Giveaway: Silver or Talk-Funny Girl

Though I mainly review young adult books here on Book Sp(l)ot Reviews, I love finding crossover titles - either those that are YA but can be considered YA/adult crossover or adult/YA crossovers.

Today, thanks to Crown Publishing, I have the opportunity to giveaway to such titles.

Both The Talk-Funny Girl by Roland Merullo (on Goodreads) and Silver: Return to Treasure Island by Andrew Motion (on Goodreads) were both mainly marketed as adult titles but can be considered crossover as they should appeal to and be appropriate for YA readers, as well.


The Talk-Funny Girl's paperback edition has just been released and it's likely you've seen an ad for Silver on Goodreads. Silver is the sequel to Robert Louis Stevenson's classic Treasure Island but the beginning seems to recap enough that you don't need to have read Treasure Island first. (I'm currently reading both books in the giveaway and hope to get at least one reviewed before it's over.)

Enter to win below - and if you want to know more about the books, click 'read more' to find their synopses. (US only, sorry.)


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Silver: Return to Treasure Island

A rip-roaring sequel to Treasure Island—Robert Louis Stevenson’s beloved classic—about two young friends and their high-seas adventure with dangerous pirates and long-lost treasure.


It's almost forty years after the events of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island: Jim Hawkins now runs an inn called the Hispaniola on the English coast with his son, Jim, and Long John Silver has returned to England to live in obscurity with his daughter, Natty. Their lives are quiet and unremarkable; their adventures have seemingly ended.

But for Jim and Natty, the adventure is just beginning. One night, Natty approaches young Jim with a proposition: return to Treasure Island and find the remaining treasure that their fathers left behind so many years before. As Jim and Natty set sail in their fathers' footsteps, they quickly learn that this journey will not be easy.

Immediately, they come up against murderous pirates, long-held grudges, and greed and deception lurking in every corner. And when they arrive on Treasure Island, they find terrible scenes awaiting them—difficulties which require all their wit as well as their courage. Nor does the adventure end there, since they have to sail homeward again...

Andrew Motion’s sequel—rollicking, heartfelt, and utterly brilliant—would make Robert Louis Stevenson proud.

The Talk-Funny Girl

In one of the poorest parts of rural New Hampshire, teenage girls have been disappearing, snatched from back country roads, never to be seen alive again. For seventeen-year-old Marjorie Richards, the fear raised by these abductions is the backdrop to what she lives with her own home, every day. Marjorie has been raised by parents so intentionally isolated from normal society that they have developed their own dialect, a kind of mountain hybrid of English that displays both their ignorance of and disdain for the wider world. Marjorie is tormented by her classmates, who call her “The Talk-funny girl,” but as the nearby factory town sinks deeper into economic ruin and as her parents fall more completely under the influence of a sadistic cult leader, her options for escape dwindle. But then, thanks to a loving aunt, Marjorie is hired by a man, himself a victim of abuse, who is building what he calls “a cathedral,” right in the center of town.

Day by day, Marjorie’s skills as a stoneworker increase, and so too does her intolerance for the bitter rules of her family life. Gradually, through exposure to the world beyond her parents’ wood cabin thanks to the kindness of her aunt and her boss, and an almost superhuman determination, she discovers what is loveable within herself. This newfound confidence and self-esteem ultimately allows her to break free from the bleak life she has known, to find love, to start a family, and to try to heal her old, deep wounds without passing that pain on to her husband and children.

By turns darkly menacing and bright with love and resilience, The Talk-Funny Girl is the story of one young woman’s remarkable courage, a kind of road map for the healing of early abuse, and a testament to the power of kindness and love.