Crowvus Book Blog

  Our focus book this week is Taking Wing by Clemency Crow (Picture) Taking Wing is a gripping fantasy adventure, written for middle grade readers but enjoyed by adults too! Published in 2019, it was rejuvenated in 2025 when the sequel Doorway to the Sunset  was published. Humans were once protected by guardians...with feathers. Twelve-year-old Freya enjoys karate and is the only one in her class who’s trusted with a part-time job. But everything changes when she meets a boy with yellow eyes. She learns about the guardians, and how an age-old fight has prevented them from fulfilling their purpose. Freya finds new friends in the Crow tribe, but not everything in the castle is blissful. A destructive shadow lies within her and all she needs to do to release it is close her eyes. But as the guardians’ war rages on, Freya realises that, although the shadow’s power can be useful, it can’t create peace. To do that, Freya and her friends must solve the mysterious crime that began the...

 Crowvus is a small company, and there is no legal requirement for us to produce an annual report. That aside, it's both beneficial and gratifying to recap the year and revisit our aims and goals. It's gratifying because you can celebrate the parts that you got right through the year. And it is so  important to take a step back and look at your achievements. In 2025, we sold a record number of books, built the newsletter to a surprising number of subscribers (if you'd like to subscribe to our monthly newsletter, then head over here !) and we had a phenomenal number of entries for the Crowvus Ghost Story Competition. Wow! What a year 2025 turned out to be! It's beneficial because it helps you gain an understanding of the business. Because of the records I insisted on keeping through the year, I now know the percentage of our readers who shop at Amazon, and percentage who prefer paperbacks to ebooks, and the country where we sell the most books. All of this information we...

... Our focus book this week is Beneath a Darkening Sky by Judith Crow This collection of gothic horror short stories is a thrilling and terrifying compilation, designed to send shivers down your spine while getting you turning the pages. We love this book because it contains ten brilliant stories that will stick with you long after you've read the final page. But you needn't take our word for it! Here what other readers are saying on Goodreads: "I was so excited to read each one and had a tingly feeling before and after each one. I loved the whole book and was sad when I was on the last story." "I like how quick these stories are, snippets but full stories in their own right. Well written, engaging and thought provoking. Loved it!" "I loved these books flow of the stories and the writing gripped me from the off. I really enjoy fairytale retelling and these were very clever with ghostly folklore and supernatural events woven into them." "I rea...

  Happy Monday and welcome back to our Middle Grade Monday series: genres! Today, I'll be sharing a couple of hints and tips for writing science fiction for children. I'm not a sci-fi author, so I'll be addressing this mostly in terms of being a primary teacher. When teaching about genres to children, it is often a struggle to explain the difference between fantasy and science fiction and, in fact, these two genres often get muddled together in awards and libraries etc. The explanation I landed on was to say that fantasy was things that cannot happen. Science fiction, on the other hand, is things that cannot happen... yet! That all important word at the end leads to my first tip. 1) Science fiction needs to be believable. You need to convince your middle grade reader that it could actually happen, perhaps to them! You do this by explaining anything that may seem magical or far fetched. This, in turn, leads onto the next tip... 2) A knowledge of science really helps! When do...

      Review My experience of short stories is more in writing them than in reading them, although some I have read and enjoyed have stayed with me for a long time. In almost every instance, I have read a book of short stories by a specific author (Neil Gaiman's excellent offerings on this spring to mind) and, in that case, it is more akin to reading a novel. By contrast, this is a book which brings together eight different authors, who provide their own unique perspectives and areas of expertise. The first thing I noticed about them as a list is that they are mostly female, with only one male author included. This is reflected in many of the stories, which take a very female perspective.  The concept of alternate history is one I can definitely buy into. As an author, I very nearly indulged in it myself when I was writing a historical novel and the actual history was just too sad. We all engage in alternate history on a nearly-daily basis too, thinking about the pat...

  Review After the disaster which was my last read for this Challenge, I immediately realised that this book was perfect for laying that ghost to rest, which is topical because that is the theme of this entire story: Brigid Cleary is driven to avenge the brutal torture and murder of her mother, Bridget Cleary, who was a real-life victim of extreme domestic violence in 1895. A historical note at the beginning of the book shares the facts. Mathilda Zeller creates the world clearly and the characters are mostly very well developed. You find yourself longing for Brigid to find the peace that she's so desperate for; being thankful - or perhaps wishing - for friends like Florence and Adelaide, and falling in love with Edmund and willing him not to let you down. Perhaps the only character who convinced me less than entirely was Mr Baxby. I felt like the whole story could have been rewritten from his point of view and he would have been a sorry character. How lovely to be back with charact...

