I HOPE YOU ARE LISTENING BY TOM RYAN TBR AND BEYOND TOUR

I Hope You’re Listening by Tom Ryan

Genre: Young Adult Mystery

Publishing Date: October 6, 2020

WELCOME TO MY STOP FOR “I HOPE YOU ARE LISTENING” TBR AND BEYOND TOUR!

An huge thanks to Netgalley and Albert Whitman & Company for the chance to read this book and to Tbr and beyond for the opportunity of being part of this tour.

BOOK SYNOPSIS

EVERY MISSING PERSON HAS A STORY.

In her small town, seventeen-year-old Delia “Dee” Skinner is known as the girl who wasn’t taken. Ten years ago she witnessed the abduction of her best friend, Sibby. And though she told the police everything she remembered, it wasn’t enough. Sibby was never seen again.

At night, Dee deals with her guilt by becoming someone else: the Seeker, the voice behind the popular true crime podcast Radio Silent, which features missing persons cases and works with online sleuths to solve them. Nobody knows Dee’s the Seeker, and she plans to keep it that way.

When another little girl in town goes missing, and the case is linked to Sibby’s disappearance, Dee has a chance to get answers with the help of her virtual detectives and the intriguing new girl at school. But how much of her own story is she willing to reveal in order to uncover the truth?

TW: child kidnapping, cult, drug use, homophobia

“I hope you are listening” is a captivating YA mystery, with a cute queer romance, missing cases, guilt, friendships, intense characters, a story with many plot twists. I enjoyed reading it and my attention was captured right away!

Dee is a really interesting and lifelike character. Her guilt (even though she couldn’t have done anything) was very realistic and the way she found to “deal with it” and to help other people with her podcast is brilliant and moving. It was so eerie and sad reading how many people went missing every years and none knows nothing about them. I loved the way people were trying to solve cases, finding clues, contacting people, digging up and the importance of the Web, if used in the right way.

Dee doesn’t want to get involved directly, she doesn’t want to reveal her identity as the Seeker, but when another girl in her city is missing and there are similarities between this case and Sibby’s, she is forced to deal again with her best friend’s kidnapping. She decides it’s time to get some answers and she starts to investigate, helped by a new girl in town, Sarah.

“I hope you are listening” follows multiple mysteries, intertwining during the whole book: Layla’s disappereance, the kid missing, Sibby’s kidnapping and The Seeker’s cases for the podcast in a very interesting novel. I was captivated right away, following Dee and Sarah looking for clues and answers, investigating and uncovering. The queer romance is very sweet and I loved reading about them together, but even though it’s there, it doesn’t put aside the mysteries and how much Dee grows in her search for the truth, unraveling emotions and burdens she still has.

I really loved reading about Dee and her investigation. She’s stubborn, fierce, quiet and determined and the traumatic event affected her, her family and her friends, changing everything. Dee is not a perfect character, none in this book is and it’s one of the thing I liked the most. They fight, make mistakes, get angry and selfish and they are wonderfully human. Dee and her best friend Burke fight, there are misunderstandings, questions and it’s very natural.

I liked the characterization. As I wrote before, Dee is a wonderful character. Burke is another character I enjoyed reading about, supportive, stubborn and who was also hurt by Sibby’s disappearance. Dee’s parents are supportive and worried this new disappearance could bring their daughter painful memories, while Sarah, the new girl in town, is a welcome novelty in Dee’s life and she’s ready to be there for and help her in this mystery.

The mysteries, some small and some big, are interesting and they captured the reader’s attention, who wants to know what happened to Sibby, what will happen next, following these improvised dectives in their search for the truth and justice.

I really liked this book, I devoured it, but I found some parts a bit unrealistic, but I won’t spoiler anything.

Overall “I hope you are listening” is a 4 stars for me and I recommend this book to those who are looking for a captivating mystery (mysteries), intense and complex characters and a thrilling story.

