Let's get using Goodreads, UK!

As a student who wasted valuable assignment time checking out the book review site Goodreads in a sort of link-by-link book trail, I know what I'm talking about when I say that Goodreads is crazy-addictive. So addictive I bought ten books that I wouldn't otherwise have known about had it not been for the 'Readers also enjoyed similar books' sidebar.

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But the Goodreads phenomenon seems to have passed the UK by. Brilliant, popular British books are getting almost ignored. For example, the excellent What's Up With Jody Barton? by Hayley Long (highly recommended, for the twist alone) is a popular, new, book, in all the big UK bookshops and on Amazon UK, but it only has ten reviews on Goodreads. When you think about how many reviews/ratings it would've got had it been a US book, ten seems a tad unfair. I get that there are a heck of a lot less people in the UK than in America, but I know more than ten people have read this book.

Someone needs to spread the Goodreads message. In the compulsory 'how to use the library' lessons we get aged eleven at school, it would've been so easy for the librarians to be like, "check out this site, kids,". When someone asks you how to find a good book that ISN'T Fifty Shades of Bookshop-Display-Hogging, point them in the Goodreads direction.

And finally, anyone who's read some good UK YA recently, or MG or adult, get onto Goodreads and review the heck out of it!

Who else loves/worships Goodreads (even though their bank manager would disagree)? And what's the best bit of UK YA you read recently?

Why Vampires/Werewolves/Faeries (???) should never be British

Honestly, I'm not uber-Patriotic or like, British-obsessed. I just wanted to share my thoughts on a few paranormal romance staples that just WOULDN'T work in Britain. I mean, I'm not a total expert, because I'm a contemporary kinda girl. And I'm not saying UK pnr romance writers are rubbish (I'm sure they're just as awesome as their US counterparts), just that our little isle is ill suited to shmexy vampire shparkleeee timez.

First of all, our town names are boring.

I've seen the summaries: "Someday Dreamer is just an average girl from Enchantment, Ohio". Or Paradise, Texas. Or Sunrise, Indiana.

Basically, US towns have these dreamy-sounding towns way more suited to witty little metaphors/titles/comments than the UK. Tell me this doesn't sound rubbish: "Anne Brown is just an average girl from Grimsby, Yorkshire." The closest we come to cool names is really grim (ha) ones like Black Dog and No Man's Land (both actual places). And Grimsby, and Hull.

Secondly, not many of us UK teens can drive. So no midnight car chases/hot pnr boy skidding into a car park to save us from thugs.

In the UK, driving age is seventeen. No practicing before that, and no going straight out in your car on your seventeenth birthday, because there is a crapload of paperwork to fill in and send off before you can actually drive.

Our streets are tiny and windy, so town/city dwellers don't usually bother to drive if there's nowhere to put their car.

Plus, insurance is shockingly expensive. So unless your boy was as rich as Midas/Edward Cullen, he would have to save you from the car park thugs (get me, Twilight reference) and then your romantic lunch would have to consist of Morrisons Bettabuy sandwiches and reduced Scotch eggs sitting in the car in said car park, because a romantic meal would probably be too expensive.

And most UK teens don't learn to drive till about 18, so that's another setback.

No ultra-expensive, super-fancy glass houses in the woods. Because you have to get planning permission for that sh*t.

And chances are, the woods are owned by some local farmer who doesn't want a wolf pack running through them, or some rich vampires setting up home there. You go climbing trees with Vampire boy, and he'll be down the bottom with his gun. Still, at least vampire boy'll be safe, because farmers don't tend to shoot silver bullets.

So that's it, people. Can anyone else think of reasons why the UK is totally unsuited to sparkley, bitey goings on?

And does anyone agree that Queen Elizabeth and Edward would make a TOTALLY awesome fan fiction? So long as Eddy doesn't eat the corgies...

Writing Brits (Limeys?) in YA

Finally, an advice post where I am a sort of expert in the matter! British and a teenager! This isn't random, by the way - it started with reading two books that made me think. I liked both books, and I'm lauding them as good examples, but let's just call them the 'Angsty Girl' book and the 'Aeroplane trip' book.

