The Thirteenth.

This one is going to be a book related post and is one that is currently close to my heart. Working at Waterstone's I come across a lot of books, some great and some not so great, and The Thirteenth is one that I think is great! It is a self published title from an author local to our area and is G. L. Twynham's first book, and I think she is off to a great start. I received a complimentary copy today for helping to arrange that the book be sold in our branch and I started to peruse it on my break, big mistake, my break is only 15 minutes long and I really didn't want to put it back in my locker! It is classed as part of the fantasy genre and is sort of in the same sort of area as all the twilight and other supernatural books with teenage characters and things that are currently selling, except there so far isn't an amazingly beautiful vampire lurking anywhere, and it is about the female character of the story being the strong powerful heroine. It's British too which makes a change for this genre. Obviously it is self published, so there is the odd spelling mistake etc, but so far I am really hoping it does well so that the author can bring out some other titles! I will give you a brief summary of what has happened so far. The story follows a young girl named Val who is turning 18 the day after the book opens. The day before her birthday she starts to experience excruciating pain, and on the day of her birthday a mysterious tattoo of the circle of the zodiac, plus a thirteenth mystery symbol, appears on her forearm and crazy stuff starts to happen. Already at this point I am struggling to not just sit and read it all in one go, and not to tell you some of the crazy stuff that happened in just the first couple of chapters. I love the character and what I know of the plot, the character is written to be very real, leading a normal life, working in a musty old bookshop (I can so relate to bookshops), and this appeals to me. Having had a normal English childhood it is nice to see a novel with more of the elements I grew up with so that I can find paralells with my own life within the story, as opposed to the American teen supernatural books which I can only partly relate to, though I couldn't make water suspend in the air in a ball and heat to boiling temperatures for when I am in trouble, and I doubt the majority of American teens can either! I literally cannot wait to read on, so I am going to take a quick snapshot, let you know it available on amazon.co.uk and that I will give a much better review when I have read the whole thing. I have a day off tomorrow, something tells me that I will have it finished!