Last night we went to see the Reasons to Stay Alive play at HOME in Manchester. We were aware of this a while back when we saw Matt Haig on his tour of Notes on a Nervous Planet and of course me and Sarah had to book tickets! Read on for a little opinion post about the play. Continue reading
Today is Mental Health Awareness Day which you have probably seen a bit about online – I think it’s really picked up profile in the past couple of years which is amazing! Obviously it’s important to talk about mental health all year round but I think awareness days and weeks are great for highlighting issues and bringing them to the forefront. I thought I’d do a little post about books I’ve read which I think capture mental health issues brilliantly. Of course, this is going to be a bit subjective and some may disagree but these are books which resonated with me in some way.
A little later than usual but here is our Book Club update post! Over September, we read Summer Bird Blue by Akemi Dawn Bowman, an author me and Sarah both love the work of. It’s probably the saddest book we will have read to date (though not in terms of the sexuality representation!) which we did warn everyone about prior to starting it. It’s also the first book we have read with asexual and aromantic representation, something which we will of course be reading more of within coming months. Continue reading
I picked the ARC of this book up at NYA Lit Fest in Preston. That was in March and I’ve been wanting to read it for a while now. I started reading it over a month ago I think but was super busy with my job at the time and had no spare time to read. I honestly really thought this book was great and I love that it covers such a taboo area in mental illness – psychosis. Continue reading
*The book discussed in this post was gifted by Hot Key Books*
A few years ago, you may remember that we did a lot of work with Stripes Publishing centred around A Change Is Gonna Come, an incredible anthology with new voices and established authors. Myself and Sophie absolutely fell in love with Yasmin’s story in A Change Is Gonna Come, so when her debut novel got picked up by Hot Key, i couldn’t have been happier.
Trigger warning: Anxiety, depression, suicide, eating disorders & in depth mental health talks later on.
A few days go, i had the pleasure of seeing Matt Haig talk again, this time at HOME in Manchester. Myself and Sophie travelled to Doncaster last year for his tour of Notes On A Nervous Planet, and hearing Matt talk about his own issues with anxiety and depression was so inspiring and relatable, i wanted to see him again.
I bought this book when it came out, ready for an event for it that we attended about a year ago in Doncaster. We went to another, much bigger one recently at HOME in Manchester which Sarah is going to upload a post on soon. I only just read the book before the HOME event after wanting to get round to it for about a year (we all know how we are with our TBR piles…) and I was really looking forward to it because it seemed really relevant to how I had been feeling the past year or so. Read on for my full review! Continue reading