    Review I should begin this review by apologising to Dan Bailes, the author. I had promised to review Marlon's most recent adventure months ago but, after a very busy three or four months, I'm only just getting round to it. But I am so pleased I did eventually get round to reading Marlon and the Scary Something . It is a charming book, and one which deals with issues of anxiety and fear in childhood in a way that rarely strays into being heavy-handed. The story follows Marlon, a cat who certainly feels like he's got the cream! He's just lounging around and winding up his brother when suddenly a dog appears! He doesn't even know what a dog is at this point - he just knows that this new arrival makes him feel afraid. Over the course of the book, Marlon realises that the best thing to do is to face his fear and, eventually, it all ends very well.  This is a personal book for the author, who explains in the afterword that he experienced anxiety as a child. This reall...

Honey Harvest tells us the story of a little girl who loves honey and goes on a beautifully ordinary adventure to find out how bees make honeycomb and how that is then turned into the runny honey which she loves to eat. It’s a long-running joke in my family that I made my little sister scared of bees. As a child, I was absolutely terrified of them and used to run away every time one came near me. Of course, as Clem got old enough to play outside, I taught her to do the same thing. Oops.  I do love bees though. We don’t keep them ourselves, but we have many wonderful wild species which visit the garden, including some rare and unusual ones. Bees are little furry, buzzy proof that magic exists. Naturally, I really love honey too. Honey on Shredded Wheat… mmm… and, recently, I’ve been reading lots about Alexander the Great so I discovered other fascinating properties of honey (if you don’t know, consider looking it up – very interesting, if slightly grisly). Back to Honey Harvest…...

Out now! The Gecko Without An Echo by Cheryl Bannerman (Author) and Anushka Bansal (Illustrator) Blurb: In a hollowed tree, in the woods, by the bay, lived Earl the Squirrel and Tim the Gecko. With his best friend right beside him, Tim wandered through the forest, calling out high and low – hoping to hear his echo. But sometimes what we are looking for is right in front of us! Let's find out how Tim discovered that when you need someone to listen, all you need to do is reach out to those who love and surround you. Author Bio: Cheryl Denise Bannerman is an award-winning, multi-genre author of seven self-published books. She is the winner of the 2018 Book Excellence Award for her book of poetry, Words Never Spoken, and winner of the Best Books Awards in the category of African American fiction in 2020 for Black Child to Black Woman. She is also a Semi-Finalist in the MLC Audiobook Awards with a 2020 IMDb Nomination for Book 1 of the Anna Romano Mystery Series, Cats, Cannolis, and a C...

Thank you to the Crowvus team for featuring me on your blog! So excited to be able to showcase my books; after all, the next best thing to reading books is admiring them on a shelf! I try to keep my books in a rough order based on genre, and I also have larger books at the bottom of the bookcase and smaller at the top. Is it just me that does this?? Starting from the bottom shelf, I have my chunky hardbacks (hardbacks… so luxurious…). Juliet Marillier’s Sevenwaters series is a fairly recent discovery; set in ancient Ireland where the gods of the forest still hold sway, this is a beautifully complex family saga which has helped inspire my current work in progress. Families tied together by magic, wicked spirits, and undying love – perfect for any hopeless romantic. Also on this shelf is Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy (useful for picking up medieval details), and the complete Sherlock Holmes – a car-boot find for 50p with lovely, vinyl-like pages. The big black folder at the end is cr...

It's Saturday! And, it's not just any Saturday for me, today is the first day of the October holidays! Bear with me while I calm down a little... Right, I'm back. So...every Saturday, I will be posting a "Positively Weekend" blog, sharing the positive sides of publishing and writing. I'm also doing a Harsh Truth Thursday which does the opposite! Because, yes, there are both sides to the publishing coin. So today, to kick off the weekend, I'm sharing the 5 things I love most about indie publishing. Indie publishing is a publishing company that is smaller than the big-wigs of the industry. They use their company funds to publish books, and don't expect any money from the author. However, they don't always pay an advance. Crowvus is an independent publisher. We are a very small publishing company which is growing every year. Initially, there was a strange wibbly line between whether we classed as an indie publisher or self-publisher, but the more we d...

So far this week I've shared with you some places and some things which have been a source of inspiration for me. Today, I'm going to share some people who have inspired me. Some of these people are not what I would call heroes, but are people whose stories have touched my own and, in some cases, whose work I hope to continue and honour with my own writings. I unashamedly have an obsessive nature. If I uncover a new person (usually someone from deep in the realms of history!) I want to know all I can about them. There have been several occasions when I've deviated from the research I was meant to be doing, and click through a series of links until I find myself researching someone who I have no idea how I even found them! The back button is very useful for this! One good example of this was when I was researching for a book which is coming out next year, called The Year We Lived , which is set just after the Norman conquest. Most of my characters who are erroneousl...