What have they got in common? A Brit boy love interest. Yeah, I'm going to focus on boys. It's more fun.

(come on, it's what we're all thinking. Yeah, I'm not the biggest Harry Styles fan)

Apparently, British boys are hot (the accent, etc). I'm kind of used to it, so it's not particularly exciting to me, but even I am not immune to the Mr Darcys - scratch that, Mr Tilneys - of this world. And, excluding Harry Styles/SuBo, I love One Direction.

And as a British reader of a lot of US YA, I find it frequently hilarious when the Brit boy becomes a combination of Prince William and Dick Van Dyke, constantly mentioning 'blokes' and such. So here is a list of five dos and don'ts for writing hot Brit boys...

5) Don't engineer situations for your Brit boy to 'show off' his dialect/language. Unlike the LI in 'aeroplane book', I have never once heard a boy call a fly a 'bloke'. It just doesn't work.

4) We're not all from London. Most of us Brits are actually from *gasp* other places. Also, in London there's accents other than cockney or hooray henry posh. I live four hours away from London, and I've only visited the place 4 times in my entire life.

3) One slang word I'd love to hear more of is 'fit'. Translation: Hot, stunning, great body. Works for girls too. i.e. "One Direction are so fit - shame about that minger Harry". So common is the UK that we don't use it to describe a well-exercised person anymore, in case they got the wrong idea. But good news, 'angsty girl' book mentioned it!

2) Brit boys do not wear suits as leisure wear. 'Angsty girl' book was guilty of this - the LI was always dressed in a skinny shirt/trousers/tie, always a bit rumpled etc. Yes, the majority of our schools wear uniform, granted. Consequently, then, boys don't fancy wearing ties in their time off. One Direction are the exception to this, because Simon Cowell wants them to be a brand. In reality, the boys I know wear Abercrombie/Hollister t-shirts (American), cream chinos or jeans, and Vans/Converse trainers (American).

1) There may only be about 60 million people in Britain, but only a tiny percentage of us have met the royals. Most teenage boys don't give a flying monkeys about Will or Kate. The only conversation I've ever overheard about the royal family between teenage boys went like this:

"You watch the royal wedding?"

"Yeah. Boring. Bride's sister was fit, though."

"Yeah! Her bum!" *lots of phwoars etc*

"Who would you snog, Kate or Pippa?"

*lots of umming and ahhing*

"Well, who?"

"Your mum."

Obviously this is a nice blog, so I've sanitised it a lot, but you get my drift.

If I sound patronising I don't mean to be - about 90% of my books are US YA - I just want to save American teen girls from coming over to England in their gap year after high school, and being thoroughly disappointed that none of the boys are wearing suits or chatting on their mobile phones to Princess Beatrice. And if a Brit boy calls you fit, you're in there...

What do you think? Ever read any brit boy love interests who've made you cringe? Which authors do it right? And which brit authors write Americans badly?

And finally, can anyone guess which books 'Aeroplane book' and 'Angsty girl book' are?

UK YA - not hiding in the shadows any more!

I was visiting the Absolute Vanilla blog, and I read this post about a brand new website for and about UK YA writers and readers. It's called www.ukyabooks.wordpress.com and it is made of awesome. And I also think it's important, because when I looked at my bookshelves, about 90% of the YA was American.

I think this is because US YA is so well-developed as a genre, and the characters are usually older, and hey, they can go on road trips! In the UK, you can travel from Land's End in Cornwall to John O'Groats in Scotland in about seven hours. Great road trip, right? Hardly enough time to fall in love and discover meaningful self-truths or whatever it is road-trippers do.

Oh, and there's a #UKYA hash tag thingie on twitter, which means nothing to me but might to others of you. Get tweeting, peeps!

Next post is going to be about a UK YA book that I've just read, which freaked me out and made me think and I'm going to review it for you all to check out.

First, though, because I can and because it's British, here are some funny Harry Potter pictures for you all!