Showcase Sunday and Stacking the Shelves #1

While I've been writing book reviews for years I've only recently become more organised and started publishing on here regularly. I would love to get to know some fellow book bloggers, so I decided to start participating in Showcase Sunday and Stacking the Shelves; two excellent book blogging memes that allow me to show some of the exciting reads I've received in the mail in the past week.


The Sea Sisters by Lucy Larke [competition win]
There are some currents in the relationship between sisters that run so dark and so deep, it's better for the people swimming on the surface never to know what's beneath. Katie's carefully structured world is shattered by the news that her headstrong younger sister, Mia, has been found dead in Bali - and the police claim it was suicide. With only the entries of Mia's travel journal as her guide, Katie retraces the last few months of her sister's life, and - page by page, country by country - begins to uncover the mystery surrounding her death. What she discovers changes everything. But will her search for the truth push their sisterly bond - and Katie - to breaking point?

By My Side by Alice Peterson [review book]
Cass Brooks loves her job, her boyfriend Sean, her life. Until, leaving home one morning, distracted and hungover, she steps into the path of a truck. When she wakes up, she can't walk. And suddenly all her hopes and dreams, the plans she'd made with Sean, the future she thought she'd have, seem out of her reach. But then fate intervenes again. Cass meets Ticket, a loyal golden Labrador who refuses to leave her side. And on a flight to Colorado, she sits next to Charlie, who believes he can show her a life full of possibilities, if only she'll let him. Cass wants her life back the way it was. Charlie knows this cannot be. Yet a future beckons all the same.

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls by Anton DiSclafani [review book]
Thea Atwell is fifteen years old in 1930, when, following a scandal for which she has been held responsible, she is 'exiled' from her wealthy and isolated Florida family to a debutante boarding school in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. As Thea grapples with the truth about her role in the tragic events of 1929, she finds herself enmeshed in the world of the Yonahlossee Riding Camp, with its complex social strata ordered by money, beauty and equestrienne prowess; where young women are indoctrinated in the importance of 'female education' yet expected to be married by twenty-one; a world so rarified as to be rendered immune (at least on the surface) to the Depression looming at the periphery, all overseen by a young headmaster who has paid a high price for abandoning his own privileged roots.


All three novels while wildly different sound right up my alley and I look forward to reading them in the coming week. I'm probably most looking forward to By My Side by Alice Peterson because not only does it seem somewhat similar to the beautiful Me Before You by Jojo Moyes, but all the novels I've received from Quercus recently have been wonderful and this one sounds like another winner.

Have you guys read any of the books showcased above yet? If so, did you enjoy them?