VBT# Review- Nourish - Laura Baggaley - July 2026 Imagine a world where nobody eats. No Sunday roasts, no warm toast, no biscuit dunked in tea. Instead there are liquid injections and vitamin pills, and a generation of people who wouldn't know what taste is. That's the world of Laura Baggaley's Nourish, and I haven't stopped thinking about it since. Our hero is Cal, who lives in a post-food society where people receive what's known as Nutritional Provision. It's tidy and efficient, and everyone accepts it as simply how things are. Then Cal's father dies, and he's sent to a fancy boarding school. It's there that he finds a rare edible substance, something that shouldn't exist, and it makes him question everything he's ever been told about nourishment. What I loved most is how the book gets you thinking about the small, ordinary things we take for granted. The smell of something baking, the way a meal brings people to a table, the comfort of ...

Review: The Boarding School Experiment - Book #1 Experiment Series - Emily Evans - September 2012 There's a particular kind of joy in curling up with a new Emily Evans book, and I'll admit I went into this one already grinning before I'd even cracked the spine. Emily is one of those authors whose name on a cover is basically a promise.  I know I'm in for something fun, fast, and full of heart and pair that with a boarding school setting, my absolute weakness as a reader, and this felt like it was written just for me. The premise had me hooked immediately. There are three steps to taking revenge on the most popular, hottest guy in your senior class: stealth, planning, and execution. Poor Elena manages precisely none of them, and instead of getting her satisfying payback, she ends up shipped off to a government-run boarding school out in the wilds of Alaska. And because the universe has a sense of humour, Thane Trallwyn  her sworn enemy and the very target of her failed...

Review: Venomous - Book #2 Monstrous Series - Nicole M. Rubino - October 2024 Some books sit on your Kindle for years before the right moment finally comes along to read them. Venomous by Nicole M. Rubino was one of those books for me. I’d had this one sitting on my Kindle for a couple of years, but it was an August reading challenge that finally gave me the push I needed. One of the prompts was for a mythology retelling, and I immediately knew this was going to be the perfect choice. Sometimes a reading challenge really does know what you need to pick up next! After surviving her first year at Alystair University, Rhiannon is barely holding things together. She is plagued by nightmares that blur the boundaries between dreams and reality, while the guilt of the friends she failed to protect continues to weigh heavily on her. Then there is Nick. Believing that letting him go was the only way to keep him safe, Rhiannon soon discovers that her plan has spectacularly backfired as Nick’s o...

Review: The Four - Ellie Keel - August 2024 There's something deeply unsettling about returning to the world of boarding schools through fiction when you've lived that reality yourself. As I cracked open The Four by Ellie Keel, memories of my own three years at Hadlow from 1997-1999 came flooding back. I had won a scholarship too, just like the protagonists Rose, Sami, Lloyd, and Marta, and that shared experience made every page feel intensely personal. This YA academic thriller had been sitting on my physical bookshelf for months, practically calling to me. My friend Liv Royal had recommended it, and I'm grateful she did. The story follows four scholarship students whose dreams materialize when they're accepted into an exclusive boarding school, but their bond is forged through something far darker than academic achievement. What struck me most powerfully was how Ellie Keel captures the unique dynamics of scholarship students in elite institutions. Having lived that...

Eva is Waiting Romola Farr Publication date: February 14th 2025 Genres: Adult, Historical, Thriller Following the death of her mother, Lily is sent to a remote girls’ boarding school, tearing her away from all the excitement of London in the Swingin’ Sixties. Bereft, she develops a relationship with Rainer, the husband of Sylvia, the headmistress. One day, Bella, the school Collie, goes missing whilst playing on the shore below sheer cliffs. Despite a rising tide, Lily is determined to find the beautiful dog and discovers her trapped between rocks in a cave. Deepening water swirls around them as her fingertips dig into the sand and touch the smooth surface of what she believes to be an animal skull. From that moment on, she is haunted by a young girl pleading for help. Lily speaks to her headmistress and learns that eleven years previously a pupil went missing. Eva was a refugee from Hungary, and it was assumed by the police that she had run away. Forced to stay on at schoo...

Review: Monstrous - Book #1 Monstrous Series - Nicole M. Rubino - January 2024 Have you ever read a book that transports you back to another time when you read books similar and it sparks up happy moments and memories and because of that, you find yourself enjoying a book? That for me was how I felt with Nicole's book "Monstrous" - to be honest, I wasn't sure what I was in for as I read the trigger warnings - I assumed it was darker and more gruesome, but as I got reading it I found myself transported back to the same feelings I had in 2016 when I began my journey to read Jennifer Estep's Mythos Academy series. This book gave me those same vibes with a hint of possibly Wednesday - the new show based on Wednesday Adams. In Monstrous our main character Rhiannon has had some changes happening and discovered that she isn't quite human - she is half-monster. Now she has been thrust into a university designed for monster students to learn to harness their skills a...

Review: The Kiss of Death - Pantheon #1 - Shaneen Ricci - September 2024 It's been years since I have read a bullymance and so when this one came along to be read as part of the Happily Booked PR ARCS, I jumped at the chance and I have to say it has reignited my love of bullymances and made me want to read more. The book starts with our two main characters Dalia and Levi at Levi's house. His mum is Dalia's music teacher and teaches her the Violin. Dalia's dream is to one day play at the Pantheon, the place that united her mum and herself. It is the place of nightmare and happiness for Dalia. When Levi's mum dies, he blames Dalia and then they go their separate ways. Years later, Dalia has a spot at the Pantheon Academy but her life is about to get harder as turns out the boy she has always loved Levi, is the King of the School and a Bully. He is the type of guy no one at the school wants to cross, he will also find out your darkest secrets and use them as blackmail ...

    Review: This Book Kills - Ravena Guron - January 2023 Ever tried to start a book and then you find you couldn't get into it at the time and it ended up being a DNF? Then maybe months later or often in my case, it can be a year or more later. You pick up that book again and decide to give it another go, sometimes I have found that even if I give it a second chance - it still ends up being a DNF. However, sometimes it works the other way and I end up enjoying the book and finishing it. This is what happened with Ravena Guron's book "This Book Kills". I recently got a new Kindle and I have been busy downloading all my books back onto it and I saw this one, the cover, and title grabbed me. As I started reading it, it felt familiar and I checked Goodreads and I had tried to read it back in September 2023. This time around though, It had kept my attention and as someone who loves writing and mysteries, I loved the premise of this book. A short story that Jess used for...