Lil

There's been a few subtle changes going on here over the past few weeks. ' Good Friends, Good Books and a Sleepy Conscience ' is no more! I'd never actually intended on keeping the name anyway, it was a sort of stop-gap until I decided what I actually wanted to call it  - a stop-gap that ended up lasting over two years! After much deliberation my sister came up with the idea of Reading in Wellies (like Running in Heels but with farmers and books, geddit?) The url is staying as lilmissvixreads for now - if anyone has any expertise on changing urls on over 200+ posts I would greatly appreciate it. Do I need to make custom redirects for all of them? Technology is hard. ________________________________ In other news, I've finally joined the wonderous world of instagram. You can find me there  @readinginwellies. I had no idea how many amazing bookstagrammers there are out there, and while I'm still very much a novice I'm loving all the beautiful book photography...

I've always been very interested in the life of Queen Victoria. It's hard not to be when you're named after her! So it was with some delight that I discovered ITV were making a television series all about her early years, penned by the wonderful Daisy Goodwin. Despite my initial frustration to discover that the majority of the series was filmed within an hour's drive of my house and I knew nothing of it, I was glued to my screen every night for the eight week duration (Captain Poldark had to wait for iPlayer). So when I heard that Daisy had written a novel to accompany the series, complete with extra scenes, well I headed straight online to pre-order it. The cover is beautiful and perfectly fitting, and I dived right in as soon as it arrived. "In June 1837, the eighteen-year-old Victoria wakes up to find that she is Queen of the most powerful nation in the world. But will she be queen in her own right, or a puppet controlled by her mother and the sinister Sir John ...

  A spectacular fraud in a London auction house.  A barefoot lover running through the Paris streets.  A colossal theft from a billionaire's yacht.  A vicious murder under a bridge in Rome.  They started it. she'll end it.  WHO IS THE MAESTRA?  Review The simple yet deceptive blurb on the back of this novel is what drew me to read it.I had no idea what to expect, and it was nothing like I could ever have imagined. Maestra comes with the tagline 'The Most Shocking Thriller You'll Read This Year'. I'll admit that I haven't read that many thrillers, but this is  certainly true for me. Maestra is unpredictable, graphic in every sense of the word and left me feeling very uneasy. I couldn't put it down. So I suppose that makes it a success. Having looked at the reader reviews I'm surprised how many negative ones there are. Yes it's explicit, designed to shock, but Maestra is reflective of the baser aspects of human nature - lust and greed. Althoug...