Read with pride was the second installment in the Paper and Hearts Society series. This was a brilliant book about rebellion, friendship and standing up for what you believe in.

The characters were fabulous as always. I loved that it was from Olivia's POV as she is my favourite character of the series. I wish that we saw more of Ed, Henry and Tabby however as they were mostly not shown.

The struggle Olivia faced seemed realistic and heartbreaking. The themes were great and so was the writing. Overall this was a brilliant read and I'm looking forward to reading the next book in the series!

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for the E-arc!

After reading and loving The Paper and Hearts Society last year I was very much looking forward to a sequel. I didn’t expect disappointment and I didn’t get disappointment. This book made me feel so seen and so happy and I cried lots of happy tears.

I liked how we got to see the friendship group from another characters’ point of view; so in the first book it’s from Tabby’s point of view, but this one was from Olivia’s point of view and I loved the differences between the characters. I also liked how we got to see the characters in their normal every day lives, as the first book is over their summer holiday, but this is when they’re back into normal routine; Olivia, Tabby and Henry are in school, Cassie is in college and Ed is looking for a job. Plus we get a whole new bunch of characters with Olivia’s new book club. Olivia struggles to keep on top of things and honestly as hard as it is to read it’s so important because, speaking from experience, teenagers are made to feel like they have to be able to juggle everything and hold everything together, and books like this can show others that you don’t have to struggle through, asking for help is okay.

There’s a lot of LGBTQIA+ rep in this book and this is such an important book for people to read, especially I think for teenagers who could be in the same position as some of the characters in this. Each of the characters writes a little #ReadWithPride note and Alf’s made me feel so seen as I can really relate to what he said. It’s only been in the last few years I’ve actually felt validated in my sexuality and if this book can help people feel that at an earlier age, then that’s brilliant and I want to throw this series at everyone to read.

I really enjoyed this book. It had everything from the first book that I liked, what with The Paper & Hearts Society Book Club, books, bookish adventures and friendship. This was a bit different to the first book as it focuses on Olivia rather than Tabby, plus it takes place during the school term, whereas the first book was set during the Summer holidays. I thought both were good changes and I liked following Olivia along on her journey to save the school library whilst also making new friends.

This book does also explore mental health, such as what happens when you take on too much and don't give yourself enough time to rest, and how that affects other things in life. Whilst I enjoy these books, I feel that the intended audience is teens in high school, and so how Lucy writes about these topics is really great for the intended audience.

The other thing I really enjoyed about this book was the LGBTQIA+ representation. Not only that, but the detail when explaining some sexualities was great. Again, I feel this book is intended for a teen in high school, and so the detail is good for anyone who may be exploring their sexuality.

I really enjoyed this book and absolutely flew through it. I hope to be back with The Paper & Hearts Society gang soon!

Following a summer of fun with her book club, The Paper and Hearts Society are back at school and college. However, upon returning Olivia quickly realises her favourite place, the library has implemented big changes over the summer. Suddenly LGBTQ + books come with warning stickers and are not accessible to all without parental permission. Furious, Olivia who is worried the books are not reaching the people who need them decides to launch an anonymous campaign. She, along with lots of new friends, bought together by the cause work to make these books accessible to everyone. The Read with Pride club is officially formed.

This is the second instalment in The Paper and Heart Society series and as with book one I rated it 5 stars, but I think I enjoyed this one a fraction more than the first. I seem to have a real thing for second books in series and they tend to be my favourites. One of the large draws of this series is how heavily it speaks to books lovers. Most book lovers enjoy books about books and they also enjoy reading about people enjoying books! This series is a homage to books in my opinion and one of the best series I have found that truly celebrates the joy of reading. A large proportion of this story is set in a library and the focal point of it is ensuring the books within are accessible to everyone. We also had scenes set in bookshops and lots of references to modern books that I can imagine many readers will have read. The characters feelings towards books just tap into mine and almost validate that its ok for books to be a passion. There is a lovely quote in this story about identifying with a character in a book and seeing yourself in them can make you feel like part of your heart is heeling. Although I cannot identify with this in the way it is spoken about in this story, I think its relevant to a whole manner of personal struggles people may face. For me personally discovering characters with anxiety and seeing feelings I struggle to articulate written down was a real turning point for me and it continues to help me every time I find a new character I can relate to. I just found this to such a beautiful and poignant quote that I wanted to mention it.

