Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by The Broke and the Bookish that other bloggers are welcome to join in, to create Top Ten lists on varying topics. This week it’s Top Ten Books We Want To Read To Get Us In The Halloween Spirit.

Paein

 

1 The Witch’s Kiss

by Katharine & Elizabeth Corr

Sixteeen-year-old Meredith is fed-up with her feuding family and feeling invisible at school – not to mention the witch magic that shoots out of her fingernails when she’s stressed. Then sweet, sensitive Jack comes into her life and she falls for him hard. The only problem is that he is periodically possessed by a destructive centuries-old curse. Meredith has lost her heart, but will she also lose her life? Or in true fairytale tradition, can true love’s kiss save the day?

It looks Halloweeny, though it doesn’t sound like it’d be so spooky. It’s about witches though and Halloween is a big time for them, whether they’re being miss-represented or actually.

2 Frozen Charlotte

by Alex Bell

We’re waiting for you to come and play. Dunvegan School for Girls has been closed for many years. Converted into a family home, the teachers and students are long gone. But they left something behind…Sophie arrives at the old schoolhouse to spend the summer with her cousins. Brooding Cameron with his scarred hand, strange Lilias with a fear of bones and Piper, who seems just a bit too good to be true. And then there’s her other cousin. The girl with a room full of antique dolls. The girl that shouldn’t be there. The girl that died.

Ms4Tune read this a few years back and told me to get it, so I did! I was hoping to read it this Halloween to be honest, but it’s been a bad month…

3 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

by Seth Grahame-Smith, Jane Austen

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.” So begins Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a bold reimagining of Jane Austen’s classic novel. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life. Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the bloodsoaked battlefield. Complete with romance, heartbreak, swordfights, cannibalism, and thousands of rotting corpses, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is an audacious retelling of English literature’s most enduring novel.

I just need to read this. I want to read it so badly! I’m hoping to read it this week after the Grisha trilogy, or maybe between them as I only currently own book 1 and as per my new rules I can’t order the rest till I’ve read it! haha.
But it’s certainly overly relevant. Zombies and bad situations and death and stuff.

4 A Discovery of Witches

by Deborah Harkness

A world of witches, daemons and vampires. A manuscript which holds the secrets of their past and the key to their future. Diana and Matthew – the forbidden love at the heart of it.
When historian Diana Bishop opens an alchemical manuscript in the Bodleian Library, it’s an unwelcome intrusion of magic into her carefully ordered life. Though Diana is a witch of impeccable lineage, the violent death of her parents while she was still a child convinced her that human fear is more potent than any witchcraft. Now Diana has unwittingly exposed herself to a world she’s kept at bay for years; one of powerful witches, creative, destructive daemons and long-lived vampires. Sensing the significance of Diana’s discovery, the creatures gather in Oxford, among them the enigmatic Matthew Clairmont, a vampire genticist. Diana is inexplicably drawn to Matthew and, in a shadowy world of half-truths and old enmities, ties herself to him without fully understanding the ancient line they are crossing. As they begin to unlock the secrets of the manuscript and their feelings for each other deepen, so the fragile balance of peace unravels…

Witches! Just because it’s witches really and I’ve had it some time. There’s other things in this too that make it sound like it might be more than loosely Halloweeny. Vampires and Daemons etc

5 Cooking with Bones

by Jess Richards

My sister is a formwanderer: she is a mirror of want. Each person she meets sees what they want, when they look at her. And she changes for each pair of eyes.
Two sisters, fleeing the city of Paradon, find their way to a village by the sea, where Old Kelp’s cottage – and her recipe book – await them.
Amber feels this is where she finally belongs, baking honey cakes each night for the villagers to collect in the morning, using a set of bone spoons that allow her to add truth, lust and confusion to her pies and puddings.
Her little sister Maya is a formwanderer, engineered to reflect the wants of others. All her life she has been like a twin to Amber, but now Amber has changed her mind, and wants Maya to learn how to be herself.
Kip, a child growing up amongst the songs and stories of the village, delivers Amber’s ingredients. When an act of terrible violence stirs and sets free the secrets of a generation, only one of these three can reveal the truth…

Mainly, the title sounds 110% Halloween. But also the storyline. I feel sorry for the sister, but this act of violence is what’s really going to kick everything off.

…

Ms4Tune

6 Passage

by Justin Cronin

Deep in the jungles of eastern Colombia, Professor Jonas Lear has finally found what he’s been searching for – and wishes to God he hadn’t.

In Memphis, Tennessee, a six-year-old girl called Amy is left at the convent of the Sisters of Mercy and wonders why her mother has abandoned her.

In a maximum security jail in Nevada a convicted murderer called Giles Babcock has the same strange nightmare, over and over again, while he waits for a lethal injection.

In a remote community in the California mountains, a young man called Peter waits for his beloved brother to return home – so he can kill him.

