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Joanne Owen - Editorial Expert

Author, publishing expert and LoveReading’s YA Lead Reviewer

Joanne Owen is a writer, reviewer and workshop presenter whose lifelong love of books began when she was growing up in Pembrokeshire, Wales. An early passion for culture, story and folklore led her to read archaeology and anthropology at St John’s, Cambridge, after which she led the UK children’s book team for a major international retailer, going on to market books for Bloomsbury, Macmillan, Walker Books, Nosy Crow and Rough Guides. She now divides her time between writing, travel writing, reviewing and hosting writing workshops.

Joanne is the author of several books for children and young adults, among them the Martha Mayhem series, the Carnegie Medal-nominated Puppet Master, and You Can Write Awesome Stories, a how-to guide to creative writing. She’s also worked on a major community story project for the National Literacy Trust (Story Quest), and a number of travel guides, including The Rough Guide to Responsible Wales and guidebooks to the Caribbean region. In additional, she’s an occasional chair of LoveReading LitFest events, and judge for the 2023 Branford Boase Award.

Reading guides Joanne Owen helps choose

Latest Features By Joanne Owen

Witchy words and potent potion poems - writing activities and book recommendations inspired by witches.

How to craft truly terrifying tales - three fearsome tips and techniques for writing spooky stories this Halloween (and through the year).

Word-themed walks on the wild side - taking creative inspiration from enjoying autumn in the great outdoors.

Get Creative and Create Powerful Poems to Cheer your Friends and Family

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Latest Reviews By Joanne Owen

All hands are on deck at the ghost-infested Tartarus Hotel in Ghouls Just Wanna Have Fun, second book in Catherine Doyle's Scare B'n'B series. Not only is this the family’s first Christmas season at the hotel, but their first wedding booking is also on the horizon. Given that the happy couple are none other than a celebrity pop star and the wealthy heir to a confectionary empire, the occasion is set to be a “glitzy, over-the-top spectacle to rival the fanciest of royal weddings”. What could possibly go ... View Full Review

Available from Amazon Books2Read Link Fast-paced and exuberantly fantastical, Sharique Zea’s Lionborn and the Secret of Dark Rider sees Fionn confront greater dangers, decisions and challenges than he endured in the first book in the Lionborn series. Existing almost in limbo between London and the magical realm of Arborea, his hero’s journey from insecurity to tentatively finding a sense of self-confidence is nothing but gripping and emotionally resonant. Life in Crestview Academy feels at once relatably ordinary and extraordinary as Fionn and his friends Ella and Tiny eat lunch while discussing a monster, Marrok, who &... View Full Review

Part of the Fear File series (think Goosebumps meets The X Files, thanks to its fascinating, well-designed DARKIVE database documents), Christopher Edge’s A Trick of the Light is perfectly pitched for 9+ year-olds who adore scary stories, spooky movies and ghoulish games, and paranormal enthusiasts. Ten-year-old Hazel isn’t having the best time of it on a residential school trip. Ostensibly an opportunity for pupils to “break down barriers and forge new friendships”, Hazel overhears unpleasant Imogen instructing her clique to ostracise her: "We ghost her....Let's all pretend that she doesn’... View Full Review

“The Long Night begins with flesh and ends with blood, the Sisters liked to say, as if their prose rendered the occasion mysterious and beautiful”. But the way Bryn sees it, once the Trial of the Long Night was underway, “I’d be naked before lunch, and dead by dawn”. Such is the arresting opening of M.J. Hastings’ Firstborn, and such is the fiery, forthright nature of its protagonist, who finds herself facing the ultimate conflict between remaining loyal to country or family, and between saving herself or her siblings. &... View Full Review

Part of a superb series, David Long’s What It Was Like to Be...a Norman deploys publisher Barrington Stoke’s characteristic dyslexia friendly-format and accessible style as it shares engaging detail on who the Normans were, how they came to enhance their hold, and how they left their mark. After handy visual profiles of key players from both sides of the Channel, Long launches into a lucid explanation of who the Normans were, relating their origins as formidable Viking “pirates and ferocious warriors” who “would arrive by sea to rob, ... View Full Review

Frank, funny and authentic, Lucy Cuthew’s Filthy seems set to fulfil the author’s hope that “this story makes young people feel seen and feel less shame, and opens the door for more necessary conversations”. Written in verse, and centred on Joss, to whom it feels like everyone and everything, including the animals in the nature documentaries she watches with her dad (cringe!), are having sex except her, it’s an exceptional book for fans of edgy, authentic, funny contemporary YA. Deeply affected by being called a vanilla prude by ... View Full Review

Glowing with lunar loveliness in the form of an aptly-named heroine, and an aptly-named dragon called Spark, Liz Flanagan’s The Moonlight Dragon is perfectly pitched with just the right amount of peril for its intended 8+-year-old audience. Wonderfully atmospheric, we first meet Luna as the full moon rises above a hill, where a stone circle stood “like a ring of giants turned to rock”. Within the circle, longing for her missing mother to return, as she does every month, Luna feels safe. And then she spies the impossible: a beautiful dragon diverting a ... View Full Review

Sizzling with questions of trust and lust through a thrusting plot that fans of gothic romantasy are sure to binge on, Charlotte B. Plumb’s Reap and Sow debut is atmospheric and arresting from the off. Readers are immediately plunged into Blackbridge, where Eda and her brothers manage the family business, Shaws’ Antiques and Curiosities. But this is no ordinary curiosity shop: “Whenever the shop bell chimed, Eda liked to guess: had they come to trade with their coin or their soul?” The reason for the siblings’ involvement in the cloak-and-dagger trade of souls is ... View Full Review

The Hexton Chronicles: The Trouble with Magic

Deftly-paced and dancing with emotional depth through its first-person narrative, The Trouble With Magic, first book in Amy Wilson’s The Hexton Chronicles, opens with Fray fleetingly living a “nice safe life in Brigstone” when the pull of his Hexton birthplace and tangible magic of his grandfather’s Croxometer sees him cross the bridge to Hexton, armed with a letter of instructions (and warnings) from Old Skeg. On arrival, the sense of mystery heightens. Hexton is, after all, where they know how to grow magic “to great, thundering resonance&... View Full Review

Companion to Godfather Death, Sally Nicholls’ Three Brides for the Devil is a beautifully-told, strikingly-illustrated, fabulously-resonant folktale. Its compelling opening sets a cunning, sharp-edged tone: “There are fairy tales where a man marries a proud or shrewish woman and turns her into an obedient wife. I hear even Mr Shakespeare wrote a tale like that once. There are other tales where a woman opens a forbidden door, and terrible things happen to her. This story is a little different”. And then comes the Devil, riding into town disguised as a handsome man “... View Full Review

First in a series, Mìriam Bonastre Tur’s Marionetta is a gloriously gothic graphic novel that sets a suspenseful mood from the get-go, when Julia is asked “what have you done? Did you...did you just kill him?” before the action swiftly shifts to months earlier when Julia and her best friend Kamille board a busy bus, and Kamille notices that the only empty seat is beside “one of those ah’kon people”, a violet-eyed man with a badge on his forehead. When it turns out that the bus ... View Full Review

In Our Strange Duet, Erin A. Craig has reimagined Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera as a lushly romantic, tormented love story that gives greater agency to young soprano, Christine Daaé. Playing out on the stage of the glamorous Parisian Opéra Populaire, it tells a story that feels at once rooted in a very specific context, and timeless in its evocation of dramatic matters of the heart. The drama begins in the dressing room of the Parisian Opéra Populaire, where we meet dancer Christine, and discover how she was ... View Full Review