Really enjoyable read. Good characters and a Good story. Well worth a read. Think others will enjoy.

This was a really great book, the story was moving and interesting so I enjoyed the reading experience a lot. The only reason I didn’t give this book five stars is because I didn’t love the mc!

It was a painful, yet cathartic read for me. As someone whose mother's ashes remain at my father's bed side, I found that element of the book interesting.
I quite liked the quirky twist to the novel with the Freaky Friday body swap element.

After reading YA fantasy for a long time it was good to dive into a YA Contemporary. Sunflowers in February was an emotional read that had an unique take on grief and what happens when someone you love passes on. However, I found the plot to be somewhat predictable and most of my guesses were right. I like to be surprised when reading and this didn’t have any surprises. I also found it quite hard to connect with our MC Lily. I found her to be a pretty selfish person and some of her choices had me rolling my eyes. Despite these, I loved the writing style and the fact that the author took some risks with a pretty sensitive topic.

The book had a promising concept however the main character was really annoying and selfish and all the information seemed to be released at the start of the book so i just skimmed the last 70%. It was boring.

I requested this book after reading the blurb and was excited to be accepted to read and review.  Reading it however, was not the experience I expected.  It didn't let me down but I wasn't as big of a fan of it as I thought I would be.  I found it all rather odd.

The story begins with the main character, Lily, waking up in a field and realising she was dead.  At first she follows her friends and family around and I did worry it was going to be a bit too close to The Lovely Bones as she makes a distressing discovery about her killer.  However, instead, this book takes a different turn when she manages to communicate with her brother, and he 'lends' her his body so she can say goodbye, tie up loose ends etc.  The tricky part is giving it back.  

Like I say, I didn't not enjoy this book but it was a bit weird.  It explores the possibility of what happens when you die and the author had an interesting take on this, but I feel that we didn't get to see enough of what happened to Ben and it never went really deep enough.  The character of Lily was likeable and a typical teen, I think this would appeal to it's most intended readers of YA.  I enjoyed the first part of the book, exploring the feelings following death (both from Lily and her family and friends perspectives) and the effect it has, but I think the twist was just a little too far fetched and strange for me.  Overall was a decent read but just not quite enough for me.

When fifteen year old Lily awakes she finds herself outside in a random area only there's a twist. She's dead after a brutal hit and run. Her parents and twin, Ben are left bereft, shocked at who could've just left her and not attempted to help her before it was too late. Then she makes a shock discovery to do with Nathan, her boyfriend and sets about trying to contact her family from the other side to allow them comfort and to move on.



A heartfelt and heartbreaking novel about life after death for everyone close to the person.



Many thanks to the publishers for allowing me to review this book for them!

For a debut novel, this was an intriguing idea.
We first meet our main character, Lily, at the start of the novel when she wakes up at the side of the road with no idea what she's doing there. Then she discovers her body lying in a ditch and realises she is dead.
Our story focuses on Lily's post-death experiences. She learns some shocking news about the identity of her killer, and has to watch her friends and family try to adjust to life without her. There are some black comic scenes where she attends her own funeral, but the story comes into its own when she first inhabits the body of her twin brother, Ben, and has the chance for another stab at life - just in another body.
It was an enjoyable read, but I found myself really wanting to know more about Ben's experiences and what he was doing while Lily took over his life.
Thanks to NetGalley for allowing me the opportunity to read this in advance of publication.

This book really made me think about things and people I take for granted. Beautifully written book. Lily tragically lose her life with so many experiences yet to live and things left unsaid. It’s a story of family and friend coming to terms with the sudden lose of lily and how they begin to mend. This book made me laugh in places and there were tears as well. Beautiful

This was a weird book, but I enjoyed it in most parts. Lily was a realistic teenager, cut from life too soon and desperate to just live one more day. So though she treats Ben terribly and is really selfish and immature, you can really see why. so even though her decisions annoyed me sometimes, I understood them completely.

