All Our Hidden Gifts

By Author / Illustrator

Caroline O'Donoghue

Genre

Fantasy

Age range(s)

14+

Publisher

Walker Books Ltd

ISBN

9781406393095

Format

Paperback / softback

Published

27-05-2021

Synopsis

A dark and supernatural contemporary teen debut by multi-talented author and journalist Caroline O'Donoghue.

Maeve Chambers doesn't have much going for her. Not only does she feel like the sole idiot in a family of geniuses, she managed to drive away her best friend Lily a year ago. But when she finds a pack of dusty old tarot cards at school, and begins to give scarily accurate readings to the girls in her class, she realizes she's found her gift at last. Things are looking up - until she discovers a strange card in the deck that definitely shouldn't be there. And two days after she convinces her ex-best friend to have a reading, Lily disappears.

Can Maeve, her new friend Fiona and Lily's brother Roe find her? And will Maeve's new gift be enough to bring Lily back, before she's gone for good?

"So gripping, so intriguing, so layered - All Our Hidden Gifts feels like a book that should have always existed." Kiran Millwood Hargrave. "Grim, gripping and gorgeous. I devoured it." Deirdre Sullivan

Sequel: The Gifts That Bind Us

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Reviews

We have all watched a creepy film where a group of teenagers pick up the tarot cards/quija board and screamed at the TV 'Don’t do it!' This is exactly what you will be doing as the get deeper into this debut YA novel... Maeve is a 16-year-old girl who lives in Ireland and due to her behaviour, attends a Catholic school, but she still manages to get into trouble. This behaviour gets her sent to the 'chokey' where she finds a set of tarot cards and discovers that she knows how to read them. She becomes the popular girl, makes friends with the 'it' girl in the school, Fiona, due to the readings she gives. However, she becomes easily manipulated into giving a reading to her ex best friend, Lily, which ends badly. Then the worst happens; Lily doesn't come to school the next day...she has disappeared!

All Our Hidden Gifts is a story about finding yourself / coming of age with a difference. The teenagers that get together have one cause, to find Lily, but that journey makes them question their own emotions and what they truly think of themselves. The book has 400 pages that are really only suitable for the 14+ readers and older book clubs due to the issues raised between its pages. Amongst these are bullying, racism, discrimination, witchcraft and LGBTQ issues that some teenagers can relate to.

The author has delivered a well written plot with interesting characters, which moves along at a nice pace that will keep any reader gripped until the last page, as it did me. I really enjoyed this supernatural, at times creepy coming of age story, with an ending that leaves you wanting the next book in your hands, which I'm lucky to have, so now I can carry on reading and see where All Our Hidden Gifts lead me!

400 pages / Reviewed by Linda Brown, school librarian