Are We All Lemmings And Snowflakes? By Holly Bourne

In this book we meet Olive, she suffers bouts of hyper activity when she can run all the time, desire and crave sudden sex, have erratic thoughts and get by on no sleep at all until she crashes into the blackness and could sleep forever.

Olive doesn't know her mental health diagnosis but after getting hospitalised again, she winds up at a trial teen camp catering on helping mental illness.

There for four weeks, she meets, Lewis and Jamie two boys she becomes friendly with, has a breakthrough about prevention of mental illness and also spirals. We see through her photography and kindness project how passionate she can be about change and awareness of mental health as she begins a movement to raise awareness of helping mental health.

It was an eye opening idea about how teens could be treated for mental health conditions and also shows the extent of the severity of what they face can be like as we see how scary and daunting it was for Olive to face. It handles the subject sensitively and with care making it one of the best YA mental health reads I've discovered this far.

Lorali by Laura Dockrill

This book is about mermaid Lorali whom winds up on a beach in Hastings naked with legs after finding out from her mum Queen Keppel about her real father, leading her to reject the sea. She gets found by Rory whose supposed to be celebrating his birthday but instead sets about helping the girl he found and takes her to hide by his home.

His best mate Flynn's grandfather knows about mer folk and knew Lorali's heritage thanks to his love of antiques and history.

As the mer folk led by Queen Keppel send Opal to the human or walkers land to help campaign for the return of their princess, they tell the walkers of their existence shocking them especially when their children come at risk.

Then Lorali gets taken from Rory as his other best friend betrays him as he teams up with the pirates after Lorali. However, Lorali is taken by the Cavities and so the Cavities vs pirates fight ensues.

Overall I enjoyed the book.
Told from a split perspective of Lorali, Rory, the sea personified or another story character I really liked the idea of a mermaids story being told as a tapestry on their tails. I do however have a hard time getting into fantasy fiction books and did find it a hard slog to get through but from persevering, I feel it was worth it. I would have liked there to be a more developed base plot line about Lorali ending up on the beach and what she planned on doing though and I wouldn't think she'd be willing to wander off with any human the way her mer folk spoke of them, surely she would be felt more uneasy.

A sparkling tale of history and fantasy.