Picture of author.

Sally Nicholls

Author of Ways To Live Forever

27+ Works 1,335 Members 83 Reviews

About the Author

Includes the names: Sally Nicholls, Sally Nichills

Image credit: Photo by Tom Harris, 2006.

Series

Works by Sally Nicholls

Ways To Live Forever (2008) 694 copies
Things a Bright Girl Can Do (2017) 135 copies
Season of Secrets (2009) 127 copies
The Button Book (2019) 79 copies
All Fall Down (2012) 75 copies
The Silent Stars Go By (2020) 41 copies
An Island of Our Own (2015) 40 copies
Yours from the Tower (2023) 22 copies
Close Your Pretty Eyes (2013) 21 copies
Shadow Girl (2014) 19 copies
Billy Button Telegram Boy (2016) 13 copies
A Lily, A Rose (2013) 10 copies
A Chase in Time (2018) 10 copies
All About Ella (2017) 7 copies
Who Makes a Forest? (2020) 7 copies

Associated Works

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Reviews

This lovely epistolary novel centers on three young women in Great Britain during the later Victorian era. Each young woman comes from a different background: Sophia is having her first Season in London thanks to wealthy relatives, Polly works at an orphanage, and Tirzah is forced to live with her grandmother in Scotland as her companion. They have been friends since their time at boarding school, now as young adults they rely on their friendships even more.
Their round-robin style letters, written to two and answered the same way, are lively and interesting, and a commentary on the lives of women and the many aspects of life that they were and were not allowed to do in the late nineteenth century.
Tirzah is the most immature of the three and the most dramatic in her letters, though the reader cannot blame her for her miserable lifestyle. Why is her grandmother so cold and demanding? Polly loves working at the orphanage and is drawn to three little boys who were left by their stepmother when their father was killed in India, and Sophia is trying to make a good match to help support her family.
Along with their notes, other letter writers appear who are central to the characters and are a welcome addition to the story. They help round out the story and fulfill the plot nicely.
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BiblioQueen | 1 other review | Jan 29, 2024 |
Starting the year by catching up with a long-overdue review of this lovely little seasonal book. I read this just before Christmas in an attempt to finally read a book in the season it's set in and it definitely helped that I was in the holiday mood already when reading this!

Christmas historical fiction is not one I frequently read, so I was very curious about it as I was going into this book. I enjoyed the setting in Christmas 1919, the first after the end of the First World War, and I felt like the special occasion and the contrasting feelings of the characters were very well captured. I also liked the small English village setting, where everyone knows one another and there is a real sense of community - with all its challenges as well as the joys this can bring.

Margot was an interesting main character. She is guarding a heavy secret and has had to deal with a lot of pain, and I liked how tactfully some of the heavier themes were tackled (e.g. teenage pregnancy and emotional trauma/PTSD). Her relationships with her family and her presumed-dead-now-returned ex-fiancé are complicated and very realistic. She was certainly good to get to know, even though I found her to be extremely frustrating at times, though I won't go into more detail to avoid potential spoilers. The rest of the characters also remained very surface-level and lacked any significant depth, and that meant I wasn't very sold on the romance aspect of this either.

This was an issue I had with most of the book actually. The way it's structured makes it feel more like a connection of journal entries of episodes rather than a single story flowing smoothly, which isn't necessarily a bad thing in itself, but ended up making this feel rather disjointed to me. It also felt like the book was dragging in quite a few places, which for a story this short is problematic.

Overall, this is a cute Christmas story. It's not bad but remains a bit too superficial for my liking even though this will probably not be an issue for younger readers.


I received an e-arc of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. This did not affect my opinion of the book in any way.
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bookforthought | 3 other reviews | Nov 7, 2023 |
I hate this book the first time I read it. But it has improved upon reading. Granted, parents will hate the "raspberry" button.

I think you could do this book in a multitude of ways--shapes, colors, etc.
 
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msgabbythelibrarian | 13 other reviews | Jun 11, 2023 |
Three orphans quest for buried treasure in this well-crafted quick-to-read story which is sad and heartwarming in turns.

This book feels like a cross between Jaqueline Wilson and Enid Blyton. There is a big dollop of ‘realistic kids misery lit’ like not being able to afford rent and vet’s bills, entwined with ‘we have a photograph of a place where Treasure is buried, can we find it?’

I bought it because I was going to Orkney on holiday. There’s only a short chunk at the end where they are on Orkney, but I thought it did capture the island well, although more from the perspective of ‘what is it like to be a tourist’ which I did kind of know already. It was fun to recognise all the places though!

I guess it is hard to write a book where children have adventures and have the main adults in the children’s lives be likeable and competent, but they really did draw the short straw with their family! A literally paranoid Aunt who causes most of the plot by hiding all the money in the first place (and who has done a staunch ‘no, I don’t help people with money, people must help themselves’ when her nephews and niece are orphaned, despite being A Fabulously Wealthy Inventor), her husband who literally steals the heroes’ inheritance, and their daughter, who is so wrapped up with raising her own perfect children at private school she turns a complete blind eye to their cousins. It felt realistic though, everyone wrapped up in their own problems and scared to start helping in case it was a bottomless hole.

The book is trying quite hard to be modern and realistic, and broadly manages it well. There were a few things that didn’t feel like they would quite work (the problem of getting back from Mainland Orkney to Aberdeen is pretty much elided with ‘a farmer has a boat on Papa Westray’ and they manage to book a car on the ferry to Orkney with less than a day’s notice in Summer with limited budget!) but nothing too outrageous.

It is doing the ‘use books for children to recommend other famous books to children’ thing, there is a liberal scattering of references to books I like, including Dorothy L Sayers, the Family at One End Street, and the title is a Donne reference. It is from the time when we all thought Potter was great too.

An enjoyable read with a very likeable plucky first person narrator.
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½
 
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atreic | May 15, 2023 |

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Works
27
Also by
3
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1,335
Popularity
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Rating
4.1
Reviews
83
ISBNs
151
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15

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