Sunday, February 17, 2013

Infinite Sky Blog Tour

Today BelleBooks is taking part in the Infinite Sky Blog Tour

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I was lucky enough to get a review copy of this book a couple of months ago, and I have to say I loved it!

As a special wee treat to all my followers I'm sharing the whole first chapter of the book with you!


It was two months after Mum left that the gypsies moved in. They set up camp in the

paddock one Sunday night while we were asleep. My brother Sam was excited when

he saw them.

“Gypos!” he shouted.

Sam used to have a gypsy in his class: Grace Fitzpatrick. She’d been famous

at school because she could do as many things with her feet as with her hands. She

could even write her name with them, which was funny because she couldn’t read.

Sam, who’d sat next to her in assembly, said she smelt like cat piss and fire smoke.

“They live off barbecues,” he told me as we watched from Dad’s bedroom

window.

I thought it sounded brilliant.

There was a caravan, and a clapped-out car, and a few metres away, a fire with

a pot hanging over it.

“Be bloody hundreds of ’em by the end of the day,” Dad said, emptying

sawdust from his overall pockets onto the floor.

“They’ll probably tarmac the field while we’re asleep,” Sam said. “Try and

make you pay for it.”

Dad made a growling noise. “Be a nightmare getting rid of them, that’s for

bloody sure.”

He left us leaning on the windowsill.

Sam made dents in the wood with his fingers while I wondered what Dad was

going to do. This was exactly the sort of thing Mum would have sorted. She’d have

been best friends with the gypsies by breakfast, had them falling over themselves to

make her happy, even if that left them without a home.

“Look at all those dogs,” Sam said. “Bet they fight them. Tie blades to their

paws.”

I shook my head.

“Seen it on the telly,” he said.

“What, on kids’ telly?”

He dug his elbow into me until I squirmed.

Two greyhounds bounded round the paddock, and I tried to imagine them

snarling at each other, blades flying, but it was ridiculous, and then the caravan door

swung open, and a tiny black dog scurried out.

A woman appeared in the doorway. Tall and thin, with red hair falling over

one shoulder, she looked beautiful. She lifted her arms above her head and stretched,

revealing a stripe of tanned belly beneath her green vest. Behind her the white

caravan seemed to sparkle.

“Prossie,” Sam said.

The woman spun around suddenly, and a teenage boy in rolled-up jeans leapt

from the caravan, laughing. He’d obviously startled her. The three dogs ran over to

him, the tiny black one lagging behind, and he bent down to tussle with them. They

licked at his bare chest.

Sam didn’t have anything to say for a second. The boy looked about the same

age as him. He was obviously the woman’s son, tall and thin like her, but with

lighter, ginger-blond hair that flicked out above his ears and curled on the back of

his neck.

“Bet he don’t go to school,” Sam said.

“Come on, you two,” Dad called up the stairs. “You’re going to be late.”

“Shit!” Sam said, because he still hadn’t found his football boots.

Still, we couldn’t help staying a minute longer, watching as the red-haired

woman filled a bucket with water from the pot above the fire and began scrubbing

her steps.

Dad left the house at the same time as we did. With fists clenched, he headed

towards the paddock.

I couldn’t wait till the summer holidays. Everyone at school was getting on my

nerves. Especially Matty. At registration, when I told her about the gypsies, she told

me this story about her second cousin’s boyfriend’s brother: he was on his way to

the newsagent’s to buy a magazine when a gypsy girl burst out and cracked him over

the head with a golf ball in a sock. For no reason. I told her we didn’t have any girls,

only a boy, and described the way his hair flicked out, but she curled her nostrils at

me.

“Pikeys are gross, Iris,” she said. “You’d get gonorrhoea.”

Matty was always name-checking STDs. She thought it made her look

sophisticated.

At dinner time, we watched the boys play football.

“Your socks are odd,” Matty told me. “Don’t you care?”

“Not really.”

“Maybe you should.”

I took my shoes off, and folded my socks down so their oddness was less

obvious.