“But take it from me, even a sad ending is better than no ending at all, and that’s always been my goal: to deliver an ending to as many unfinished stories as possible.”

“Listen up. Let’s try.”

“I just tell stories. I hope that telling them might make up for the story I wasn’t able to tell properly all those years ago. The story that never had an ending.”

“I’ve heard it said that everything good that happens to you wouldn’t have happened but for every bad thing that happened to you before it. But if that’s true, then doesn’t stand it stand to reason that the opposite is true as well?”

“It’s our story” she says. “We should tell it together.”

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Tom Ryan is the award winning author of several acclaimed books for young readers. He has been nominated for multiple awards, and was the winner of the 2020 Arthur Ellis Award for Best YA Crime Book. Two of his books were Junior Library Guild selections, and three of his young adult novels, Way to Go, Tag Along, and Keep This to Yourself, were chosen for the ALA Rainbow List, in 2013, 2014 and 2020. He was a 2017 Lambda Literary Fellow in Young Adult Fiction.


Tom, his husband and their dog currently divide their time between Ottawa and Nova Scotia.

Website: http://www.tomryanauthor.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/tomryanauthor

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tomryanauthor/

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5267233.Tom_Ryan

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tomryanauthor

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The God game by Danny Tobey

I received this book from NetGalley in exchange of an honest review.

Publication: today! January 7 2020

CW: attempted suicide, violence, self harm, depression, blackmail

The God Game is the most peculiar, exciting and brilliant book I’ve read in a long time.
The writing is perfect, the characters well rounded and so real, so relatable (Alex and Charlie were really perfect) it hurts, the plot captivating and chilling.
Everything starts with a chatbot, the God game, that answer any kind of question, an AI that claims to be God and starts sending messages on Charlie’s and his friends’ phones, asking them to do something. It’s a game, a wild one where it controls everything, can access everything, from phones, to pc, to cameras and so on. It’s God, He sees and knows everything.
Intrigued by the ad, Charlie, Peter, Vanhi, Alex and Kenny decided to play this peculiar game, using their phone, accessing, in this way, a cool and peculiar virtual reality. The Game is simple. If you do well, you get Goldz and something good will happen in your life. If you do bad, you get Blaxx and more Blaxx you got more likely the player will be killed. And if someone dies in the game, dies in the real life. Skeptic and curious, Charlie and his friends decided to try the Game and they started doing quests, following instructions, running around the school at night, discovering it, through the virtual reality, full of mysteries, gods and quests to accept or to buy.
The game inspired by the religion is a wild one and day after day they each found caught up with missions and with the Game. From simple request to dangerous one, to lies and cover ups.

I loved many things about this book. The game itself is creepy, brilliant, controlling, managing to use its players like pawns, using them and turning them against one other. In a game where the difference between reality and virtual one is really slim, where they can’t trust anything electronic, the characters move and act, in a giant chessboard, without knowing exactly what’s the Game real goal, where are the others players, what will they do, what are the purposes of their missions. It rewards them if the player do what the Game asks and punish them otherwise. It’s a crescendo of missions, lies, revenge and so on, pushing and threatening them into doing things they wouldn’t have done, otherwise.

What I loved more about this book are its characters. I rarely read characters so real, authentic and raw. So multidimensional. So relatable and well constructed.
Charlie is a young man, who lost his mother to cancer and since her disease and death his life, his grades and relationship with his father is spiralling out of control. He feels resentment for his father, who fell apart when his wife got sick, basically leaving Charlie to do the caretaker and bearing his suffering alone.
Vanhi is a brilliant woman, a bass player, an Hindu girl who’s struggling against her parents’ expectations and their desire she will go to Harvard, hiding a bad grade and a paper forged from them.
Kenny is a cellist, the philosopher, from a very religious family and he too, like Vanhi, has to suffer his parents’ pressures to do better, to do perfectly.
Alex is a nihilist, a young man who is abused at home, depressed and lonely, bullied and feeling himself suicidal.
Peter is the golden boy of the situation, the rich one, the carefully hidden deranged one, doing drugs and dealing, with his absentee father and a mother who left him when he was young.
They found solace in their group, called the Vindicators, doing pranks, supporting each other and doing the Game, that tested their friendships, morals and lives.

