INKY SQUIGGLES

What's it about? 'Tsukimi Kurashita has a strange fascination with jellyfish. She’s loved them from a young age and has carried that love with her to her new life in the big city of Tokyo. There, she resides in Amamizukan, a safe haven for girl geeks who regularly gush over a range of things from trains to Japanese dolls. However, a chance meeting at a pet shop has Tsukimi crossing paths with one of the things that the residents of Amamizukan have been desperately trying to avoid – a beautiful and fashionable woman! But there’s much more to this woman than her trendy clothes! This odd encounter is only the beginning of a new and unexpected path for Tsukimi and her friends.' [Kindle edition blurb] Things I loved I'm a sucker for slice-of-life josei manga geared towards an older female audience – they're such unicorns! – so the premise of this and its quirkily charming art style immediately appealed to me.  I was also impressed by its focus on an often overlooked grou...

The Curse of Batterslea Hall  was always my favourite CYOA book – it was also, for reasons I'll get into, one of the more unusual ones. It sparked my later love of adventure games and inspired some of my sketchy early attempts at creative writing (including a thinly veiled recreation on 90s 'edutainment' program Storybook Weaver ). It also deepened my devastation when I returned home one fateful school night to discover my mum had donated my extensive CYOA collection – precious gems tremblingly unearthed from the dusty Mills and Boon-straining shelves of my local Scope – back to charity. Around twenty years later, and I took the obvious next step for a mildly lockdown-crazed 90s kid squinting down the barrel of their thirties: sourced a copy inflated by just four times the original cover price through eBay. But was it worth it, and does it still hold up? Dust off your bootcut jeans and fire up your Walkman – it's adventurin' time, 90s* style... The premise Battersl...

⚠️  This review contains spoilers for Volumes 1 to 5 . How it started Fuyumi Soryo's manga career had an unlikely start – as an artsy fashion college student, she earned an honorable mention in a manga competition after entering to raise money for a fashion contest.  Mars , which would become her most popular work, was first serialised in shōjo magazine Bessatsu Friend  from 1995 to 2000 before being published as 15 manga volumes from 1996 to 2000. Despite the shōjo genre's bubblegum trappings, Soryo became known for exploring darker, more psychological themes in her work.  While Mars fell out of print several years ago, it has enjoyed a recent resurgence ; it was adapted into a live-action series and film in Japan in 2016, and ComiXology and Kodansha Comics brought the series back into digital circulation in 2019. You can read it now via a Prime Reading or Kindle Unlimited subscription or buy it on Kindle (Amazon actually did good in this case). What's i...

Cold Bath Street by A.J. Hartley  (with illustrations by Janet Pickering ) , £7.99 (UCLan Publishing, 9780995515574) Publication date: 27 February 2018 My rating:   ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ Despite appearances, most ghost stories focus on the living and the impact the dead have on them. By the beginning of Cold Bath Street , however, protagonist Preston Oldcorn has already died, his heart and watch stopped forever at 9:22p.m. Part supernatural thriller, part mystery, Cold Bath Street is pacey and engaging, drawing the reader in with an unpredictable plot and warmly drawn characters. Hartley casts Preston as a relatable young boy who, like many of us, wishes he'd spoken up for himself more often. Unfortunately, it takes his untimely death to jolt him with this realisation. The extraordinary circumstances in which he finds himself see him face many of the usual worries and desires of a teenager alongside the dawning realisation that he will never again get to act on any of them. Some...

We Are Not Okay by Natália Gomes , £7.99   (HQ Stories, 9780008291846) Publication date:  2 May 2019 My rating:   ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ⚠️  This review contains spoilers and refers to sensitive issues, including sexual assault and suicide. Four teenage girls: all of them different, all of them struggling with their own shame and secrets. Lucy loves to gossip, Ulana is from a conservative Muslim family, Trina likes to party and Sophia has a seemingly perfect boyfriend. But in this book by the author of the dark social problem novel Dear Charlie , no one is exactly as they first appear. Gomes’ chatty, readable narrative style belies, and sometimes jars with, its mature subject matter, which ranges from interracial relationships and teen pregnancy to slut-shaming and sexual assault. The chapters cycle through each girl’s perspective; each is given a voice, and I assume that the intent is for the reader to identify with different aspects of the narratives, building a cumul...

The Harm Tree by Rose Edwards , £7.99   (UCLan Publishing, 9781912979004) Publication date:  19 July 2019 My rating:   ★ ★ ★ ½ The resistance is rising and dark forces stir to take back what was once theirs. Belief in the ancient gods runs strong—the sacrificial Harm Tree still stands.  Torny and Ebba are friends. Sent away by their families, they work together and watch out for each other. Too young to remember the war that tore apart the kingdom, Torny dreams of the glorious warriors of old, while Ebba misses her family, despite the darkness she left behind. But when a man is murdered on the street and Torny finds herself in possession of a dangerous message, the two friends must tread separate paths. These will lead them through fear, through grief, to the source of their own power and to the gates of death itself. As Torny and Ebba are used as tools for the opposing factions of the war, a deep power is ignited in them both. Can they uncover their own strengt...

