The Diaries of Bluebell Gadsby: After Iris. Review and giveaway.

I’m really pleased to be coming back from our time travelling break to take part in the The Diaries of Bluebell Gadsby:After Iris (Natasha Farrant) blog tour, and host a giveaway today.

Blue’s twin sister Iris died three years ago and her family is going off the rails. Drama queen Flora changes her hair colour on an almost daily basis, Jasmine and Twig are obsessed with their pet rats, their mother spends her weeks flying round the world and their largely absent father is becoming alarmingly trendy. Enter Zoran the male au pair and Joss the troublemaking boy next door – and life for the Gadsby family takes a turn for the more chaotic. From fragmented to fully dysfunctional to ultimately reunited, Blue films her family and tells their story in a sequence of film transcripts and diary entries which will make you cry, laugh and give thanks – sort of – for the gift of families.

The style of this book made it a little difficult to get into, written as it is partly in transcripts of video diary entries filmed on a camera phone. I’m not sure about that as a device tbh, and it was too offputting for Big, who gave up on it about 40 pages in. In some ways, although she’s the target age for this book, it’s just not her kind of thing. When I picked it up today though, it was just perfect for the slightly hazy state of mind I’m in, and I raced through it.

I can identify with a character who has lost a sister. However, I did it when I was an adult, and this is a story through a child’s eyes of a family disintegrating due to the stresses of grief. Alongside that there are the tensions of growing up, concerns as to whether absent parents will return or are divorcing, and it’s not surprising that the children aren’t holding it together too well. I didn’t find it laugh out loud, or particularly plausible, but I did enjoy it. It reminded me of something, and it will come back to me what. The Bagthorpes perhaps?

I’d say this is an ideal read for a less worldly tween or early teen, one more like the main character perhaps. And I’m not sure whether the visual aspects of the book lend themselves to someone with a more visual style. I’d love it if competition winners would feed back once they’ve read it 🙂

I’ve got two copies up for grabs, and it’s the usual comment to enter method. I’d like you to tell me your favourite flower 🙂 As usual, the competition runs for a week up until 16 July at midnight, and is UK only. You can have extra entries for daily tweets/ shares/ likes etc, but you must leave extra comments for them. Prize will be supplied direct by the publisher, so you must be happy for me to pass details on.

Good luck!