Bookstoker Young Readers
The 1,000-year-old Boy
Who wants to live forever?
Things a Bright Girl Can Do
For bright young feminists everywhere, celebrating 100 years of Votes for Women
Welcome to Bookstoker!
We’re here to help you find that book that you can’t put down, the book you’ll push on all your friends, the book that’ll change your life.
We read literary fiction, non-fiction, classics and children’s books, all genres and styles embraced in our aim to share the love. You’ll also find fabulous Bookstagrams and literary news.
A world of bookish delights!
Kirstin and Julie
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Review by Julie
Sisters
Torn apart by jealousy
Our unnamed narrator, the second wife of a successful Wall Street bond trader, is consumed with jealously for the first wife – ‘she’ – in this short novel, where the classic direction of jealousy is reversed. She is composed, blonde, tall and ‘lovely’, a talented musician with two exceptionally bright kids. ‘I’ is everything she’s not. A stirring portrayal of jealousy, emotional neglect and obsession, easily read in one sitting.
News by Julie
More than Hay
The Hay festival in Cartagena, Colombia took place a few weeks ago (25-28 January) and I’m sick with envy. I’ve long been wanting to go, maybe next year will be the year? The Hay Literary Festival, Britain’s most famous literary festival once described by Bill Clinton as the Woodstock of the Mind, is a lot more than a week in Hay-on-Wye in Wales at the end of May, although that’s where it all started.
Review by Meg
Lullaby
A psychological thriller about the Mary Poppins from hell
‘The baby is dead. It only took a few seconds.’ The chilling opening line of this hugely hyped thriller about a killer nanny leaves you in no doubt about its horrific ending. And this horrible premise certainly doesn’t make for an easy read. Touted as the next Gone Girl, the first of Leila Slimani’s novels to be translated into English and winner of the prestigious French literary prize, The Prix Goncourt, does Lullaby (American title – The Perfect Nanny) deserve the hype?
News by Julie
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Bookstoker Young Readers
Blame My Brain – The Amazing Teenage Brain Revealed
An entertaining guide for teenagers and their long-suffering parents
Frankenstein
Stretch your teen with this school syllabus favourite on its 200th anniversary
Astrid the Unstoppable
A resilient heroine sparkles in this prize-winning Norwegian tale
News by Julie
Costa Prize winners 2017
The winner of the Costa Prize Book of the Year 2017 was announced yesterday. The poet Helen Dunmore received the prize posthumously for her poetry collection Inside the Wave, a collection of poems written during Dunmore’s battle with cancer. She died in June of last year, 64 years old. The poems, which are guaranteed to leave a lump in your throat, are ‘concerned with the borderline between life and death’. And if that doesn’t do it, listening her daughter talk about her poems on BBC Radio 4 this week certainly will, unless you have a heart of stone.
‘To be alive is to be inside the wave, always travelling until it breaks and is gone’
News by Julie
Blinkist, the ultimate cocktail party prep
Ever heard about the App Blinkist? I hadn’t until a friend excitedly told me about it the other day. Blinkist is an App which condenses books into 15-20 minute reads, basically Cliff Notes for adults, only it’s exclusively non-fiction (thank God!). I gave it a try and I’ve now ‘read’ Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, a book I’ve been curious about for a while. Except I don’t feel I’ve really read it, I only know the definition of ‘the beauty myth’ and have learnt that we women should try to be friends not competitors….it took me 19 minutes.
Review by Julie
Mrs Osmond
A worthy sequel to Henry James's great classic
Some books just scream out for sequels. None more so than Henry James’s 19th century classic The Portrait of Lady which ends with heroine Isabel Archer facing the choice between going back to her adulterous, deceiving husband or scandalising society by leaving him. Brave is the author who picks up James’s pen and continues his masterpiece, but John Banville does it and, somehow, manages to pull it off.
Review by Jane
Little Fires Everywhere
Clever on the shifting dynamics of family life
The teenage Pearl and her artistic mother Mia move into a rented house owned by a wealthy family in a smarter area of the same Ohio neighbourhood. The lives of both families become entwined in healthy and not‐so‐healthy ways in a deceptively simple tale about motherhood, belonging, responsibility, and standing up for what you believe in.