I was really sad, especially in the first part where Lily is just following her family around. Though I felt it lost it's feeling after Lily gets to live again inside Ben's body. Though I was worried about Ben, I felt the emotion and sadness that was captured so well in the start of the book.

So, really I was a bit disappointed as the book went on. I enjoyed it all. It definitely wasn't a bad read, but I feel that it could have been so much better.

It's worth reading. It shows the feelings of grief and terror of being dead so well that you could imagine it's real. It just wasn't as moving as I thought it would be.

This book was so weird. At first it started off this cutesy YA book, then she died. When I read the premise, I was expecting more of a ‘If I stay’ by Gayle Forman vibe and unfortunately/fortunately however you look at it, it starts out this way but then it just got crazier from there.

* POTENTIAL SPOILERS ALERT *

Lily enters her own twin brother’s body so she isn’t a ghost anymore. So she pretends to be her twin brother! What the hell! That’s actually quite creepy when you think about it. She realizes that she isn’t ready to go and to ‘move on.’ She realizes who killed her and it’s not as much of a shocker as I wanted it to be. It’s a coming of age story but she’s also dead? If that makes sense. I mean it’s YA, everything makes sense in YA. But still, it’s about finding herself even though she’s not herself anymore. It’s about her learning to deal with the fact that she is not dead. This book covers a lot of issues and for that I commend it.

Premise has great teen appeal but the tone feels at odds with the subject matter being explored & the characters fail to convince. Disappointing.

An exploration of life after death.

‘Lily wakes up one crisp Sunday morning on the side of the road’ and soon realises she is dead. She has been the victim of a hit and run accident.

This is how the story begins and we soon learn that Lily is fifteen years old and has a twin brother, Ben. As she floats above the world she has left behind, she watches as the news of her violent death is given to her family and close friends. After her funeral she realises she is not ready or prepared, to ‘move on’. It is then that she visits her twin brother and decides to take over his body. She also learns that the person responsible for her death in the drink driving accident is the mother of her boyfriend, who, overcome by guilt is now drinking herself into oblivion. Lily’s violent death at such a young age is having a devastating effect on those around her and she soon witnesses her previously close family falling apart. Will she be able to help them, will she be able to expose her killer and will she feel able to return Ben’s body to him and leave the physical world? These are the questions that are posed to the reader.

The nub of the story is where Lily inhabits Ben’s body and she starts to live his life. This has its problems for her, as being a girl, she is out of her depth both physically and socially. She also begins to learn there is a dark side to her twin that was completely unknown to her.

I am always rather nervous of ‘life after death’ stories in ‘The Lovely Bones’ genre. There cannot be a reality to them and it brings out the sceptic in me. This was an ambitious subject for a first novel. There are interesting aspects but it didn’t really hold my attention.

Jane

Silence.
The bluish light to the day gives away the early hour, and I hug my knees to my chest as if I should be cold. Sitting on the grass verge of a narrow country lane I become aware, with the gradual creeping light of dawn, that I must have been here for some time.
It comes to me slowly, in the same way that I search for recent dreams when I first wake. I can’t remember . . . The shrill call of a wild bird and the urgent flapping of its wings shatters the still air, nudging me to question why I am here and not at home where I should be, in my pyjamas and tucked under my duvet.
All around there is nothing but sparse winter countryside, no house, no shop, no building.
Grief, I have learned today, is the colour grey. All around us is grey. The walls, the equipment, the skin of the dead, and the skin of the living . The reddish brown of Mum’s jacket and the green of Dad’s chunky‑knit jumper look barely sepia against this room of grey.
Having confirmed with that nod that the lifeless mass of slowly putrefying cells lying in front of them had recently been me, the living, breathing, body of Lily Richardson, fifteen years old, daughter of James and Amelia Richardson, twin sister to Ben Richardson, they are allowed to leave. Or rather, they are encouraged, gently, to abandon their child, so that the accurate cause of my death can be determined, and recorded.


