Five Minutes Peace

BOOK NEWS: Like Bees to Honey by Caroline Smailes

Caroline Smailes' third novel, Like Bees to Honey, is released today.  

I was lucky enough to go along to one of the launch events last week in Liverpool and it was wonderful. (I didn't get any photos though, which was a bit of a stupid oversight. Too busy chatting, you see.) 

Like Bees to Honey is the story of Nina, who left her Maltese home to go to Liverpool University, where fell in love and fell pregnant. She'd promised to return to Malta after getting her degree, but then broke her parents' hearts by staying in the UK with her husband and baby. Sixteen years later, she returns to Malta for one last visit with her aging parents. 

I can't wait to read it. The trailer gave me goosebumps. Watch it over the cut. 

BOOK REVIEW: Rich and Mad by William Nicholson

I absolutely adored William Nicholson's Wind Singer trilogy, so when I read that he'd written a teen romance I could hardly wait to read it.  

Rich and Mad is the story of - yes - a boy named Rich and a girl named Maddy (Mad for short). Both Rich and Maddy are desperate to fall in love. They're teenagers so they're familiar with lust, but love seems to them to be something else entirely. Both inevitably look in entirely the wrong places before finding each other (as, of course, the reader hopes and knows they will). 

I really enjoyed Rich and Mad. Both Rich and Maddy are bright and sweet and funny and I really wanted it all to work out for them. I only had a couple of chapters left when I went to see William Nicholson (along with Melvyn Burgess) give a (wonderful) talk about sex in YA fiction. It was clear that Nicholson wanted to write about first love and first sex in an honest and positive way and I do think he does that, but I also found Rich and Mad sweetly old-fashioned. It felt like it could almost have been written in, say, the early eighties. 

There are a couple of other points I'd like to make, but I don't want to post them here because they are spoiler-ish. All I can really say is that I think Nicholson addresses something incredibly important that I haven't seen in teen fiction before. Read it - I doubt very much you'll regret it. And then let me know what you think. 

Quick update and Luisa Plaja webchat news

Sorry it's been so quiet around here lately. Diane's actually not writing for Five Minutes Peace anymore (we haven't fallen out or anything, honest!) and my book came out last week so I'm spending a lot of time promoting it (and fretting about it). We'll be back soon, I promise. 

In the meantime, I just wanted to tell you that lovely Luisa Playa is taking part in a live webchat on Random House Publishing's Fiercebook page tomorrow – it starts at 5pm and will last approximately one hour, find out more here.

Authors share their cover stories

You may have noticed I'm a bit obsessed with book covers and recently a couple of my favourite authors have been blogging about the processes behind their covers. 

Jennifer Crusie shows the many, many rejected covers for her relaunched St Martin's Press books here. (I REALLY love the final covers.) 

YA author Lauren Barnholdt whose chick lit writing course I did YEARS ago (and which actually set me on the road to having my own book published), has also blogged about her covers here, here and here.

Finally, Melissa Walker regularly features authors talking about their book covers on her blog.