A huge focus of this book is on friendship, new friendships Olivia forms and her current ones. We see Olivia through various circumstances making friends with a little group of seven people who all have their own reasons for wanting to ensure LGBTQ+ are easily accessible in the library. I thought the little group they formed was awesome. I would have loved to have friendships like these when I was Olivia’s age, in fact I would love friends like them now!. They were so accepting and caring towards each other despite not having been friends for long and just generally were such a positive bunch. Initially we see Olivia finding it difficult to balance her two friendship groups and feel she needs to keep them apart. However, when she starts to struggle, we see each group take it upon themselves to come together and support her. It just showed what a great cast of characters they were and how important friendships can be.

I really liked how the book explored mental health in Olivia’s character. We see her go from a very together student to someone who suddenly struggles to cope. Pressures start to mount in the form of juggling her GCSE schoolwork, friends and her campaign involving the library. It allowed us to see how lots of small things can build up and really add pressure to someone as we see Olivia sprawling downwards in front of us. It also showed how talking about these matters can make all the difference in their outcome. I just feel Lucy handles sensitive topics in a really delicate and relatable way and this means that everyone, particularly teens could identify with this.

This was just the perfect book for book lovers that really celebrated reading, love of books, particularly those involving LGBTQ+ characters, the need for these books to be around and get into the right people’s hands. It celebrated friendship, standing up for what you believe in and not underestimating the need to take care of your own mental health. More importantly it shows the importance of sharing your stories and reading with pride.

Thank you to Netgalley and Hachette Children’s Group for providing me with a copy of this book for review.

TW: homophobia, anxiety, burnout, transphobia

I really loved being able to rejoin the Paper & Hearts society and particularly that this time, we got Olivia’s viewpoint (possibly my favourite character). She’s incredibly relatable, as she deals with exam stress, activism and burnout. Powrie discuses the high and lows of trying to bring about change and the strain it can place on an individual, especially the toll it can take on mental health. Change can only be effective if you’re in the right place to be able to continue the fight.

The general sense of acceptance, support and love in both the Paper & Hearts society and the Read With Pride gang is just so lovely to read and consider the positive impact this book could have on young teenagers struggling to find a group where they can truly be themselves. Powrie really celebrates the sheer joy of seeing yourself in a book and how devastating the impact of censorship can be. LGBT+ representation is vital and it is our place as readers to shout about it and all other forms of diverse representation in the media we consume.

I just always know that with these books, the characters will feel like real teenagers, right down to the tiny details Powrie inserts. It’s in the titles of books chosen, the dialogue that will bring a smile to your face and the way you find yourself transported back to high school instantly. To me, it shows the careful, considerate writing that never patronises its audience, weaving an enjoyable plot and expansion of side characters. There’s always more going on with people than you may initially realise, as Powrie shows throughout the story.

Read With Pride is a loud and proud call for love and support that I think will be hugely beneficial for so many readers.

I loved Read with pride, the follow up to last years The paper and heart's society. I thought the plot was absolutely brilliant and it was great to see all of the gang and some new faces. I think this book could really be a lifeline for teens in school struggling to understand their own sexuality. I know it's just a book, but the solidarity shown in it and community can't help but make you feel a little less alone in your own thoughts and feelings. I love that Lucy's books always center around some greater cause and she brings attention to her passions in her writing so well.

