Booktube Rereadathon February Edition!

The Princess Plot by Kirsten Boie was a core book of my tweenage years, I loved this book so much with its contemporary disguise masking a deeper and more poignant story so I was happy to pick this book for the “last read at least 10 years ago” prompt for February.

This book follows Jenna who sneakily auditions for a role in a movie despite her strict mother not wanting her to go. She gets the part! And she’s flown off to Scandia to meet the director of the film. But everything is not as it seems. This is such a fun book and I honestly didn’t expect so much from it.

What I mean by that is that I remembered the plot, but I didn’t expect Boie to so clearly make points about politics, classism, racism and to explain terrorist groups so well. She points out things which are present in our own societies (Boie is German but as a Brit, everything registered too) and utilises the made up country of Scandia to demonstrate the issues here without angering any one country.

That’s another point too, I had never known that this was a translated work! A surprising number of my childhood reads were translated from other languages and I love it!

Back to the review 😂

This is the first book in a duology, however, it stands on its own really well too. I think it’s a great book to give a tween/teen and a fun read as an adult too! Of course the nostalgia makes me biased, but I also genuinely believe that this is a great MG/YA book (it’s one of those rare books that targeted at the younger end of YA).

Have you read this book before? Did you know it was translated? Let me know!

 

Do YOU ReRead??

I did! And then I didn’t… and now I do again! Okay let me explain haha

When I was a kid I’d re-read books all the time, I didn’t have access to the shops without my parents (or the money to buy books anyways) so once I had finished what was on my shelves I had no other option than to read what I’d already read until the next time I got any books or got to go to the library. Now don’t get me wrong, my parents bought me so many books and we’d visit the library fairly often, I just read like a mad child and got through a ridiculous number of books!

Theeeeeen education happened. I live in the UK but I’m sure this is something that you guys from all around the world can relate to. I also had my various chronic illnesses kick in at this point, including migraines, and I just didn’t have the time or the energy to pick up books and read for pleasure with everything else I had to do. I still loved books though, which I showed by taking books with me to Uni, despite not having read in 3 years.

And then I did it, I picked up a book. I had to force my way through it. It wasn’t as easy as it used to be when I was a kid, it didn’t flow as naturally. But I did it. And that was it. That year I started reading and never stopped! I found this community and a couple years later I joined in as an active participant! But I wasn’t picking up my old books, I wasn’t re-reading at all. Now that I wasn’t living at home and I had some savings/birthday money I could bring books home without any issue and having found the Bookternet I had too many books that I now wanted to read to be able to justify the time spent on re-reading old books. It felt like it would be a “waste of time”. Which is sad.

That’s why I decided to do Alex and Abi’s Booktube ReReadaThon. To give myself accountability and to “justify” spending my time on it! I actually intended to do this in 2019, but that really just did not happen for a massive variety of reasons and so I abandoned it. But this year is my year! I have already read my re-read for January, the challenge was to reread a translated work so I went with Heidi, a book I hadn’t read since childhood!

I’ll be putting up a full review soon, but suffice to say that I really enjoyed it. It’s a lovely, simple and inspiring story that I really enjoyed diving back into and it reminded me that I really do love re-reading books. Which is why so many of the books on my shelves have cracked spines from reading them again and again and again as a child!

I’m really excited to carry on with this re-reading throughout the year! I’ve linked the challenges here and also Alex’s video and Abi’s video announcing the challenge for the year so that you guys can go and check it out!

Do you like re-reading books? Let me know down below and explain why!!