Sophie Masson

Selena, having lost her mother at a young age, had been sent away to school. Upon returning home she finds things vastly different, most notably is the additions to her small family. Her father has remarried and her stepmother is unreasonably cruel to her, as are her stepsisters. However after years of being treated as a slave in her own home Selena discovers a magical way to attend the prince's ball, change her fate and fulfil her destiny.

Moonlight & Ashes is a Cinderella story with witches, wizards, werewolves and wishes. True love, mistaken identities, a journey, an assassination and destiny weave together to produce a story more fairytale then fantasy, a story that younger children will enjoy. However, as there are so many stories retelling, reinventing and reproducing this age old classic in new and differing ways, this particular tale unfortunately fails to stand out of the crowd.… (meer)

PLOT: Imagine a world where all seems normal and yet nothing is – a world very much like our own, yet jarringly unlike. A world where two clandestine organisations, the Ghost Squad and the Base, are engaged in a secret battle for control of information so dangerous it could literally change life as humans have always known it… (Google Books) There has been a Pulse of radiation which has effected all the electricity in the world including the equipment keeping 5 critically ill patients alive. When the power comes back on, 3 of the patients are dead but a line still appears on their monitors...proof of an afterlife. From this event two organisations have sprung up and are fighting to keep control of information about the afterlife. The Pulse has also caused some people to be able to see ghosts and others to communicate with them. Its also meant a weird type of reincarnation has happened where the reincarnated person remembers snippets of their past life.

Sound confusing? It is!! I get what Masson was trying to do but she had so many acronyms and terms for different types of people and organisations in this future world that I got quite lost trying to work out who were the bad guys and who were the good guys! Not sure if students will understand and finish this if I struggled to keep up. I did finish it but I thought the ending was lame.… (meer)

Cover is a bit ordinary and the book started out slow but got better. Tells story of Sasha in occupied Europe during WW2 who is inspired to do her little bit, no matter how small, to stand up to the Nazi overthrowers and help the alliance.
At the same time, we have a parallel story about a German boy who believes everything he is told about the third Reich in his Hitler Youth movement and how when crosses paths with Sasha, he is forced to reevaluate what he knows. Will he betray her or will he change sides?
First in a series.… (meer)

DNF at 35%. I felt as if very little had happened except for a great many conversations in an overblown gothic romance style. And treatment of the female character--who I thought would be a main character and who certainly has one of the main POVs--is passive and adrift after a bad breakup, until she instantly falls in love and becomes, if possible, even more passive as nearly everyone condescends to her.

I really wanted to like this book. It had me at Russian paranormal, and I even found the gothic romance style dialogue fun at the beginning. I intend to put this book aside and maybe try again later, but for right now I'm done.… (meer)