Tag: Young Adult

A Young Adult Mystery Worth a Read

“Welcome to Castle Cove – A town cursed with missing girls, bad boyfriends, family secrets, and some very steep cliffs.”

I have had an exciting week of reading. Three books in one week. I will be fitting an extra post in this week to catch up. This is the first of the three books I completed.

I ventured into reading young adult fiction and it was worth it. This book has all the thrills and adventure of any adult mystery but with characters who are a little younger. If anything, their age made me more concerned about them confronting danger than I might have if the characters had been adults.

Summary:

Alice Olgivie is an only child of a wealthy couple who rarely stay home with her. She is being raised by a nanny. She is lonely and smart which doesn’t help when she is also fearless. Because of her loneliness, she has become an avid reader of the Agatha Christie novels. The beginning of each chapter starts with a quote from one of Christies novels.

Iris Adams comes from a home with only her mother parenting her. They live in an apartment complex and her mother works in a bar. Iris too spends a great deal of time alone but she does have a loving mother who she sees daily.

Iris is asked to mentor Alice to help her catch up with some of her classes. Alice’s boyfriend dumped her the previous year and Alice decided to disappear. She thought she was re-enacting an incident in her hero, Agatha Christie’s life who disappeared when her husband dumped her. Alice had a rude awakening when her best friend stole her boyfriend while she was gone. When that same friend is found dead Alice struggles with mixed feelings of both hating and mourning that friend. She and her ex-boyfriend quickly become prime suspects once Iris and Alice are able to convince the local police to actually investigate the friends death.

The two girls are not friends in the beginning. Who could become a friend with someone who is being paid to mentor you? Alice resented having a mentor while Iris resented Alice for having so much and screwing it up. Iris experienced envy when she first walked into the mansion Alice lived in until she noticed how alone Alice was rattling around in the huge empty space. Iris was able to push those feelings away when she focused on her goal of making enough money for her and her mother to escape their own bad situation in Castle Cove.

Both girls had their own group of friends. Alice’s friends dumped her though when she did her disappearing act because all of them had been investigated as suspects in Alice’s disappearance. Iris has a group of nerdy geek friends who do come in handy during their investigation but neither girl has a true best friend.

During the investigation the story points toward a handful of suspects, giving reasonable explanations as to why they might have done it. It kept me guessing right up to the end.

The rest of the story involves Alice and Iris investigating the friend’s death using techniques they picked up from Agatha Christie. They do solve the murder and become true friends.

Review:

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The characters were fun and their dialogue was perfect. I loved some of their attitude and dialogue reactions. Typical teenagers. I enjoyed their angst and watching them become more likeable human beings.

Both characters were well developed and felt like their own persons. Maybe because the book was co-written I am guessing that each author wrote in one character’s point of view.

Both girls were lonely and both needed a true friend. They found that in each other within this story. There were moments I worried about the situations they got themselves into but then I also celebrated their victories.

Interspersed between the story are text messages between the characters that really reflected that the characters were teenagers. It also cemented us into the timeframe of this story.

I think this is a fantastic read that sucked me in from the beginning. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a good mystery. I gave this book 5 stars and plan to continue reading this series.

Title: The Agathas

First Published: May 3, 2022

Category: Mystery, Young Adult

Pages: 432

Rating: Goodreads: 3.96

Location: Castle Cove, CA

About the Authors:

Kathleen Glasgow is the author of the New York Times bestseller Girl in Pieces, How to Make Friends with the Dark, and You’d Be Home Now. She lives and writes in Tucson, Arizona.

Liz Lawson is the author of The Lucky Ones. She lives in Washington, DC with her family.

Coming Soon:

My next review will be coming up later this week for The Last Word by Taylor Adams. I hope to attend an on-line author event with him Tuesday evening. Hopefully that will give me a little more to share within his book review.

Happy Reading!

Virginia

Why Should You Add Classics to Your Book List?

