop myself from reading it. David Sheff, who is first and foremost a journalist, knows his way around words. The way this book was written meant that I was emotionally invested as a reader. Every time something bad happened to the Sheff family, I felt as if I was there and was experiencing it with them. 

The narrative of this book starts with Nic as a teenager/young adult, coming home from university. David believes he has been clean this whole time, but it transpires that Nic has been using the entire time he was at university. It then flips to the Nic being born, and slightly before that, with his parents' marriage. We follow David and Nic as Nic grows up. As a reader, you are trying to pinpoint the moment Nic begins to fall down this path, but you can't. To the audience, it as if Nic starts using out of nowhere. By the end of the book, it is revealed that Nic is now an adult and has been clean since his early-mid twenties. You feel a sense of relief knowing that he is alive and well.

Something I particularly enjoyed about Sheff's writing was how he intertwined his own life with various points of Nic's. He shows how he was a reckless teenager and took drugs himself. We learn of his friend Charles, who was a drug addict, addicted to meth and who eventually died from complications from his addiction. Through this, Sheff is not parroting the usual "drugs are bad, I never did drugs, you are bad etc". It gives us as readers a refreshing take on what is becoming a reoccurring storyline in fiction and in everyday lives. I also enjoyed the way he included his family, especially his two younger children, Jasper and Daisy. Seeing their lives in all of this offered us moments of hope, yet it also showed us how it can affect children.

My only critique of this novel is the "info dumping" for want of a better word. At points it felt that Sheff would go off on tangents, giving us so much information about drugs and drug culture. During the first half of the novel, it was informative, but in the second half, it began to feel like a torrent of information. This could be because Sheff is a journalist and is used to fact over fiction, but for me as a reader, it felt a little bit distracting.

There is actually a "sequel" to Beautiful Boy. Nic Sheff wrote his own account of what happened to him and published it in a book called Tweak.