A great follow-up, just as delightful as the first book. Yet again Lucy Powrie manages to incorporate so many important issues in a way that is respectful and fully accessible to young people. Teens aged 12 - 16 will get a lot from this series. This book, in particular, examines the impact of 'burnout' on young people - how the pressures they face can impact their well being. It felt painfully real., how it isn't always a distinct process or a quick one - how these feelings can be gradual yet ever-present and impede on everything.
The friendship book remains one of the most joyous in current YA, they feel real and believable - as do their range of experiences. These books will mean a lot to a lot of young people.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for sending me an early e-arc of this book.

I read The Paper and Hearts Society very recently and really enjoyed it, I was eager to get into the next book. I actually think this one was even better.

Read with Pride tackles some really hard hitting topics including homophobia, but does so in such a wonderfully delicate way. It does so much justice to the subject matter whilst also bringing forward the awareness to the reader.

I love the characters. I loved getting to know the previous characters and watching them develop. I also enjoyed getting to know the new characters and learning to love them just as much as the others.

I would definitely recommend this series and I will definitely be picking up the next one as soon as it is released.

This second book of the Paper&Hearts Society series is just as lovely as the first, but with a twist that is much needed today.

Olivia is an overachiever, book lover and overall amazing person. When she discovers that her school library is forced to require parent/guardian-signed forms to check out LGBTQIA+ books, she feels hurt and betrayed. But she is not the only one to feel like this. In fact she will soon befriend a very diverse cast of characters, from all walks of life and different sexual and gender orientations who feel betrayed, misunderstood, and erased. This is the start of Read with Pride, a group of activist teenagers that are not afraid to speak up for their rights and are willing to sacrifice everything they hold dear so that people are more inclusive and understanding.

This book was such a delight to read, especially now. A manifesto for everyone who needs to be heard, who has a voice and who wants to change the world for the better.

On a technical level, this book definitely reads younger, which makes it very accessible for middle grade readers and potentially advanced primary school readers too.

It is definitely a book that I will order for my library.

I flew through the second instalment in this bookish series, and it cured the reading slump I was on the verge of! More bookish jokes and friendships around books abound in this entry.

Like the previous book, READ WITH PRIDE can be read as a standalone. It follows one of the friends from the first book, giving her spotlight and keeping Tabby (the previous book's protagonist) present without her taking over the story. A lot of this is achieved by introducing a new cast - the members of the new book club/rebellion Read with Pride - which means the focus isn't entirely on the Paper & Hearts Society members.

Given it's Pride month and some of the conversations on social media at the moment, the central threat of the library restricting access to LGBTQ+ books felt timely and all too real - and it is. READ WITH PRIDE is a book that should prompt conversations about the matter at hand.

The depiction of burn out was so painfully real. As someone who dances on the edge of burn out a lot, and has crashes several times a year (including one at the start of the month), I could really see myself in Livvy. Thankfully, I've never gotten as bad as she does, but I could empathise so much with her and see the steps leading her towards it. I kept wanting to jump into the book and stop her, because I didn't want to see her go through it all, because I was reading myself into her. I love it when that happens, because I get so invested in a book.

I love how this series tackles well-being issues that are often caused by societal and personal pressure. They're so deftly handled, functioning almost like self-help books, while never feeling like a manual. I'd wish I'd had them when I was younger, because it would have been so good to read these before my GCSEs!

I describe The Paper and Hearts Society as the bookish novel all teenage bookworms have been waiting for, so I will say that the sequel, Read with Pride, is the bookish novel queer UK teens have been waiting for! Read with Pride continues to fuel us with a brilliant book club, YA novel name drops and strong friendships but also includes a wealth of LGBTQ+ characters, adding an inclusivity we’ve been missing in UKYA. If you haven’t yet read the first book in this series I would definitely urge you to, the sequel is amazing and I’m expecting many more great things from this bookish series.

