I’ve got one of my best pals on the blog today! Sarah from The Little Contemporary Corner and I recently found ourselves reading the Toffee by Sarah Crossan at the same time, so we decided to review it on each other’s blogs. We love a good blog swap!
Without further ado, I’ll hand you over to Sarah. Over to you, Sarah!
I’m taking over the wonderful Charlotte’s blog for the day to talk about one of our auto-buy authors! Myself and Charlotte both adore Sarah Crossan and her books, and find them so incredibly easy to read with wonderful story-lines. So we decided to do a little co-read of Toffee, Sarah’s latest novel written in verse.
Sarah always writes such strong and powerful novels about teenagers, with themes such as immigration, abuse and grief, nothing ever particularly light! However, I absolutely adore her stories and always sit and wait eagerly for her next release. I first came across Sarah’s work when One was released, and now she’s definitely an author that I have to pick up ASAP.
Toffee follows Allison who has run away from home, and particularly from her dad after some abusive behaviour. We follow her as she sleeps rough and eventually finds a home with an elderly lady suffering from dementia. The story is about survival and unlikely friendship, and both of those things are my buzzwords!
Allison is such a wonderful character who feels incredibly realistic. She’s not clean and polished like so many YA characters, she’s struggling with her feelings and you can see it in the way she reacts to certain situations. She’s searching for safety and can barely settle when she’s found it. I adored her character and thought she read so much older than she was. I really appreciated this take on being a teenager which has barely been discussed before. I feel like a lot of people could relate to Allison’s story and it’s one that definitely needs to be shared.
As always, Sarah’s writing was outstanding. As someone who rarely reads verse novels, I have always adored Sarah’s writing and the way she tells her stories. Toffee was incredibly easy to read even through its deep and unnerving topics. The writing flows perfectly and I really enjoyed the way it was written with more conversation within the verse. I’ve not read anything similar before and it was really interesting.
Without a doubt Sarah will stay as one of my auto-buy authors. She’s a very intriguing writer and I constantly want to find out what topic she’s writing about now. Keep in mind, it’s a very rare thing for Sarah to write anything happy. Although her stories are incredibly heart-warming, they’re quite difficult to read about sometimes.
If you have any triggers for abuse, parental abuse or homelessness, then maybe this book isn’t for you. However, I found it wonderful and something needed in the genre. It really highlights an abuse issue in the U.K. which isn’t spoken about in YA specifically.
Thank you so much Charlotte for letting me have a spot on Wonderfully Bookish, and keep an eye on my blog for Charlotte’s review of Toffee.
