Reviews written by Graeme Cash

Thirteen Reasons Why (stylised as Th1rteen R3eason Why) follows shy high school teenager Clay Jensen. Clay has received a box of with seven cassette tapes. Upon listening to them he learns that they were recorded by Hannah Baker, his classmate, workmate at the local cinema, and his...

Nick O’Leary, the straight bass player in queercore punk band, is playing at a club in downtown Manhattan when he spots his ex-girlfriend Tris with a new guy. So he asks a random girl dressed in an oversize flannel sitting nearby to be his five minute girlfriend. The random girl,...

The Maze Runner is the first novel in a series set in a dark post-apocalyptic world. Our central character is sixteen-year-old Thomas. When he wakes inside an metal elevator car, he has no memory of how he got there or who he is, except for his name....

As the title suggests The Diary of a Part-Time Indian is written in a first person episodic diary format. The novel follows fourteen-year-old Native American Arnold Spirit Jr., known as Junior, over his first year in high school. Junior is growing up on a Spokane Indian Reservation...

Rowling wrote Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them, along with Quidditch Through the Ages, as a supplement to the Harry Potter series. Profits from both books benefited the charity Comic Relief. It is designed to be a reproduction of the textbook owned Harry Potter, first mentioned...

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is told from the point-of-view of sixteen-year-old Jacob Portman. As a child Jacob’s grandfather Abe, a World War II veteran and Jewish refugee, would tell him stories from his own childhood featuring flesh eating monsters and children with the most peculiar...

This post-apocalyptic novel takes places in Dayton, Ohio following a wave of alien invasions that has devastated the Earth’s population (more than 99% of the population was wiped out before the story begins – dramatic backstory!). Our central protagonist is sixteen-year-old Cassie Sullivan (short for Cassiopeia). She...

The protagonist and narrator is Kristina Georgia Snow, a straight A high school student, who travels to Albuquerque, New Mexico for three weeks during the summer before her junior year to visit her estranged father, who she has not seen in eight years. It is here in...

‘One minute the teacher was talking about the Civil War. And the next he was gone’ is the opening line to Michael Grant’s first novel in the Gone series. 14-year-old surfer Sam Temple is day dreaming in his third period history class when his teacher Mr. Trentlake...

The novel opens with Melinda Sordino starting her high school freshman year. She has been ostracised by her friends and fellow students after she called the cops at a summer party. It is clear that something happened. I think most readers will be able to predict what happened at the...

A Rose for the ANZAC Boys focuses on the female volunteers of World War I, who nursed and cared for soldiers, drove ambulances, raised money for the War effort, sent food parcels and knitted clothing. Jackie French calls these women the ‘forgotten army’. It is 1915 and...

Nine-year-old Bruno is growing up in Berlin during World War II. After Bruno’s father is promoted to a Commandant, he and his family move to ‘Out-With’ on the orders of ‘The Fury’. ‘Out-With’ is Bruno’s misinterpretation of the Auschwitz concentration camp and ‘The Fury’ was his misinterpretation...

This coming-of-age novel is written as a series of anonymous letters that fifteen-year-old high school Freshman Charlie writes to someone he has never meet but thinks will understand him. He addresses the letters as only as ‘Dear Friend’. The 53 letters span a period from August 1991 to August 1992....

Jerry Renault, is a freshmen at Trinity, a Catholic high school for boys. He is a quiet and reserved student, silently coping following the death of his mother. One day Jerry is approached by Archie Costello, who is the Assigner for the Vigils, a secret underground student...

The novel is narrated by seventeen-year-old Ellie Linton as she documents in a journal her experiences during a military invasion and occupation of Australia. Tomorrow, When the War Began takes place in the fictional small rural Australian town of Wirrawee. Ellie and her high school friends Corrie,...