The Raven's Children by Yulia Yakovleva  and  Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp (translator) , £6.99 (Puffin Books, 9780241330777) Publication date:  5 July 2018 My rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ A bestseller in its native Russia and translated into English for the first time, The Raven’s Children was written to ‘break the silence’ surrounding a dark and largely hidden period of history. However, despite its setting of Stalin-era Russia, a time of terror, paranoia and the Secret Police, Yakovleva delivers an accessible, engaging and resolutely hopeful story. This is achieved through the courageous protagonist, seven-year-old Shura, whose innocent world is shattered after his family—Mama, Papa and baby brother Bobka—vanish overnight, spirited away by a mysterious figure called The Raven. Nevertheless, Shura determines to find them himself, navigating a hostile, unpredictable city where birds talk, the walls have eyes and few can be trusted. As Shura discovers the truth about the S...

Charlie Changes into a Chicken by Sam Copeland  (writer) and Sarah Horne (illustrator) , £6.99 (Penguin, 9780241346211) Publication date: 7 February 2019 My rating:  ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ Meet Charlie. He’s a fairly normal nine-year-old who enjoys playing FIFA on the PS4 and tries to stay positive—even though he’s the target of the school bully and his brother is in hospital. Oh, and he also happens to turn into a colourful menagerie of animals when he least expects it, from a high-hopping flea to an incontinent rhino. Young readers are sure to be delighted by Charlie’s lively tale, which begins in action-packed fashion and manages to sustain its pace throughout. Each animal transformation is as unpredictable as its consequences, setting off an imaginative chain of preposterous events.

Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within by Jane Jensen , $6.99 (Roc, 9780451456212) Publication date: 1 December 1998 My rating:  ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ Just as Gabriel Knight is finally settling into his ancestral home in Germany, he is called upon in his role as schattenjagger, or "shadow hunter", to help solve the savage killing of a young girl. The authorities claim it was a wolf escaped from the zoo, but the townspeople say it is a werewolf. Gabriel soon becomes certain the answer lies within an exclusive hunting club in Munich that celebrates the nature of the beast. As his loyal assistant Grace delves into the past to discover the truth, Gabriel finds himself ensnared in a sinister trap, in which the beast within himself becomes the greatest threat of all! I found a digital copy of this as it turns out the paperback is near-impossible to acquire these days. I wasn't expecting much in the way of literary merit, simply a way to get my Gabriel Knight fix having exhausted man...

⚠️  This review contains spoilers and refers to sensitive issues, including sexual assault and abuse . After 21 volumes and 80 chapters, I've finally come to the provisional* end of a manga series whose characters have taken on the familiarity of old friends. Endearing, relatable and, at times, hopelessly infuriating. Saying goodbye to them was accompanied by a quiet sense of loss I'm sure the two Nanas would implicitly understand. So what was it about Nana that made me stick with it for so long? Nana follows two young women who move to Tokyo in search of their dreams at key junctures in their lives. A frivolous airhead who attaches herself to men too readily and a fiercely independent punk rocker set on making it as a lead vocalist, on the surface, Nana K. (a.k.a. Hachi) and Nana O. share little more than a name and the same train journey. Nevertheless, they make an improbable connection.

The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald  (Simon & Schuster, 9780743451505) Publication date: 25 June 2002 (first published 1922) My rating: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ Would-be Jazz Age aristocrats Anthony and Gloria Patch embody the corrupt high society of 1920s New York: they are beautiful, shallow, pleasure-seeking, and vain. As presumptive heirs to a large fortune, they begin their married life by living well beyond their means. Their days are marked by endless drinking, dancing, luxury, and play. But when the expected inheritance is withheld, their lives become consumed with the pursuit of wealth, and their alliance begins to fall apart. (Vintage Classics description) 'Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.'

Photo credit: Rick's Photo Thing With  Sarah  and  Lynette SUMMARY Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe is working for the Sternwood family. Old man Sternwood, crippled and wheelchair-bound, is being given the squeeze by a blackmailer and he wants Marlowe to make the problem go away. But with Sternwood's two wild, devil-may-care daughters prowling LA's seedy backstreets, Marlowe's got his work cut out – and that's before he stumbles over the first corpse... (Penguin re-issue edition) IMPORTANT TOPICS AND THEMES L: Money – everyone's doing something for money. I think this book is set in the 30s, right? Depression era. So money is pretty high on everyone's mind. And honour – family honour and Marlowe's own honour code, which I thought was interesting; he's an honourable man even with his 'dirty' work. S: Ooh, I like those. I thought that, too – it's interesting that Marlowe is shown to not just be in his job for the money and h...