Book Review: Love, Tanya

As promised, last week I went out and bought Tanya Burr's new book 'Love, Tanya'. I read the whole book the same day I bought it!

I absolutely love the front cover! Yeah you shouldn't judge a book by its cover but this one is beautiful. It's the first look at many of the beautiful features throughout the book.

The book is about aspects of Tanya's life and her experiences through it. She provides advice everything from hair and beauty to becoming confident and happy. There are also plenty of spaces for you to write lists of your own and read her favourites lists. I chose not to write in the book itself but on post-it-notes instead. 

This is a great book for fans of Tanya or YouTubers in general. I really recommend reading this if you are wanting to learn about the YouTuber life and how they become who we see them as. 

'Love, Tanya' is split up into different chapters covering a range of topics. My favourite chapter is probably the 'Growing Up' chapters. I also really enjoyed looking at all the pictures from Tanya's photoshoots.

Here's a couple of my favourite pages from the book:

I hope you pick up Tanya's book and love it as much as I have! Go view her YouTube channel and watch some of her videos. I promise you will love her bubbly and genuine personality. Well done Tanya!

xxMegan

P.s. I'm unsure whether there will be a post next week as I will be visiting Prague from Monday to Friday. I will try my hardest to get a post scheduled by then for you!

Book Review: Elizabeth Scott

Being a little bit cheeky this week and clustering multiple books together, but they're all by the same author so that makes it okay!

Now you may not have heard of Elizabeth Scott before but neither had until I found 'Love you, Hate you, Miss you' in a second hand book shop. After I read this I had to find out more about her. This led me to try out 'Stealing heaven'. That was it then, I had to read as many of her books as possible! Most of these I read on the day I got them as I just could not put them down! 

Picking a favourite is hard but it has to be 'Stealing Heaven'. It's about a girl called Dani who was trained as a thief by her mum when she was young. They move around so much that they never stay somewhere long enough to form real connections and a real life.

Elizabeth Scott writes to effortlessly it makes me jealous! She is partly one of the reasons I want to become a writer. Some how she manages to deal with very serious issues in a way that doesn't make you want to cry for a month. Her novels are perfectly paced in a way that you are hooked in but don't feel rushed through the events.  

My collection of her books isn't complete yet thanks to money having to go on everything but books. But I gave in and purchased 'Heartbeat' which is currently in the post! 

I cannot recommend her books anymore! I hope you love them as much as I do!

Come back next Tuesday for my review of Tanya Burr's 'Love, Tanya'.

xxMegan

Book Review: Matched Trilogy

Hi guys! First of all let me just say how sorry I am for the lack of blog posts for the past week, I've had a mountain of coursework to do and have only just managed to complete it all. Wow college is stressful but bring on University!

I want to start doing more book reviews and thought I'd kick that off today with the first one.

Matched Trilogy - Allie Condie

Genre -  Dystopian Young Adult 

The first book 'Matched' is about a tightly ruled society that decide who you love, where you work and when you die. At the age of 17 you are "matched" with your life partner. The trilogy follows seventeen year old Cassia Reyes who ends up being matched with her best friend, Xander Carrow. However, when she views the information pack about her "match" an unsuspected face shows up instead of her best friend. She attempts to find out about the mishap but becomes conflicted about her match. 

The book is then followed by 'Crossed' and 'Reached'. Obviously I'm not going to tell you much about the next two books or it will spoil the first one. 

I loved this trilogy and could not put the books down! I think it took me a total of a week to read the trilogy and have re-read it many times since. I highly recommend these books, they will keep you held in until the very end.

At first you think it's just another cheesy forbidden love story, but it turns out to be so much more than you expect. Ignore the bad goodreads reviews and go read the first book! 

Check out the youtube trailer for the first book here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaeNWL8rlBI

Here's my favourite quotes from each of the three books:

"It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures" 

- Matched

"Love changes what is probable and makes unlikely things possible" 

- Crossed

"When you can't cry because all you are is pain, and if you let some of it out, you might cease to exist" 

- Reached

Come back next Tuesday for another book review! 

xxMegan

2014 Book Favourites!

Picking a small selection of books that were my favourite in 2014 has been very hard! I love to read books and have a small collection of just over 200 of them to myself. You can call me greedy if you want but I'm just a bookworm.

I've tried to mix my selection up a bit and pick books from different genres and also ones that you may not have heard of before.

The Queen of the Tearling - Erika Johansen

Absolutely loved this book! I ended up reading until silly hours in the morning because I couldn't put it down. It's written from the perspective of Kelsea. I especially love that Kelsea who is a princess isn't amazingly beautiful. It adds a touch of realism and also reminds us that looks don't get us places in life, our motivation and determination do.

This book is also supposed to be a combo of the Hunger Games and A Game of Thrones, but that's not the reason I picked it up.

Not for the faint hearted.

"Even a book can be dangerous in the wrong hands, and when that happens, you blame the hands, but you also read the book."

Alienated - Melissa Landers

I'd never heard of this book or the author before, but someone from instagram recommended that I give it ago. Although it's a bit cheesy, I still love it. This novel features an almost 'forbidden love' plot, yet also includes the idea of aliens as if they are not so different from ourselves.

If you are looking for something with a romantic theme but also something a little different then this is definitely the novel for you!

"It's common knowledge that shiny rocks are preferred among human females."

Girl Online - Zoe Sugg

Even though I am a fan of Zoe on YouTube, that was not the entire reason I read this book in the first place. Girl Online discusses issues of online bullying and anxiety, and personally I feel this was done in a way that not only helped its readers but did not make the book dismal.

Zoe has also had a lot of criticism for having help when writing this book. However, these negative opinions have not swayed my view on this book as I still believe that Zoe's ideas and concepts make up the groundwork of the novel.

"Sometimes you have to face up to your fears to realise that they aren't actually real."

Delirium - Lauren Oliver

A friend of mine suggested that I read this book. Within a week I had read all three books in the trilogy. Lauren Oliver writes so beautifully and had me held in from the very first page. The trilogy takes a completely different twist on the idea of love and treats it has a disease know as 'armor deliria nervosa'. The plot follows Lena who falls in love weeks before she is supposed to the 'cure' for love.

It was this novel that made me fall in love with dystopian genre of books. Since reading this trilogy I have read other Lauren Oliver novels and can say that she is one of my favourite authors.

"I love you. Remember. They cannot take it."

 

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

This will always be my favourites children's classic no matter how old I get. Lewis Carroll plays with the ideas of logic and anthropomorphism, yet is also considered literary nonsense. Even though this a children's book, reading it now as an adult I know consider the darker elements of the books, such as the Queen of Heart's obsession with beheading and the caterpillar's drug usage (although subtle). The kind of book that can not only entice children and adults is both a rare find and a masterpiece.

"I can't go back to yesterday because I was different person then."

No matter how old I get I will also be a bookworm. I will always have a book that I'm reading and one day I want to have written the book that people are talking about.

What's your favourite book and why?

xxMegan