Sara Crowe

A delightful book. How strange that: the narrator's mum has recently committed suicide, and our 17 year old heroine has chosen to live with her aunt, rather than remain at her home with her dad and his new partner, whom she loathes. But she is charmingly witty, hopeful, optimistic and perceptive. She uses malapropisms to great effect. Her aunt's lodgers are plain eccentric, her co-workers at the cafe where she spends her days the source of many of her pains and pleasures. I loved this book and didn't want it to end.… (mehr)

If you are located in the US please PLEASE do yourself a favor and listen to the audiobook version of this book, because the US publishers trashed this book by downgrading it from YA to Middle Grade.

The book is originally a UK YA book and the audiobook is based on that version and holy smokes is it soooo much better then what the US did to it.
Chunks of the story were completely removed to make it kid friendly.
This story gets dark, 15/16 year old boys threatening to murder each other, suicide, an army dad who suffers from PTSD, so many heavy harsh elements that are severely downplayed or completely removed from the US version.

Each chapter just got increasingly darker and heavier which really helped sell the story for me, I’m so use to US YA books ending is happy love stories that this was a fresh of breath air. It starts heavy and then ends heavy, aside from the supernatural aspects of the story, which were good, the story is real, and tackles real problems and issues that some people face and it doesn’t gloss it over. (unless your reading the US version)

It’s a deep story with real issues and a bit of supernatural fun to bring other elements of the story to life, it’s a heavy ride but worth it.

I just can’t understand why the US publishers felt it was necessary to downgrade it to Middlegrade and just completely hack and trash the story, it lost its whole appeal and deeper storytelling that was involved.

I constantly compared the two as I had both version from
My library, and I’m just really upset the US publishers ruined a really good book.… (mehr)