Rick O'Shea

I’ve read George Monbiot before, both in book form and in newspaper columns, so what I expected before I started the book and what I got were surprisingly different. It’s a very human and personal story leading to the much larger idea and movement based around the concept of allowing tracts of the countryside around the world to rewild themselves or be rewilded with bison, bears and wolves amongst other species (there are very good reasons for this, far too longform for a short review) and the oceans too. I ended up slightly depressed actually at how little time I spend interacting with “nature” of any […]

freida lives in a dystopian future in which girls are no longer born naturally but are bred and schooled specifically to become companions for the few thousand powerful men left in the world and their sons to come. Her class is getting ready for the arrival of the boys they will either marry and bear children with or become sexual concubines for. The pressures exerted on them to look perfect, stay the right weight, dress appealingly and be submissive to the young men they will be “wives” to are a sickening funhouse mirror for the real expectations put upon young women of 2015 by media […]

This is one of those books that you come across every now and them that stands in a category all of its own. On the surface it’s the story told by Claire, a teenager growing up on Newcastle, about her friend Ella, the boy she meets and the events surrounding her “disappearance”. I use quotation marks because huge tracts of what you’re reading are a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Euridyce writ large in modern day Tyneside. Put simply, this is a stunning piece of work, something that defies categorisation and deserves to be read far beyond the traditional YA […]

Wow. This is a special one. Nathan is seventeen, his father is a hated, reviled, seemingly invincible black witch in hiding who appears to have killed his mother along with many others. When we first meet him he’s locked in a cage for months on the side of a mountain somewhere in the middle of nowhere being held captive trying to escape. The story tells scrolls back, tells us how her got there and leads us into a very, very interesting world that pans out and out and out into something that could become absolutely top drawer as the series unfolds. There are huge […]

This is very much the real deal. 4 stories that the author says you can read in any order (I tried it the old fashioned front to back way and that worked for me) set from the palaeolithic era through witch hunts and an asylum in the 1920s all the way into the far future and deep space. All 4 are connected by the shape of a spiral. I’m not telling you anything else as I think you should read the rest for yourself. My immediate thought on finishing is that it’s a smaller, more simplified sort of Cloud Atlas narrative linking vastly different eras of […]

Renée and Flo live on Guernsey in another coming of age story told in the last year before college. They have complicated family lives, questions as to whether they’re going to college together and subplots with boys, religion and tragedy. A solid story, well told but not my favourite on the list by a long shot. (Goose is one of the books I judged for the UK & Ireland YA Book Prize 2015)