Review: The State Of Grace

Being a human is a complicated game
- like seeing a ghost in the mirror and
trying to echo everything they do.

Grace is autistic, a little different from the people around her, but that's ok. She's got a best friend, a horse, and a routine that makes life a little easier. But with things starting to feel off at home and an unexpected development with a cute boy, Grace's ordered world is starting to slip off its axis, and it's up to her to fix it.

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Review: A Quiet Kind Of Thunder

Millie Gerdavey cheated on her boyfriend again.

Steffi has been selectively mute since she was small, she doesn't speak at school, she's practically invisible, but this year she's determined to prove herself. Then on the first day of sixth form her rudimentary BSL skills get her assigned to the new boy, Rhys. He's deaf so he doesn't mind that she struggles to talk out loud, he can see her, and he just might make her world that little bit bigger.

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Review: His Bloody Project

I am writing this at the behest of my advocate,
Mr Andrew Sinclair, who since my incarceration
here in Inverness has treated me with a degree
of civility I in no way deserve.

On a seemingly normal morning in 1869, a brutal triple murder rocks the remote highland village of Culduie. There is no doubt that the perpetrator is local teenager, Roderick Macrae, who freely and openly admits to carrying out the bloody crime.
All that's left in question is his motive, and his sanity.

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Review: The Trespasser by Tana French

My ma used to tell me stories about my da.

Detective Antoinette Conway has had just about all she can take of the constant drip of hostility she's been facing since joining the murder squad. When she and her partner Steven Moran are handed the case of a young woman found dead in her home, it seems to be yet another slam dunk domestic, but it isn't long before they start to wonder if maybe there might just be a little more to the story.

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Review: Alex As Well

There are moments in life where something happens and it changes everything.

Raised for fourteen years as a boy, Alex's parents never told her she was born intersex, but she just told them what she always knew: she is a girl. They did not take it well; her mother had a tantrum, her father walked out. Hoping to start over Alex enrolls at a new school, one where nobody has to know that she is anything but just another girl.

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Review: The Reason I Jump

When I was small I didn't even know I was
a kid with special needs.

Naoki Higashida, a thirteen year old, non-verbal autistic boy from Japan had his world opened up by the application of an alphabet board, giving him a long desired way to communicate his thoughts to those around him. Here he answers questions about his experiences, the way his mind works, and of course, why he jumps.

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Review: A Brief History Of Seven Killings

Listen. Dead people never stop talking.

Jamaica, 1976, and the country is at a tipping point. With just weeks until a general election, Bob Marley is planning a concert for peace, to unite the warring gangs and political parties. Around him spin the lives of gang kids, journalists, dons, forgotten one night stands, drug lords, hitmen and CIA operatives, not all of whom want him to succeed. Spanning years and continents, this is their story.

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Review: Salt To The Sea by Ruta Sepetys

Guilt is a hunter.

1945, WWII is heading towards its bitter end, and thousands flee from the oncoming Russian army through German occupied Europe. As the evacuation progresses, the paths of four young people, a Lithuanian, a Pole, a Prussian, and a German, are becoming entwined. All four have a secret. And all four are heading towards the Wilhelm Gustloff, and the greatest disaster in maritime history.

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Adaptation Observations: The Little Prince

Title: The Little Prince
Source: Netflix
Director: Mark Osborne
Starring: Jeff Bridges, Mackenzie Foy, Riley Osborne
Adapting: Le Petite Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Rating: 

A Little Girl and her Mother are desperate to get her ready to attend the prestigious, if intimidatingly rigid and boringly adult, Werth Academy. They have a plan and they are going to stick to it. But a spanner, or an airplane propeller, is thrown into the works when the Little Girl meets her new next door neighbour, the Aviator, who begins to tell her the story of the time he was stranded in the Sahara desert and met a Little Prince.

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Review: We Have Always Lived In The Castle

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood.

Merricat lives with her sister Constance and their unwell uncle in the large Blackwood house, hating and hated by the locals. They have lived content in their seclusion since Constance was acquitted of the murders of every other member of their household several years before. But a new threat to their way of life is about to appear, in the form of their opportunistic cousin, Charles Blackwood.

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Review: Harry Potter And The Cursed Child

Dad. He keeps saying it.

Nineteen years later, all is well, and Albus Severus Potter is off to Hogwarts. It's difficult being the son of famous Harry Potter, especially when your first day doesn't go quite as expected and you just don't fit in... But now it's time for Albus to have some adventures of his own, adventures that will dredge up the past and that could turn the present into a living nightmare...

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Review: Vicious by VE Schwab

Victor readjusted the shovels on his shoulder and stepped gingerly over an old, half-sunken grave. 

Victor Vale has just broken out of prison with only one thought on his mind: the man who put him there, Eli Ever. Ten years previous, Victor and Eli were college roommates, best friends, arrogant, brilliant, and undertaking a research project into the rumours of EOs, ExtraOrdinaries, people with superhuman powers…

But this is not a superhero story.

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