Sam's Fireside - Cosy Book Reviews & Recommendations

"Are you certain of the diagnosis? Is there any chance you might be wrong?" 📖 A unique and in-depth read, this book explores the trauma the Plourde family face when they receive the devastating news that their son’s leukaemia has returned. 💔 If You Knew… is an incredibly emotional story that will tug at your heartstrings every step of the way. 😢 We live through each moment of Gabriel’s treatment plan as he prepares for a bone marrow transplant. 🏥 ✨ Alongside the true-life elements of the story is a fictional take on how someone might change their life if they knew what the future held. ⏳ Do you carry on as normal, knowing what lies ahead will be traumatic, or do you try to change your path before anything bad can happen? 🤔 📚 This isn’t the type of fiction I would usually choose to read — I tend to avoid authors like Jodi Picoult because I often find the stories too sad — but I really enjoyed this one. ❤️ The time-traveller aspect is woven in nicely and adds an interesti...

"LIFE is many things - good, bad, steady, unexpected - but we can all agree that each one is UNIQUE. " I didn’t really know what I was getting into with All This & More 🤔. It’s a concept I’ve only ever experienced as a child, through the Choose Your Own Adventure stories 📚. Peng takes that idea to a whole different level, delivering it in a far more complex and lengthy way. I’m not sure how much my experience was affected by listening rather than reading 🎧, but whenever a choice came up, I almost always selected the option that said continue listening. It was simply easier, especially as I was usually doing other things at the same time 🏃‍♀️🧹. The only exception was right at the end, when I chose to listen to all three endings 👀. The book blends fantasy, sci-fi, and time travel 🚀✨, which—for the purposes of this story—is explained through quantum physics 🔬. That’s something I don’t understand and probably never will 😂! I’m also not sure whether we’re meant to lik...

“We’ve got to treat men like humans, even if some do inhuman things.” My third of @hook.me.a.book challenges is the #NeglectedFaithfulsReadingChallenge, which I’m using to read physical books that have been sitting on my actual shelf for far too long! 📚✨ First up is Truth Be Told by Kia Abdullah, the second book in the Zara Kaleel series. I’ve just checked and I read the first one at the end of 2022, so yes — I’m a bit behind! 😅 In my experience, male assault isn’t something that’s covered often in books, and it’s a difficult subject to write about. However, Kia handles it with sensitivity and a great deal of research, which I really appreciated. 💛 Zara has her own issues to deal with alongside her work as an assault counsellor, and then she takes on Kamran’s case — not an easy one to manage. I went through a whole range of emotions while reading this: angry, empathetic, and sad, often towards the same characters. 😡💔 The immaturity of youth is portrayed in the boys who attended Ha...

"Hurricanes aren’t just weather; they are monsters that never truly die.” The Storm was my second January listen for another of @hook.me.a.book’s challenges, the #LetsEarItAudiobookChallenge 🎧📚. I’d been seeing this one everywhere on Instagram over the past few weeks, so I finally got around to listening. It took me a while to get into it. The build-up was slow, and I found it took a minute to get to grips with all the different characters — particularly in audio format, where each character had a different narrator 🎙️. However, once I’d heard from them all, I was hooked and the pace picked up more and more. Alongside the multiple points of view, the story also uses a dual timeline — just to confuse me and intrigue me a little further ⏳🤔. After all the twists and turns, I still couldn’t fully work out what had happened in the past or how it was going to play out in the present, especially as the latest hurricane headed towards St Medard’s Bay 🌪️. As the story peaked, I found ...

"How could he have betrayed his beautiful wife like that?" This was one of my January listens for another one of @hook.me.a.book challenges. This time it's the #LetsEarItAudiobookChallenge. I'm pretty sure this is my first Susan Lewis book, and I really enjoyed it. 😊 Of course, I spent most of the story trying to second-guess what was actually happening, but apart from a few inklings, I didn’t see the twist coming at all until it was fully explained. 😲 No One Saw It Coming is told from multiple points of view, but I never felt confused. It was easy to move between perspectives, and I very quickly became invested in each character and desperate to know what would happen next. 📖💭 A great deal of research has clearly gone into the mental health aspects of this novel, and they’re portrayed both sensitively and realistically. It’s quite frightening, really, how sometimes we just can’t understand how someone else’s brain is wired. 🧠 Now that I’ve read one, I’ll definit...

"I've been looking for you. I'm in trouble and could do with a place to stay." Historical fiction is one of my favourite genres 📚❤️, but I usually read books set around the Second World War, so the late 1800s is a rarity for me ⏳. The author weaves fact and fiction together seamlessly 🧵, incorporating difficult subjects including prostitution, abuse, gambling, and factory strikes ⚙️. It seems absurd to me that girls who were brought up well, with a good education and a decent job, were banished to the workhouse by their parents if they fell pregnant 😔. I appreciate that, in some walks of life, this still happens even now, but it continues to baffle me that parents could do that to their own flesh and blood 💔. Even though it is set in the East End of London 🏙️, which we all know or imagine to be part of a large city, there is still a huge sense of community spirit and support, which I loved 🤝💞. Young and old alike are more often than not willing to help their ne...

"...family isn't just blood, it's the people you choose to bring into your life." I’ve joined a few challenges this year, and one of them is the #kindlecrushchallenge which is being run by @hook.me.a.book 📖✨ The aim of this challenge is to finally read some of those books that have been sitting on your Kindle forever. So, I started off with Forever Starts Now by Stefanie London 💕, which has been on my Kindle since 2021—and I’m ashamed to say it was also an ARC. 😬 I really have no excuse other than life getting in the way and new books constantly being added to the pile. 📚 Anyway, I’m here now and I’ve finally read it… and I really enjoyed it 🥰. We’re in the small town of Forever Falls 🏡, where Monroe is stuck in a rut and Ethan drops into town in an attempt to discover the truth about his father. In doing so, he also drops straight into Monroe’s life. 💫 The story is full of friendship, romance, family, and self-discovery 💖—everything that small-town life bring...