Stewart is a thirteen-year-old prodigy, academically brilliant but socially inept, and grieving over the death of his mother. Ashley is a fourteen-year-old queen bee, ruling the school but struggling with her work – and hiding the secret that her dad split from her mother as he’d fallen for another man. When Stewart’s father and Ashley’s mother fall in love, the four of them move in together – but can these unlikely new siblings learn to tolerate each other?

I’ve been gushing about this on social media and at events a LOT since first reading it one Wednesday last November, then rereading it just two days later as I loved it so much. So of course, I’ve never actually got around to reviewing. For the few readers of this site who’ve somehow missed my dozens (maybe hundreds?) of tweets about it, this is an absolute gem. The two narrators have brilliant voices, particularly Ashley. As a former secondary school teacher, she’s right up there with Candy Harper’s wonderful Faith as one of the ch...

Simon Spier is sixteen, gay, and not out yet. But he IS enjoying a rather wonderful e-mail flirtation with Blue, another student at his school – it’s just that neither of them know the other’s identity offline. Simon is hoping that the secretive Blue will eventually let him in – and then things take a turn for the worst, as fellow student Martin gets his hands on an e-mail, decides he can use this knowledge to pressure Simon into hooking him up with Simon’s friend Abby. Can Simon manage to come out on his own terms and win the boy of his dreams? And how will his friends and family react?

I have read a lot of amazing books with LGBT characters over the last few years, and would have immense difficulty picking the absolute best. How can you compare Lisa Williamson’s stunning contemporary The Art Of Being Normal with BR Collins’s gorgeous historical romance Love In Revolution, or Holly Black’s fabulous fantasy The Darkest Part of the Forest, and say one is better than the other when they –...