Bound together in ways they cannot comprehend, for each of them a door is about to open into a future they could not have imagined. And a journey is about to begin. An epic journey that will take them through a world transformed by man’s darkest dreams, to the very heart of what it means to be human.

And beyond.

Something about an apocalyptic storyline always gets my heart raising and thinking of crazy things – the perfect blend for Halloween. I keep meaning to read this but it’s such a huge book I’m kind of scared that I’ll never finish it and be scared forever!

7 Skin Hunger

by Kathleen Duey

Sadima lives in a world where magic has been banned, leaving poor villagers prey to fakes and charlatans. A magician stole her family’s few valuables and left Sadima’s mother to die on the day Sadima was born. But vestiges of magic are hidden in old rhymes and hearth tales and in people like Sadima, who conceals her silent communication with animals for fear of rejection and ridicule. When rumors of her gift reach Somiss, a young nobleman obsessed with restoring magic, he sends Franklin, his lifelong servant, to find her. Sadima’s joy at sharing her secret becomes love for the man she shares it with. But Franklin’s irrevocable bond to the brilliant and dangerous Somiss traps her, too, and she faces a heartbreaking decision. Centuries later magic has been restored, but it is available only to the wealthy and is strictly controlled by wizards within a sequestered academy of magic. Hahp, the expendable second son of a rich merchant, is forced into the academy and finds himself paired with Gerrard, a peasant boy inexplicably admitted with nine sons of privilege and wealth. Only one of the ten students will graduate — and the first academic requirement is survival. Sadima’s and Hahp’s worlds are separated by generations, but their lives are connected in surprising and powerful ways in this brilliant first book of Kathleen Duey’s dark, complex, and completely compelling trilogy.

More the name and the cover than anything else. Skin Hunger? Come on that’s creepy! I read somewhere that this is kind of a darker version of Harry Potter which excites me greatly. Hopefully I’ll read this sometime as I currently own books 1 and 2.

8 Cuckoo Song

by Frances Hardinge

The first things to shift were the doll’s eyes, the beautiful grey-green glass eyes. Slowly they swivelled, until their gaze was resting on Triss’s face. Then the tiny mouth moved, opened to speak.

‘What are you doing here?’ It was uttered in tones of outrage and surprise, and in a voice as cold and musical as the clinking of cups. ‘Who do you think you are? This is my family.’

When Triss wakes up after an accident, she knows that something is very wrong. She is insatiably hungry; her sister seems scared of her and her parents whisper behind closed doors. She looks through her diary to try to remember, but the pages have been ripped out.

Soon Triss discovers that what happened to her is more strange and terrible than she could ever have imagined, and that she is quite literally not herself. In a quest find the truth she must travel into the terrifying Underbelly of the city to meet a twisted architect who has dark designs on her family – before it’s too late…

I loved Frances Hardinge’s The Lie Tree, it was the perfect Halloween read last year and since then I’ve been trying to get my hands on as many of her books as possible. This one has to be up next. It has loads of great and creepy covers but I own that one so I thought I’d add it. Great isn’t it?

9 Between the Devil and The Deep Blue Sea

by April Genevieve Tucolke

You stop fearing the devil when you’re holding his hand…

Nothing much exciting rolls through Violet White’s sleepy, seaside town… until River West comes along. River rents the guest house behind Violet’s crumbling estate, and as eerie, grim things start to happen, Violet begins to wonder about the boy living in her backyard.

Is River just a crooked-smiling liar with pretty eyes and a mysterious past? Or could he be something more?

Violet’s grandmother always warned her about the Devil, but she never said he could be a dark-haired boy who takes naps in the sun, who likes coffee, who kisses you in a cemetery… who makes you want to kiss back.

Violet’s already so knee-deep in love, she can’t see straight. And that’s just how River likes it.

Not entirely sure what to expect from this one but it sounds kind of creepy and mentions the Devil and as it’s been on my TBR list forever I thought I’d add it to this list. Have you read it? What do you think?

10 This is Not a Test

by Courtney Summers

It’s the end of the world. Six students have taken cover in Cortege High but shelter is little comfort when the dead outside won’t stop pounding on the doors. One bite is all it takes to kill a person and bring them back as a monstrous version of their former self. To Sloane Price, that doesn’t sound so bad. Six months ago, her world collapsed and since then, she’s failed to find a reason to keep going. Now seems like the perfect time to give up. As Sloane eagerly waits for the barricades to fall, she’s forced to witness the apocalypse through the eyes of five people who actually want to live. But as the days crawl by, the motivations for survival change in startling ways and soon the group’s fate is determined less and less by what’s happening outside and more and more by the unpredictable and violent bids for life—and death—inside. When everything is gone, what do you hold on to?

End of the world, Life or Death, Survival! What more could you want from a Halloween book? Oh yes blood on the cover… ah got that too, GREAT!