“That’s your problem, Iris,” she sighed. “You think that makes a difference.”

Before Maths, next lesson, I nipped into the toilets and took them off.

Matty had moved to Derby from Guildford four years ago with frizzy black hair and

too-big glasses which left red dents on her nose, but every new term she got prettier.

Today her black frizz was tamed into long waves that she twisted round her little

finger. Her glasses had shrivelled to contacts, and to make matters worse, her boobs

had gone from a size nothing to a 32B in the last six months. As far as Matty was

concerned, she was a fully mature woman.

“Remember, Iris,” she’d taken to saying to me, “my birthday’s in September.

Really, I’m in the year above you. Really, I’m a Year Ten.”

Every day, after school, I watched the gypsies. They hadn’t listened when Dad told

them they weren’t welcome, and much to his annoyance were getting on with their

lives. As well as the teenage boy, the dogs and the red-haired woman, there was a

man, a baby, and four little girls.

The boy spent a lot of time with his mum. He got in her way while she was

cleaning, and made her laugh. Sometimes she grabbed him and ruffled his hair. They

reminded me of how Mum and Sam used to be.

The gypsy boy was good to his sisters. They were all loads younger than him,

but he still played hide and seek with them, and picked them up when they cried. I

couldn’t imagine him getting mad at them for something as silly as borrowing his

socks.

In the evenings, they all sat around the fire, or on the grass nearby, until it was

time to eat whatever their mum cooked in the pot, or their dad brought home in the

car. Later on, when the mum had put the little ones to bed, the gypsy boy went to lie

underneath the caravan by himself, and I felt as though I understood him completely.

Dad shouted if he caught me watching from his bedroom window.

“It’s not a game, Iris,” he said, and so I kept my spying to when he was out.

One night, I left my curtains open so the sun could wake me. I wanted to see what

the gypsies did first thing. It was well before six when I crept upstairs, past Dad

sleeping with his head half-under the pillow, to my usual perch on his armchair by

the window. He didn’t notice. Mum was the light sleeper, the snorer too. She used to

make herself jump in the night.

Underneath the early white sky, the paddock was dotted with poppies, and fat

wood pigeons in the tall poplars surrounding the yard called to each other. The boy

got up first. He jumped down the caravan steps and did a lap of the field with the

dogs. Occasionally, he stooped to pick up sticks, or tugged dead branches from the

hedgerows.

By the entrance to the paddock was a huge pile of logs that Dad and Austin,

his apprentice, had cut down over the months – a year’s supply at least. Reaching it,

the boy stopped. He glanced towards our house, and I ducked behind Mum’s rose

pincushion cactus. I peered round its spiky dome, which was flowering purple, and

watched as he added a couple of long, slim branches to his pile.

Back at the camp, he knelt to build a fire. By the time the door to the caravan

opened next, he was fanning the flames with a sheet of cardboard. His mum emerged

carrying a stack of bowls, the baby wrapped to her back, and the boy changed

position to direct the smoke away from them.

“Eye?” Dad lifted his head. “That you?”

Dad called me Eye, as in ball. Mum used to tell him off for it, back when they

still talked to each other. “She’s named after the flower,” she’d say, but she didn’t

mind really. It was just something they did.

“What you doing?”

“Need some socks,” I said, pretending to rummage in the unsorted pile I’d

been sitting on.

The plastic of Dad’s alarm clock creaked as he looked at it. “S’not even

seven,” he groaned. “Go back to bed.”

I watched the boy put on a rucksack, pat the baby’s head, and walk to the

far end of the field where the paddock dropped into the brook. He reappeared on

the other side of the water, and then disappeared into the Ashbourne Estate, and I

wondered where he could be going.

It was the last day of school, and the Year Elevens ran around scrawling over each

other’s shirts and planning who to egg and flour. Only the most popular kids didn’t

have at least one willy drawn on their back. I wondered how Sam would have done

if he hadn’t been suspended. I saw his best friend, Benjy, a couple of times. His lip

was still split from where Sam had punched him.