I enjoy classics because they never grow old. They have stories that pull you in and hold onto you until the very last page.

“When you re-read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.” Cliff Fadiman

Someone recommended this book to me many years ago. I did purchase it but it sat on my shelf. I have been trying to dip into the classics and decided this would be a perfect spring read. It was.

First Published: January 1, 1908

Category: Classic, Young Adult, Historic Fiction

Setting: Prince Edward Island

Pages: 384

Goodreads Rating: 4.30

Summary:

I enjoy classics because they never grow old. They have stories that hold you like a warm hug. They have characters you love and they are written with a passion that can be felt even a hundred years after they were first written.

If you are like me and have never read Anne of Green Gables, it is the story of a little orphan girl who is adopted by Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, an older unmarried pair of siblings.

Matthew and Marilla live on a farm on Prince Edward Island. Because they are getting up in age, they decided a young boy would be helpful for Matthew with the farm chores.

Matthew drives to the train station to pick up the little boy and finds Anne sitting there waiting. The station master tells Matthew there is no little boy, only the little girl.

Matthew who is very shy finally approaches Anne and finds out that yes, she was the child sent to them. He doesn’t let her know of his disappointment. He takes her home because he has no choice, he can’t leave her there alone.

On their way home, Anne talks constantly. ( A trait I noticed when raising both a boy and a girl. My daughter, when she was small, was the chatter box. ) Anne talked constantly while Matthew listened. On that ride home, she stole his heart.

Of course Marilla said she had to go back and Matthew had already decided to leave the raising of the child to Marilla but when he had a moment alone, he let her know that he thought maybe she should stay. She could keep Marilla company.

Anne’s heart is broken and she cries all night while Marilla sleeps on it. After Marilla and Anne go to visit the woman who was supposed to bring the boy they find out that there had been a miscommunication.

In the meantime, Marilla learns about the struggles Anne has already had to endure. She’d been loaned out to other families to help raise children and do housework. She’d often been treated like a slave. She learns that Anne has not had a chance to have a childhood.

Marilla’s heart is softened and she decides to give Anne a try. The story then tells of their time together as a family and how they learn to love each other and grow.

Review:

There are lots of heartwarming characters within the community and you feel for Anne as she tries to fit in but always seems to make mistakes. Sometimes I too wanted to shake Anne because she kept doing so many things she shouldn’t but I learned to love her despite her over active imagination.

Marilla was chosen to raise the child so sometimes she had to be the bad guy. I loved watching her character evolve as Marilla opened her heart to Anne and her attitude softened.

Loved the inter action between Anne and the other children. Anne was a born leader and half the time they all got into trouble for following.

It felt like a snapshot of the past. You were able to experience how life was then without the hardships.

Montgomery tells the story beautifully making you want to pick up the book and read yet not necessarily want to finish it because you’ve come to love her world.

If you want a read that warms your heart and gives you hope, this would be a good choice. This is a book I would read over and over again. I gave this book 5 stars.

I guess I have always had some connection to Anne.

I felt for Anne who hated her red hair. People often made fun of it. I too am a redhead and though I did go through a phase where some kids at school taunted me by saying – I’d rather be dead than red, I ignored them and grew up thinking my hair was beautiful because it was different.

Anne also always pointed out that her name was spelled with an e. I ran into a similar situation when naming my daughter. Her name is Jennifer Anne and the hospital kept trying to drop the e off the end.

About the Author:

Lucy Maude Montgomery was born at Clifton, Prince Edward Island November 30, 1874. She lived at Leaskdale, after marrying Rev Ewen MacDonald on July 11, 1911. She had three children and wrote almost a dozen books. She died April 24, 1942 and is buried at Cavendish, Prince Edward Island.

Coming Soon:

Another reason I chose to read Anne of Green Gables at this time is because I was gifted an uncorrected arc of a book from Goodreads. That book is After Anne – by Logan Steiner. This is a novel that was written using L M Montgomery’s journals. I will have a full review soon.

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