October 2017 – Heart Full of Books

*Note: We were sent this title from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I started reading this in July, got through the first 30 pages and then gave up because the writing style was too bogged down with adjectives. I picked it back up again because royalty and boarding schools are two of my favourite buzzwords and I really wanted to be impressed. But, I think I’m a decade too old to really enjoy it. A lot of the story had a more middle-grade vibe than YA, so this would be the perfect book for 10-12 year old girls who love princesses because they play a huge role in this story.

The boarding school element of the story was one of the most underdeveloped aspects. Lottie wants to go to Rosewood. It’s prestigious but it’s not magical, it’s just where some royal and wealthy kids go. The lessons are completely regular and besides one maths lesson, you don’t get a lot of insight into them. The book takes place over one school year, but it’s the end of Christmas break, Valentine’s Day and results day at the end of May all in the span of 20 pages. What the heck? Am I meant to believe that nothing nefarious happened in five months to Ellie and Lottie who were in danger at Christmas break? It was ridiculously paced!

The plot is a bit all over the place as well. Obviously the focus is on Lottie taking the place of Ellie, Princess Protection Program style, but then there are all these boarding-school-by-numbers moments like sneaking out to the library in the middle of the night that didn’t do anything to enhance the main story line.

And let’s not forget Olly, who’s posed as Lottie’s best friend from back home. Rosewood has rules against mobile phones and the internet (if only that was the case in the identically named hometown of Pretty Little Liars!) which is a convenient way to justify Olly being completely forgotten and replaced by Ellie. It was like Lottie didn’t even care about him anymore even though I was always thinking ‘what about Olly?’

Ellie and Lottie’s friendship was built out of nowhere too. They go from being seemingly enemies as Lottie steals Ellie’s real identity, to best friends when they realise that’s actually a good thing. I wanted them to have Sophie and Agatha traits, but it felt a little stilted to be that. Still, I appreciate a strong female friendship, even if it was instantaneous.

With the little world building it did have, I was reminded of the character dynamics in ‘Vampire Academy’ and ‘Rebel Belle’, but posed for a younger audience. Important royals have Partizans, who are essentially guardians that protect them. Lottie’s role of switching place with Ellie is called a Portman. Those terms and one curse word are as far as the world building goes for the country of Maradova. You get no other sense of where it is, what it’s like or why Ellie is in danger as the princess. Frustrating, right?

I won’t be continuing on with the series, but if a middle-grade version of the two comp titles above appeals to you, definitely pick this one up!

The title of this post makes it sound really melodramatic but Bee and I have been having a lot of thoughts recently that have really affected our reading/blogging/BookTubing and whether the passion we had for Heart Full of Books is still as strong as it was when we started…four years ago.

Four years is a long time to keep something going. It’s not a secret that we’ve put more effort into our YouTube channel than our blog, and that filming videos and posting regularly has always been more of a priority than sitting down to write about our most recent reads. I guess that’s because on our channel is where we’ve built the biggest audience, and although no one likes to admit it, sometimes the numbers do matter and can be a huge motivator to keep working on something.

It’s also true that the people who read our blog or not necessarily the people that watch our videos. Because our blog has always been more of a side project, despite being the thing we created first, we just haven’t put the time and effort into building a little community over here.

Each year, both of our platforms have grown steadily. There was a time where I’d look at stats every morning and be really pleased with how many people were finding our stuff. We always wanted to make sure that we were posting what we wanted to post, but if we looked at what’s most popular, it’s not what we did most often. It got us thinking if we should start making more spoiler reviews or ‘Top 5’ posts.

As is the usual with the September-October months, we’ve done a lot less reading because of starting our final year at university – which is obviously super important and deserves our focus – but the time away from reading put some interesting thoughts in our heads.

Did we still want to do wrap ups anymore? How often did we want to post videos? Do we want to do more readathon vlogs because people seem to really like them? And most importantly:

Is our blog dead??

We haven’t posted on our blog in a month. We’re not motivated to write reviews. We can never think of anything interesting to write about outside of reviews…

But we want to do Blogmas. It’s been a tradition on our blog since it started and darn if we’re breaking the tradition this year. I want to be passionate about blogging. I want to find an audience that wants to read what I have to write and I’m not just saying that to convince myself.

Heart Full of Books has been our entire identity for four years, pretty much. Reading and talking about books is our number one hobby. It got to a point where we forgot it was possible to have other hobbies at the same time, but now that we’ve started drawing and writing again, our reading/blogging/BookTubing was bound to reduce.

I guess I’m just not entirely sure how that makes me feel. Just because you take a break from something doesn’t have to mean you love it any less, but that’s definitely the mindset I fell into.

Bee and I are going to work hard to make this blog something we want to work on and something that we’re proud of. And we’re still going to post videos, if a little less regularly than before. There might be some changes in content, like less wrap ups/reviews and more…other stuff that we haven’t quite figured out yet.

This was an absolute ramble of a post and something we don’t really share a lot of on this blog, but maybe that’s something that can change too. So, crisis over. Thanks for getting to the end of the post if you did, and look forward to more regularly scheduled, mixing-it-up content in the future!