I was sad to be leaving science for the summer. Biology was the best, not only

because I got a break from Matty. I was in the top set, and she was in the bottom,

and I paid extra special attention when Mrs Beever talked about the parenting traits

of various birds. Apparently both male and female swans help build the nest, and

if the mother dies (or drives off in a van to Tunisia) there’s no need to spaz out and

call the RSPB. The male swan is completely capable of raising his cygnets alone. I

almost wished Matty was sitting next to me when I heard that.

All afternoon we bickered, but choosing sweets in the shop after school she

still invited me to sleep over at hers that night. “We can do a fashion show with my

new clothes,” she said. “Mum’s making spag bol.”

“Doubt my dad’ll let me,” I lied, putting ten fizzy cola bottles in a paper bag.

“He still being weird?” she said, and I nodded, but the truth was I couldn’t

bear it round hers any more.

Her mum, Donna, asked questions with her best talk-to-me expression: are you

okay? and is your dad okay? and is everything OKAY at Silverweed Farm? The worst

thing was that Matty didn’t stop her. She just stood there expectantly, as if the two of

them had become some kind of talk show mother/daughter duo, and I their favourite

guest. Matty and Mom!

I hope you loved it!
Make sure to stop by the other blogs taking part in the tour!


Sunday, January 27, 2013

Stacking the Shelves: Birthday Edition!


It was my birthday yesterday, yay! 
So I got a lot of books to show off!

For Review

The Indigo Spell (Bloodlines, #3) Scarlet (Lunar Chronicles, #2) Unremembered (Unremembered, #1) Born Wicked (The Cahill Witch Chronicles, #1) 

Bought
I went to the book launch for On Dublin Street by Samantha Young with Lesley from My Keeper Shelf
I know I'm not supposed to be buying any books just now, but I think this one was allowed!

On Dublin Street 

Birthday Presents

Legacy (Night School, #2) Bitter Blood (The Morganville Vampires, #13) Wolfsbane (Nightshade, #2) Bloodrose (Nightshade #3) Rift Friday Night Bites (Chicagoland Vampires, #2) Biting Cold: A Chicagoland Vampires Novel Through the Ever Night (Under the Never Sky, #2)

Thanks everyone who got my birthday pressies! x

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Stacking the Shelves #6


I really need to start posting something else besides these posts lol, I've been such a crap blogger recently.
Well I'm still doing project 10 Book so I haven't bought any books this week. I have had a few books for review and some Amazon Kindle freebies though.

For Review:

Vortex (Tempest, #2) Beautiful Creatures : The Official Illustrated Movie Companion Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader School Spirits (School Spirits, #1) Scent of Magic (Avry of Kazan, #2) The Lost Prince (The Iron Fey: Call of the Forgotten, #1) Confessions of an Angry Girl (Confessions, #1) 

Freebies:

Evolution (Evolution, #1) Raven (The Raven Saga, #1) Indelible Love - Emily's Story So I'm a Double Threat (Double Threat, #1) The Princess of Egypt Must Die The Girl (Guardians #1) Chasing Nikki (Chasing Nikki, #1) The Trouble With Spells (Of Witches and Warlocks, #1) 

Audiobooks:

Halfway to the Grave (Night Huntress, #1) One Foot in the Grave (Night Huntress, #2)

Saturday, January 5, 2013

Stacking The Shelves #5


No where near as many books to show this week, thank goodness!
I have started my Project 10 Book now, but I did manage to get some sneaky purchases in before it started!
If anyone is interested in finding out more about Project 10 Book and wants to join in on the fun, I've made a Goodreads Group, come and join us!

Most of these were either free or ridiculously cheap on Amazon UK for Kindle.

My Misery Muse The Coincidence of Callie and Kayden (The Coincidence, #1) From Ashes Impossible (With Me, #1) While it Lasts (Sea Breeze, #3) Ten Tiny Breaths (Ten Tiny Breaths, #1) Significance (Significance, #1) Magic to the Bone (Allie Beckstrom, #1)
 
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