The Paper and Hearts Society focused on new girl, Tabby, but the next instalment is told from the perspective of demisexual character, Olivia. Our new protagonist is an out and proud character who is in an f/f relationship with her dear friend, Cassie. Olivia is the first to shockingly discover the new lending policy of her school library, all books featuring queer characters now have a warning sticker on the cover and can only be taken out by students whose parents have given written consent. As an ex-teacher I can say that this sadly is quite possibly the reality for some students, when faced with complaints some schools take extreme measures to appease the parents, usually to the detriment of their own students. Obviously as a queer teen herself, Olivia takes great offense at the new measures making it difficult or even impossible for students to read books featuring characters like herself and her girlfriend Cassie, she decides to take action by forming a secret rebellion!

Read with Pride introduces us to many more new characters, most of them queer who join Olivia’s secret rebellion. I loved how Olivia created a safe space for LGBTQ+ teens to speak freely about how they were feeling. The characters shared their experiences, from being openly LGBTQ+ to keeping everything under wraps for fear of homophobic parents finding out. It’s important to acknowledge that for some coming out isn’t always safe and might have to wait until they’ve moved out, and Read with Pride definitely did that. The inclusivity of this novel is educational for both queer and straight teenagers, I really hope young adults who might be struggling to understand their sexuality will read this novel and realise that the way they feel is valid and okay. I hope that they might relate to a character or be inspired to search for deeper meanings to some of the terms used.

Another aspect that Read with Pride explores is the immense pressure school students put themselves under and the added (not always intentional) pressures put on by friends, family and school. Olivia really struggles with the workload she has taken on, from campaigning with the Read with Pride club, to baking a cake for a friends birthday, never mind all the homework that’s piling up in her final school year. I find that not enough YA novels discuss the pressures of school and how this can ultimately build up and up until teenagers burn out, as a teen I felt as though I was failing while everyone else was thriving, so I very much appreciated reading about this in Read with Pride.

Read with Pride is honestly everything and more I was expecting from this UKYA novel, it’s fresh and fantastic! I can’t wait to see this book with it’s beautiful cover on the shelves of book shops and libraries tempting teenagers to pick it up and Read with Pride!

Throughout June, GeekMom will be celebrating Pride Month with lots of LGBTQ content. Follow the Pride Month tag to find all the content in one space and keep checking back for more throughout the month. Today’s book review is The Paper and Hearts Society: Read with Pride by Lucy Powrie.

Please note: This post contains affiliate links.

The second book of the Paper and Hearts Society series, Read with Pride sees protagonist Olivia starting out on the first day of her final year of secondary school. Olivia is an overachiever and this year she needs to juggle revision for her upcoming GCSE’s, spending time with her girlfriend Cassie, and hanging out with her friends in the Paper and Hearts Society, a group formed around a mutual love of books. That morning, however, she discovers that her school has instituted a draconian new library policy. After a complaint by a parent, all students need a signed permission slip to remove books from the library, and the slip has a second box that must be signed to allow books “featuring LGBTQ+ characters” to be withdrawn. Worse, books featuring LGBTQ relationships now have huge stickers on their covers with the word “WARNING” on them.

Olivia and her friends are horrified. They know the importance of reading about others who look and think like you and the school’s new policy will keep those books out of the hands of the kids who need them the most. Determined not to take this lying down, Olivia forms the Read with Pride activism group with other like-minded students at school and begins campaigning to rid the library of this new policy. But with a campaign group and a whole bunch of new friends to manage on top of everything else, Olivia soon begins to feel her internal pressure building to unbearable levels and something, somewhere is going to have to give.

Read with Pride was a surprisingly short read that I pretty much powered through in a single afternoon. Written by one of my favorite YouTubers – Lucy Powrie – it features many of my favorite YA story elements, nerdy, bookish teens, a sweet romance element, and young people fighting to change an unjust system imposed on them by adults. I also loved the message the book promoted about how vitally important it is that young people get to read about people who look, think, and feel the way they do. I know having access to more wide-ranging literature in my own teenage years would have helped me avoid a lot of unnecessary confusion and, as a result, we keep fiction featuring all sorts of characters and relationships freely accessible in our home.

