Six Degrees of Separation - Gone Girl to Trouble

 

Six Degrees of Separation is a fabulous meme which started a few months ago! Huge thanks to Annabel Smith and Emma J Chapman for coming up with the idea. Head over to one of their blogs and leave a link in the comments if you take part, please! 
 
Okay, I picked up Gone Girl a while ago despite not reading that many adult novels these days because there were SO MANY people raving about it on Twitter. Admittedly, I haven't got round to reading it yet, but I still intend to, honestly. Another adult novel I picked up because of the buzz on Twitter was We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler, recently longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Unlike Gone Girl, I HAVE read WAACBP, and loved it. I firmly believe it's a novel you should go into knowing as little as possible about it, but I'll say for now that it's a wonderful look at how your family can screw you up, even when their intentions are good - as is Sarah Crossan's upcoming MG novel, Apple and Rain.

As I've mentioned on Twitter a couple of times over the last week or so, I've been really struggling with contemporary books recently (not ideally for someone running a blog called YA Contemporary, in addition to this one!) Apple and Rain is one of the few recently to have held my attention from start to finish, with the other I can recall being Judith Tewes's My Soon-To-Be Sex Life.

MSTBSL sees a girl trying to lose her virginity, although - despite the title - it's far from being the main point of the plot. One book which is strongly focused on teens trying to have sex for the first time is Lobsters by Tom Ellen and Lucy Ivison, one of the funniest reads of the year so far.

If you're a regular reader of my reviews, you'll probably remember that dual narratives are one of my favourite things in a story. There don't seem to have been that many this year - at least not ones I've read - but those I have read have been great. Lobsters is definitely one of the best, having two narrators with wonderful voices, but you can say the same thing about Non Pratt's superb debut Trouble.