Goth Girl and the Ghost of a Mouse (Goth Girl, 1)

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I have no expectation for this book, except how beautiful and exciting the cover is. Turns out i really love this book, and here's reasons why you should read this once it's published: Basically Goth Girl is Ada Goth a young girl living with her father in Ghastly Gorm-Hall. Her mother was an acrobat and died while high wire walking. Because Ada reminds Lord Goth so much of his wife, he hides Ada away. A child must be heard and not seen. He wants her to walk about Gorm-Hall in loud boots so he can hide when he hears her. He only has one meal a week with her. Ada has gone through a number of nannies but they never last. Not because Ada isn't nice, but because of them. She will get a new one during this particular story. I'll let you meet her. With a nod to Mervyn Peake, the Goth family home is named Ghastly-Gorm Hall. The grounds hold not only the Secret Garden, but also the Even-More-Secret Garden, along with the Unstable Stables, the Dear Deer Park and the Lake of Extremely Coy Carp, all crafted by the renowned garden designer, Metaphorical Smith. For eight and above, there’s a fascinating Swedish fantasy from Pushkin: The Murderer’s Ape by Jakob Wegelius, translated by Peter Graves. Sally Jones – always given her full name – is a silent but multitalented gorilla; engineer, chess-player and cargo-boat companion of the Chief, a Finnish seaman and her greatest friend. But when the Chief is framed for murder, she falls in with fado singer Ana Molini and Luigi Fidardo, a repairer of musical instruments, and begins the arduous, far-flung process of clearing his name. Sally Jones’s dispassionate, delightfully old-fashioned diction is a perfect match for Wegelius’s nostalgic monochrome illustrations.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Flux, an imprint of North Star Editions, for the opportunity to read this book. I’m rounding up from 4.5 stars. I also really enjoyed how everyone tried to support each other and to show that it’s okay to not fit in.

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Ada Goth is the only child of Lord Goth. The two live together in the enormous Ghastly-Gorm Hall. Lord Goth believes that children should be heard and not seen, so Ada has to wear large clumpy boots so that he can always hear her coming. This makes it hard for her to make friends and, if she's honest, she's rather lonely. Then one day William and Emily Cabbage come to stay at the house, and together with a ghostly mouse called Ishmael they and Ada begin to unravel a dastardly plot that Maltravers, the mysterious indoor gamekeeper, is hatching. Ada and her friends must work together to foil Maltravers before it's too late!

Jess is a foster child and already had a lot other foster homes before she got to Barb. In the many years as a foster child she made up rules for herself to not get attached to anyone. My favorite character was definitely Barbra, the foster mom, but I can’t tell a lot about her without spoiling the whole story. She is one of the kindest moms I’ve ever read about! THE NERDY CULTURE<3 As a nerd myself i love to read how excited the team to join the cosplay expo and to become one of them. There are many references from popular stories, such as Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, Star Wars, etc. Altogether I really enjoyed the book and I needed a little break after finishing it to stop crying happy tears. I really recommend it to everyone who likes geeky books! Illustrated and written by Riddell, Goth Girl tells of Ada Goth (based on Ada Lovelace in a sense) and her home, Ghastly-Gorm Hall. It has English literature puns and references galore, though some take a bit of working out as Riddell has taken some liberty with them. The story itself is fairly simply, though I am delighted to say that it is not written in that awful style you sometimes get with children's books where the author is talking down to their intended audience because, as everyone knows, children are stupid. It is neither patronising nor simple, it is simply a delight.

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Aargh! Mä niin odotin tätä ja ensilukemalla hienoinen pettymys. Olisin toivonut helppolukuista fantasiaa, sellaista kivaa ja kaunista sisäänheittokirjaa. Sitä tämä ei ollut. It’s a slow road for Jess learning to trust. Her biomom is schizophrenic. Jess has been in foster care since age 7 and even though foster mom Barbra seems nice, Jess has been burned before and is hesitant to open herself up to more hurt. As some have already said; much of the writing, jokes and play on words would be lost on most children as they would be simply too young to `get it' or understand them, and so this is rather an odd book all round... Not quite sure what age group it is really aimed at - still a great and fun read though, but am undecided myself yet as to whether I shall be purchasing the follow up. Goth Girl by Chris Riddell is a beautifully illustrated series about the adventures of Ada Goth - a lonely girl living in a very strange house - from the bestselling author/ illustrator of Ottoline.

As others have said many times before me, representation matters. And in this book, Goth Girl, Queen of the Universe, we have Jess, who is a kid in foster care, after her mother had a mental breakdown when she was seven. The one thing she has learned from this is to trust in herself, and not make friends, because she is constantly losing foster homes, and being moved on. She has created a persona around herself, of Goth Girl, which she uses as her shield against the painful world around her.

Jess was claimed by the state when her bio mom’s mental illness made her unstable. While their relationship is far from traditional, blood ties are hard to break. There’s only one problem: Jess can’t reunite with her mom in New York City without a bunch of paperwork and she worries her social worker will never approve the trip. That’s when she remembers Oscar’s cosplay group, which is aiming for that big convention in New York . . .