Saturday 12 April 2014

Keep the Faith, Candy Harper


Pages: 288
Publisher: S&S
Release Date: 24th April 2014
Edition: e-proof, review copy

Other Titles by this Author: Have a Little Faith, The Disappeared (as CJ Harper)

Get ready for boy dilemmas, friendship dramas and madcap grannies – Faith is back!

Will Faith make her mind up between the gorgeous Finn and the lovely Ethan and manage to get herself a real-life boyfriend?

Will Mrs Cox finally get off her case and recognise Faith’s true genius?

Will Faith’s family learn how to be normal, non-embarrassing people?

Will Faith and her BFF’s beat the world record for the number of biscuits eaten in a minute?

All these questions and more will be answered in the hilarious next instalment of this brilliant new series from Candy Harper.

Have a Little Faith was one of my favourite books last year, and one of the funniest I’ve read in a long time so Keep the Faith had a lot to live up to. Luckily, I loved it just as much as the first instalment.

I have to admit that Faith would drive me crazy if I knew her in person. She’d be a riot to have in class; she’d make everything hilarious, but she really would drive me mad. But she’s a bloody brilliant protagonist! Faith’s sass, humour, self-importance and endless harassment of her friends really do remind me of Georgia Nicolson and you should all know by now how much I love Georgia. Her inability to see Finn’s blah-ness and Ethan’s complete awesome-ness was rather infuriating though. It was so obvious! I did love how she gradually realised what she wanted and what she needed weren’t necessarily the same thing or the same person.

One of my favourite things about this series is the friendship between Faith and her friends. The fierceness, loyalty and genuine affection between Faith, Megs, Lily and Angharad that is hidden underneath the teasing, joking, whacking each over the head and the hanging the little ones of stairwells is awesome. I really enjoyed it being such a focus of the novel as contemporary YA usually is overrun with the romance rather than the friendships; it was refreshing.

Actually, all of the relationships in the novel were realistic and touching and involving. Especially, the connection Faith had with her parents. They weren’t ignored or dead or terrible parents. Both her mum and dad were present throughout the novel and had full, three-dimensional personalities and I loved them. Having Faith as a child must have been...challenging, but I loved that I could see similarities in them. Them, with Faith’s little brother Sam, felt like a proper family. The brother/sister relationship between Faith and Sam was hilarious; her incessant practical jokes and teasing was hilarious, though I did feel a tad sorry for the poor boy!

Keep the Faith is a wonderful portrayal of friendship, navigating your way around boys and finding your feet and I can’t wait to read more about Faith, Megs, Lily and Angharad in the next instalment!

Thanks to NetGalley and S&S for this!

Sophie

2 comments:

  1. Oh yes girl! I recently read Have a Little Faith and loved every moment of it, instantly one of my favourites of this year, and I have this ARC too, so I'm so excited to get to it. She best up with Ethan or I'm going to find Harper and shoot her down, he's just so damn adorable and sweet and gah! So glad you enjoyed it Sophie! :D

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  2. Glad you enjoyed this one - brilliant series!

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