A Book That Makes You Happy (05)

button 30 Day Book Challenge

Welcome to the Moonlight Library’s 30 Day Book Challenge!
This meme intends to generate discussion, so please feel free to add a comment.
This particular challenge is taken from the 30 Day Challenge Archive on Tumblr.

Day 05 – A Book That Makes You Happy

I first discovered CJ Archer’s The Wrong Girl when I was auto-approved for Patchwork Press on Netgalley. The beautiful cover caught my eye:

The Wrong Girl (Freak House #1)

And the blurb drew me in:

It’s customary for Gothic romance novels to include a mysterious girl locked in the attic. Hannah Smith just wishes she wasn’t that girl. As a narcoleptic and the companion to an earl’s daughter with a strange affliction of her own, Hannah knows she’s lucky to have a roof over her head and food in her belly when so many orphans starve on the streets. Yet freedom is something Hannah longs for. She did not, however, want her freedom to arrive in the form of kidnapping.

Taken by handsome Jack Langley to a place known as Freak House, she finds herself under the same roof as a mad scientist, his niece, a mute servant and Jack, a fire starter with a mysterious past. They assure Hannah she is not a prisoner and that they want to help her. The problem is, they think she’s the earl’s daughter. What will they do when they discover they took the wrong girl?

Not only did I think the opening line was one of the best I’d ever read:

 To say I’d been kept prisoner my entire life in an attic wasn’t quite true.

But the book was beautifully written with three dimensional characters, no insta-love (insta-attraction, yes, but come on, Jack’s hot), lovely characters, and best of all, it had the most phenomenal voice and character personalisation. Archer’s Australian like me, but I read all the dialogue in different English accents depending on the speaker. I love love love Gothic novels and I especially love self-aware Gothic novels like this one.

I was wary that the book might be one of those ‘polished first 50 pages the rest is crap’ self-published books I’ve fallen for the in the past, but it wasn’t. It was entirely consistent and awesome and the whole thing just made me so blissfully happy. I was just so ridiculously happy whilst reading it, something I haven’t felt since my other Books of the Year like Bitterblue and Entwined.

I’m currently reading Book 2: Playing with Fire, which is just as awesome as the first, and I interviewed CJ Archer here.

What book makes you happy?

What is it about that book that makes you happy?

Nemo
Nemo

About Nemo

A lover of kittens and all things sparkly, Nemo has a degree in English Literature and specialises in reviewing contemporary, paranormal, mystery/thriller, historical, sci-fi and fantasy Young Adult fiction. She is especially drawn to novels about princesses, strong female friendships, magical powers, and assassins.

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