Each one of this characters, the main ones, are beautifully written and I was able to feel their rage, pain and frustrations. What it impressed me was that the side characters were amazingly well rounded too. There aren’t sterotypes, like the girl to win over or the bad guy. We read about Mary, the perfect and beautiful girl, controlled and with a big secret to mantain. Kurt, violent henchman, with an homophobic father. Tim, violent and controlling, with his stealing father. There are no absolutely good or bad people in this book, but incredibly complex ones. Even Charlie and his friends nurture feelings that could hurt one other, like envy or bitterness or rage, raging against each other, hurting each other.
The Game, knowing everything about them and their dreams, manipulated them and everyone else in a big chessboard, moving pieces like it wants. Or He wants, according to the Game.

It was amazing reading about the augumented reality, seen through phones or glasses, reading about missions, packages, quests and it was disturbing and creepy see the characters being controlled more and more, until they try to quit the Game and be free. Reading they being so controlled and observed was suffocating and I felt their emotions, their warring thoughts.
I loved the characters in The God Game, because they were flawed and human. Charlie with his rage, Alex with his depression, Peter with his need to control everything, Kenny and Vanhi with their desires and family’s pressures. It was moving reading how Charlie was so lost after his mother’s death and how Peter, in his own, maybe debatable ways, was with him or how Charlie was so caught up in his own grief to not want to reach for Alex’s pain, favouring the carefree and unconcerned Peter. Or how Alex was so in pain to get involved so much in the Game, that used his suffering to manipulated him. Or Vanhi’s and Kenny’s ambitions, their fear of disappointing their parents, their need to do the right thing, to be honest.

This book put forward interesting and moral questions. If it someone or something offered me what I want, would I accepted it? Even if it hurt someone? Could I hurt someone to save someone else, maybe a loved one? Someone else’s pain is worth my friends’ or family’s lives or could I sacrife someone to save myself or my loved ones?
During all the book, from small and innocent missions, the characters found themselves debating moral choices, which path take. If someone is a bully he deserved to be hurt and humiliated? Can I ruin someone’s life to life mine better?
What will you do if your life isn’t yours to control anymore? If you didn’t ever have any control on it? What will you do when you’re so caught up in the Game and you can’t see any way out other than the worst one? And the Game, in his infinite power, manipulated, fooled and tricked all his gamers, until the ending, showing them the free will was a difficult thing to achieve, in The God Game, to be free from the Game itself.

Charlie and his friends grew in the book, I loved reading about their development, their choices, their desires, their healing each other. I loved their relationship, how they all are so fallible, human, torn between doing the right thing and follow their desires, their selfishness.

Besides pushing the reader to think about moral choices, grey areas and religion, it’s a book about friendship and relationship, mostly between fathers and sons, from the complex and incredibly frustrating one with Alex and his father to Charlie and his dad.
About friendship, because it was absolutely moving reading they going to the great lenght to save and protect each other, notwithstanding their small fights and misunderstanding.
It was a book that gave me hope, because its characters, even though they are hurt and flawed and will do mistakes in the future, go towards a path of growth, forgiveness, another chance to liberation, like one of the character say.
That things may seems bleak and awful, but you could go on, pick yourself up, glue the pieces together again and try to be better, to try again and harder. Not alone, of course. With friends, family and help.

This book is absolutely brilliant, pushing the reader to ask questions, to seek answers, to be moved by friendship and love
And, to be honest, to fear how far the technology, any AI, could go and do.
An excellent read. A 5 solid star. Danny Tobey’s writing style is enthralling and his characters are alive and pulsing with life and choices.

“I’m a guinea pig in a fucking morality play that stops when I’m dead?”

