Book review: Leave Your Mark by Aliza Licht

Aliza Licht's Leave Your Mark promises to help give you tips to land your dream job, kill it in your career, and rock social media. 

Those are some big claims, and while I don't think reading this book is going to suddenly set you on the path to awesomeness, I think it'll fire you up so that you want to try.

Licht started in fashion journalism before joining DKNY in a publicity role. There, when Twitter appeared, she set up DKNY PR Girl, pretty much the first Twitter account to give the inside track on PR in the world of fashion. Taking her experience in journalism and PR, Licht has written a how-to guide to making the most of every career opportunity that comes your way, and creating some of your own.

I don't read business books or self-help guides or anything similar - the closest I've come before this is Sheryl Sandberg's wonderful Lean In. So I wasn't really sure what to expect when I picked up Leave Your Mark.

The first thing is that it's very upbeat, very matter of fact, and Licht's voice is very confident. Confidence is a big point in the book, but it took me a while to get past my British reserve and start really enjoying what Licht was saying and the way she was saying it. I never really got used to the 'take a selfie' sections, where Licht almost gives the reader a task in which you have to assess yourself. The use of the word selfie felt a little trying too hard to be trendy to me, and I didn't love it.

Book review: The Cousins O'Dwyer Trilogy by Nora Roberts

A battle between good and evil is always a great subject matter for a book, and in the hands of Nora Roberts, you know it's going to be a greater story than in the hands of many other writers.

The Cousins O'Dwyer Trilogy follows siblings Branna and Connor, and their cousin Iona, as they engage in a battle against the malevolent being Cabhan, a witch who has for hundreds of years clashed with the O'Dwyer family. As the three cousins move ever closer to finding a way to beat Cabhan, they also have to let love into their lives, in the form of loyal friends Fin, Meara, and Boyle.

Dark Witch, Shadow Spell and Black Magick are pure Roberts - a great story combined with realistic characters you love, and an enemy to overcome who you hate, as well as romance. The three couplings - Iona and Boyle, Connor and Meara, and Branna and Fin - are so compelling to read about because the individual characters are well drawn and likeable, as well as being complex and mysterious in just the right ways. I think everyone that reads series by Roberts always has a favourite couple, and for me it was Branna and Fin, because their path to love was the hardest, and not just because they're both stubborn.

Book review: The Liar by Nora Roberts

If you count yourself a reader and don't know who Nora Roberts is, then I'm guessing you've probably been living under a rock for a while.

Roberts is pretty prolific, generally producing a standalone and a trilogy every year, plus the books she writes under her pseudonym J. D. Robb, but her novels are always quality over quantity. 

Her latest standalone is The Liar, a thriller mystery about Shelby Pomeroy, who decamps back to her parents' house with her young daughter Callie when her husband Richard dies. Richard's death revealed that he was a liar and a cheat, whose fortune was built on a stack of debts that Shelby has now taken on. As she works out how to support herself and her daughter, Shelby meets the handsome carpenter Griffin Lott, but also has to face up to the fact that Richard's death doesn't mean she is free of him.

In Shelby, Roberts has created a likeable character who I rooted for from the moment I met her. She's got faults - her naivety about Richard and the way she gave in to him made me want to shake her. I think Roberts is well aware of that fact - I think Shelby's best friend Emma Kate is a stand in for the reader, sharing and conveying our thoughts and feelings, and we get to know Shelby as Emma Kate re-learns her best friend.

Book review: Burnt Paper Sky by Gilly Macmillan

Having your child go missing is, I'm guessing, one of the scariest things that could ever happen to a parent. The uncertainty of knowing where your child is, the knowledge that you can't help them. But what about everything else that happens to you when your child goes missing?

In Gilly Macmillan's Burnt Paper Sky we meet Rachel Jenner, whose eight-year-old son Ben disappeared when she let him run ahead of her in the woods, and James Clemo, the detective put in charge of finding Ben.

Macmillan has obviously taken inspiration from various cases of missing children that have hit the headlines in recent years, but in Burnt Paper Sky she takes us into the world of the parents, beyond those headlines. We join Rachel a year after Ben's disappearance, as she recounts what happened - not just her feelings and fears over the disappearance and what was happening to Ben, but her paranoia, the way other people looked at her, the way the media was on her side and then wasn't, the way one simple, gut reaction resulted in everyone seeing Rachel as a completely different person. Macmillan examines the psyche of a woman who is facing judgement from all sides when all she wants is for her son to be found, and the psyche of people like us - members of the public, the media - who watch from the sidelines when something like this happens. And judge. And form opinions about something we really have no idea about.