While I loved the sections of the book that dealt with Olivia’s Read with Pride group and their attempts to force their school to examine its policy, those focused on the Paper and Hearts Society ended up feeling like a distraction from the main story. This is book two of a series and as I’m yet to read the first volume, perhaps I would have connected with those parts more if I had done? As it was, I mostly felt eager to move on to the next part of the book whenever I found myself reading a section where the group met to decorate bookmarks or have a Book Olympics.

As for the characters, I did find myself getting occasionally mixed up given how many of them there were by the end. Once you add together the members of the Paper and Hearts Society, Read with Pride group, and occasional others like Olivia’s younger sister, there were nearly a dozen teens to keep track of and I often got mixed up about who was who – even when reading nearly all the book in one day. With so many characters to follow, it was natural that the majority were rather two-dimensional, with only Olivia having a huge amount of character development. Of her friends, Ed was the one who leaped out as having a distinct personality, even more so that Olivia’s girlfriend Cassie who received surprisingly little page-time. I’d have loved to see more development for the Read with Pride members and I felt like the book could have benefitted from that extra length.

As it was, Read with Pride was a short and sweet book with a powerful message about the damage that prohibiting access to books can cause, and the lengths people will go to in order to regain that access. It’s a book I’d love to see parents, teachers, and librarians picking up in order to help them understand why they need to allow the young people in their care to have access to those books – honestly, it may be even more important for adults to read this than the young adults it was written for! I’ll be using the #ReadWithPride hashtag used here for all my Pride Month books this year so look out for it across our social channels over the coming weeks.

GeekMom received a copy of this book for review purposes.

I would like to thank netgalley and Hachette Children's Group for a free copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

I enjoyed the story of Olivia fighting injustice with a secret Pride reading club.

I also loved the representation of demisexuality as this is the only book I have read with the main character being demisexual. The first book in the series was the first time I came across any character who was demisexual and I was so happy about it.

However I'm not sure that the story of a queer immigrant of colour is a story that a white author should be telling.

I loved The Paper and Hearts Society, it was one of my favourite books of last year so I was incredibly excited for the sequel and it did not disappoint. I really love this world Lucy has created, mainly because the characters are so wonderful. I love every single one of the characters and they are all so well fleshed out. This book introduced a lot of new characters who I loved equally as much as the original gang. This book was great and the plot was just wonderful. Seeing young teenagers in literature fighting for something they believe in warmed my heart. I always felt like Lucy accurately portrays teenagers so well because they don't feel like caricatures. They're unique and so realistic to modern day teenagers. What I especially adored about this book was the conversation around burn out. Teens who are doing their GCSEs have a lot to deal with at that point and most YA contemporaries skip over the school aspects of teenagers which is so stupid. It's such a big portion of a teenager's life and I love when they're portrayed accurately. Lucy Powrie always manages to talk about difficult topics but still having wonderful and hilarious stories. Now I'm just waiting for Ed's story as he is my personal favourite character.....

A brilliant continuation of the 'Paper and Hearts Society' series. This book follows Olivia's story as she gets to grips with increasing school pressure, keeping up with her Book club and friends... After she finds out the school library are restricting all the books with LGBTQIA content, she is outraged. What starts as an idea soon forms a revolution! With all the plates spinning, Olivia soon finds she can't keep them all up in the air, and everything is at risk of coming crashing down. This series is a great introduction to contemporary YA for 11+ and it covers so many issues that should be represented in books, whilst addressing why books are so important for our understanding.

I really enjoyed Lucy's first book- The Paper & Hearts Society and this is a great follow up to the first installment, they're a fab little group of characters!
The only (very minor) negative I have at all is the repeated naming of current authors and book titles as i fear they're almost freezing the book in time.