His mind was a house of pain, all exits locked.

The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert

One of The Observer’s Best Children’s Books of 2018!

Fans of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and The Children of Blood and Bone have been getting lost in The Hazel Wood…

“The Hazel Wood kept me up all night. I had every light burning and the covers pulled tight around me as I fell completely into the dark and beautiful world within its pages. Terrifying, magical, and surprisingly funny, it’s one of the very best books I’ve read in years“. -Jennifer Niven, author of All The Bright Places

From Google

Melissa Albert is a web editor and the founding editor of B&N Teen Blog. She has written for McSweeney’s, Time Out Chicago and more. Melissa grew up in Illinois and lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is The New York Times bestselling author of The Hazel wood. (from the back cover of The hazel wood and The night country).

The Hazel wood, first book from the series The Hazel wood (the sequel, The night country will come out in 2020) is a really peculiar book. It’s a fantasy and a thriller and a fairy tale book with horror strokes. The main character is Alice, a seventeen years old, who spent all her life moving from city to city, with her mother Ella, living in friends’ houses, trying to shake their uncanny bad luck. When a letter informed them that Ella’s mother, Althea Proserpine (a fairy tales author Alice has never met), is dead in her mansion, the peculiar Hazel Wood, Ella thinks their problems are gone, their luck restored. They are free. She decided to marry up and for a while she and Alice settled and tried to live a normal and quiet life. No more running, no more bad luck. But one day Ella’s kidnapping turns Alice’s world upside down. Her kidnapper claims to be from the Hinterland, the mysterious world Althea set her story in. Alice finds herself alone, left by her stepfather and stepsister and with a strange letter, bearing her name in a story, with weird and dangerous people following her and no choice but ask her classmate Ellery Finch, a great fan of her grandmother, to help her find her mother and The Hazel wood.

They start a magic and perilous journey, through fantasy and reality, dangers and death, stories that are not just words on paper, but are real and dangerous, ready to maim and kill them. Running from the Hinterland itself, manifesting through its inhabitants, Alice and Finch follow clue after clue to find the mysterious Hazel wood, Alice’s grandmother’s house. And they find more they had bargained for.

The hazel wood is a book full of twists and revelations. So many shocking twists, I loved them. It was a rollercoaster. Melissa Albert book is, among other things, a dark fairy tale. Interwined and fundamental for the main plot there are fairy tales, loved and narrated by Ellery Finch. The main characters are interesting and well written.

Alice is full of rage and ice, a young woman who decided to take the power and the story in her own hands and she’s driven by her love for her mother, her need for answers. Alice’s journey brings her to a world she never thought it could exist. Obsessed, when little, by the arcane figure of ther grandmother and her fairy tales, she discovered a world and answer so shocking her life is changed forever.

Ellery Finch is a complex character, full of loss, pain and intelligence and wit, different from the rich kid Alice thought he was. He’s complicated, with a painful past and bleak present. I adore reading about his love with Tales of the Hinterland, Althea’s book, a love so great to become obsessed with that world, to desire to visit it, to live in it. I totally relate to this desire to discover and see other worlds, magical ones.

This book is a story about a lonely girl who is trying to find her mother, about discovering her real identity, a journey to find herself and her place in the world, the Earth or the Hinterland.
The story is amazing, captivating and it conveys the importance of words, how could they change, heal or hurt someone.

Reading about the Hinterland was absolutely amazing. A world where Stories exists, where stories from a book are real, living in a world where the Story Spinner controls everything. Everything and everyone but Alice. She’s not a damsel in distress, a princess to be saved, but a strong and clever girl who fights to decide her own life and world.

The fairy tales intertwined with the main plot are not the Disney ones, but there are cruel, creepy and captivating, full of blood, murder and mystery, like the story of Alice Three Times. I’d love to read all the story from Tales from the Hinterland.

In the end, The Hazel wood is a 5 stars reading, able to captive your attention and making you wish to follow Alice and Ellery in their journey.