Geezer Girls

TOP 5 WEDNESDAY: Books You Want to See as TV Shows

Top 5 Wednesday is a great feature created by GingerReadsLainey and hosted by ThoughtsonTomes. To find out more about Top 5 Wednesday and the upcoming topics, check out its Goodreads page. This week, in honour of autumn TV it’s all about those books we’d love to see adapted for TV. Here’s the five books I think would make great TV shows.

fiveghosts vol1Five Ghosts by Frank J. Barbiere and Chris Mooneyham
This is a comic series about an adventurer kind of like Indiana Jones but he has this stone embedded in his chest which grants him the powers of five ghosts, or rather the ghosts take over when he needs it most. It’s very pulp-fictiony and would make a great adventure TV show because it’s full of supernatural elements, archaeology and bad guys.

 

sabriel1Sabriel by Garth Nix
The Old Kingdom series would make such a good TV series! It’s all about a young girl who inherits her father’s legacy of sending the dead back where they came from. It’s magical and creepy and set in a different world to ours. It’s a rich world so having it as a TV show would be a lot better than a film.

 

the passage elenasquareeyesThe Passage by Justin Cronin
This would be a great TV Show for fans of The Walking Dead and The Strain. Most of the story is set in a post-apocalyptic future where a disease has pretty much wiped out everyone and those who are left have to struggle to survive against creatures that are pretty much vampires. The interesting thing about The Passage is that because it’s set a good 100 years after the breakout of the virus, the characters don’t know what life was like before, there’s no nostalgia just a sense of getting on with life the best they can.

emancipatedEmancipated by M.G. Reyes
This would be a show would be full of the usual high school tropes because it’s a bunch of teenagers living together but also have an air of mystery as to why some of them have been emancipated and there’d be secrets and lies to uncover.

 

FullSizeRender (70)Geezer Girls by Dreda Say Mitchell
A crime TV show about some women who were once under the control of a London gangster but now try to live their own lives until that gangster comes back onto the scene? Sign me up! It’s good to see women be bad or morally ambiguous, who will do bad things to protect those they care about plus there’s the family of choice trope.

 

What books would you want to see adapted for TV?

REVIEW: Geezer Girls by Dreda Say Mitchell

FullSizeRender (70)Jade, Amber, Ruby and Opal are all fifteen and scared. They’re forced to smuggle drugs and guns for the man they call “the Geezer” and it isn’t till a shocking event reveals to them what’s really going on that they can make their escape. Now ten years on they’ve all made a life for themselves. Jade, now going by the name Jackie, is about to get married and her three best friends are her maids of honour. But then the Geezer arrives back into their lives and either he’ll kill them or they have to do one last job for him. Jackie and the girls must decide if they can trust him and if they can risk their new lives for this job.

I found Geezer Girls a bit hard to get into to start with. I think it’s because thanks to the blurb, you know the girls get away from the Geezer so it’s the story where they’re older that I was more interested in. Also I found it frustrating as Geezer Girls is one of those books where the reader knows more than the characters (at least during the first section) so it’s frustrating when they trust someone who you know is the bad guy.

All the girls were different and each had their strengths and weaknesses and they all balanced each other out very well. It was great to read a book that’s essentially about female friendships and found families. My favourite out of the four was Opal, she had been through terrible things but still managed to find love and friendship.

There’s heists and deception, violence and surprises in Geezer Girls. I loved to see how the girls worked together to protect each other and to plan various schemes. There were some great secondary characters too and I liked looking into the world of gangs and crime.

If you like crime thrillers with great female characters then you should check out Geezer Girls. It is the first part in a series but luckily it doesn’t end on a cliff-hanger (I thought it would) so I will probably be checking out the other books in due course. 4/5.

W is for: World Book Night 2014

BlwOJvMIEAA7-RXWorld Book Night is an international event held on 23rd April. I heard about it this time, last year while watching a video by booktuber booksandquills. Now I’d heard of World Book Day and remember the £1 books that we could get in school with our voucher when I was a child but never heard of World Book Night. So, World Book Night is when a volunteer is given 18 copies of a book and then must do their best to hand them out to people who don’t normally read. You may leave the books in places if you like to too to see if passers-by pick it up.

In about November last year I applied to be a volunteer and found out I was successful in late February. I was to give away copies of Geezer Girls by Dreda Say Mitchell. It’s a book that I haven’t read but I loved the sound of it from the synopsis so was looking forward to handing it out around my University and the surrounding area.

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