When I first saw the cover and the description I was hesitant to read this because I have had quite a hit-or-miss experience with Contemporary YA books. I then saw the first few chapters being offered as a preview from Readersfirst...and I just had to read more!
This book grabbed me from the first chapter - after reading the preview I went to request the ARC on Netgalley because I just had to know what happened. Luckily, I was approved and feel very privileged to have read this prior to publication.
The main character, Lily is very realistic and relatable. I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of her relationship with her family and friends, as well as the small touches to do with her favourite things which fleshed her out and made her really sympathetic. The story starts with Lily waking up on a cold morning, looking down at her body in the ditch of a country lane, the everything that happens as a result.
The mystery of who knocked her down is revealed quite early on and I thought it was handled really well. The guilty party goes through a range of coping mechanisms and I thought it was really great how their family is shown to have been affected in a negative way, just as much as Lily's family when dealing with the aftermath of her death.
This book is a beautiful reflection on the value of life, friendship, familial love and forgiveness.


‘I’m obviously the superior twin,’ I told him frequently over the years, since I had made it down the birth canal first. Nearly sixteen years ago on 3rd June, I was born a full hour and a half before Ben had finally decided to turn up. I could imagine myself pushing and shoving my way past him, in my eagerness to be first, and then we had spent the next fifteen and three‑quarter years behaving in exactly the same way, competing for the best of everything, from the first go down the slide at the park to grabbing at the biggest slice of cake.
Yet in truth our love for each other was our strength. We fought each other’s cause, when needed, with the determination of gladiators and we protected each other from the rest of the world like private bodyguards. We were always in tune with each other.
We were each other.
I want my life back.
I’m not ready.
I don’t want to go today.
I want a future.
Everything that I could be doing rather than attending my own funeral plays in front of my eyes. I want to remember what it is like to have a huge plate of salty chips, or a squidgy cake, a cold ice cream . . . some hot chocolate. I want to go out with my friends , to party and laugh and dance.
I want to go home and tell my parents I love them.
I wish, more than anything, I had appreciated every single little bit of it.

What I liked: Good parents in a YA book - yay for this as it's something we don't often get to see! Lily and Ben's relationship which was portrayed in a very realistic, yet tender way. I liked how each character was given time for development - they all came across as very human with flaws and strengths. I liked the positive messages about relationships and the importance of being honest with the people you care about and working towards your dreams.

Even better if: I found it really hard to reconcile one of the decisions Lily made partway through the book. I know that the main characters are teenagers and I can understand why she made the decision she did. I just could not agree with it and the discomfort I felt affected my enjoyment more and more as the story continued.

How you could use it in your classroom: This would be a good addition to any library catering for teenagers as the book touches on grief and bereavement, relationships with friends, boyfriends/girlfriends and family, blame and forgiveness and making the time we have count. I could see this being very popular in a secondary school library or with the text being used to spark discussion.

I really, really thought I was going to like this book. On the face of it, it was everything that I like. But it did not work for me at all.

I'm not sure what it was that didn't work for me. It might have been the close-knit nature of the action - that Lily's family and the driver are so closely intertwined that I felt it totally unlikely. It might have been that Lily seems to have no regard for her brother's life, riding roughshod over his decisions to 'do a good thing' and make his life better. It might even have been that I can't imagine anybody would believe that the teenage boy in front of them was actually his dead twin sister, much less as quickly as the characters in this book did.

Whatever it was, this book just didn't click with me. I don't think it was the author's fault though. This isn't a bad book. It's got some lovely themes, some profound moments, and a great understanding of the difficulty of sudden death, especially in teenagers.

I don't know what it was at all, but this book really didn't work for me. For that reason, and that reason only, my rating is quite low. It's not a reflection on the quality of the book, but rather my reaction to it.

But, sadly, for me, this wasn't a winner at all.

