The Mountains of Instead

The Strain/The Fall/The Night Eternal Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan Harper Collins 2009/2010/2011

It seems like everywhere I turn these days I'm finding myself knee-deep in post-apocalyptic scenarios. Every book I open assaults me with nuclear war, planetary collisions, universal collapses an…

Earlier this year, I signed up for the UKYABB Secret Santa and yesterday my gift arrived.  After a week of unexpectedly defrosted and subsequently broken freezer HELL, it couldn't have come at a better time.  On opening a, quite frankly, ginormous cardboard box, I was met with this:


Which on fu…

It's very rare that a book comes along which ticks all of your boxes at once. When it does, it's a magical experience. With Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, debut author Robin Sloan reduced me to a grinning school kid within the first ten pages. By the (all-too-short) time I reached the…

Dash and Lily's Book of Dares Rachel Cohn and David Levithan Mira INK 2012




Trust me, that song is the ONLY WAY to start this review.Are you grinning like a loon? Excellent, you may proceed.
It’s Christmas time in the city and Dash really doesn’t want to hear any silver bells (see what I did there, …

Ah, matchmaking - beloved by many from Mrs Bennett to Blair Waldorf it can be a rocky road for the Matcher, leading down the mountain of friendship into the ravine of resentment.  Or at least the swamp of sheepishness.  And that’s just when you’re matching PEOPLE.  Here, we are here to talk of a Ma…

This is for ERIN


She receives this beauteous gift (which is, in no way, a generic image that I found on the internet) because she shared THIS:



Would you like a rainbow, or sunshine, or lollipops, or unicorns, or fluffy kittens?  Or all of the above?
If so then ask yourself THIS:

As many of you may know Splendibird - that would be me (there is no way I can write this entire post talking about myself in the third person, but we are legion here at The Mountains of Instead so best differentiate) - (and by legion, I mean four) has reached the second round of Mira Ink's blog…