What a wonderful debut. It brought tears to my eyes, made me chuckle and smile but most of all gave a sense of positivity and made me look at the world with fresh eyes.
It is hard to review without giving anything away but it covers how one death can have consequences for many, how people grief differently, family bonds but most of all how precious life is. This is the best book I have read this year.
I was given an ARC for an honest review.

Oh my goodness, this book made me sob. It's the story of Lily, who wakes up one morning on the side of the road and realised she's died. We follow her spirit as she observes her family and friends coping with their grief, until she gets the opportunity to 'borrow' her twin brother's body for a little bit and get closure. Until that plot point happens, the book feels a bit derivative of If I Stay by Gayle Forman, but it twists the formula in a way that works surprisingly well. Lily is a wonderfully drawn character, who is likeable but decidedly not perfect, and Shrimpton paints a believable portrait of her family and friends. These feel like 15 year olds - they do stupid things, they get drunk, they lash out - but also the adults are well observed, and all cope with grief in different ways. The story unfolds in a sad, beautiful way as it flits between the perspective of Lily and the people around her, including her killer. It's definitely not a book to give to someone who has suffered a recent loss, as the descriptions are all very raw and feel very real, but it tells the story well, is impossible to put down and left me in a crying heap by the end.

I enjoy a YA book that has depth, that gives real feeling about a topic many people have experienced, in this case death but this book really lacked that for me. The first third of the book I did enjoy, it was interesting and thoughtful but it went off on a strange unrealistic tangent which I really didn’t enjoy.

In reality, saying goodbye to someone is the hardest thing to go through, but the book didn’t seem it was about that. The book was too freaky Friday for my likely, lacking connection with the characters and felt overall uninspiring. I would have preferred it if we got to see how Lily’s family grieved normally, coping with all the issues.

I’ve worked with a number of young people who have felt the raw emotion of loss at an age where they shouldn’t have to deal with it, I don’t think death is tackled in the way it should be within this type of book.

All being said while this isn’t my favourite YA novel out recently, I think I will still check out what the author does in the future with the hope they become more realistic.

A stunning debut that skillfully tackles the topic of life and death, whilst full of warmth and humour.


Sunflowers in February is a simply stunning debut; it tackles a topic not often found in YA in this capacity and is written from a unique perspective that's surprisingly realistic. Lily is such an engaging character that you can't help but want to keep turning each and every page to find out what's going to happen next.

A key aspect of Sunflowers in February is the idea of moving past grief, and how, whilst this "missing piece really does ruin the overall picture of the puzzle", life moves on and it's important that people do move on and accept that they can get past their grief knowing that life won't be quite the same. This is such an important message for everyone as, unfortunately, we will all experience grief at some point in our lives and it's "how we move on that counts". This is not to suggest that Shrimpton doesn't show how utterly devastating death can be; she does, but she also shows the process of coming to terms with death.

All of this is not to say that Sunflowers in February makes for a depressing read; it really doesn't! There were points where I laughed out loud, a key point being during Lily's funeral where Ben comes out with some of the best lines in the book. I also learnt some scientific facts about hugging - did you know that a twenty second hug releases some kind of bonding hormone?

Ultimately, however, I think that Shrimpton has crafted a book that, whilst about death, is mainly about living. "If only I had the chance to die knowing that I had really lived. Maybe then it wouldn't be so bad." It's about grasping opportunities and not just wasting your days away, about showing people how you truly feel, about how little decisions can have big effects. It's about not taking things for granted, both big and small; "the irony of death is that you obviously don't find out what you meant to people until it's too late."

This book is full of raw emotion, humour and warmth, with a wide array of characters who all cope with their grief in different ways and are suffering for different reasons. It also makes you realise the importance each and every person has even if they don't think that they're valued or needed. Whether or not you have experienced grief, there is something for everyone to take away from this book - we are all significant and we all have our own lives to live.

"Life wasn't just about living and breathing."