All Our Hidden Gifts is a paranormal YA novel about lost friendship, adolescence and the supernatural. When Maeve finds a pack of old tarot cards, she discovers that she has an affinity for tarot reading and other supernatural powers. But when Maeve gives a tarot reading for her ex-best friend who then suddenly disappears, Maeve begins to see her true power and searches desperately for a way to bring her friend back.

There's a lot going on in this book. The main plot point is Maeve's learning about witchcraft, but the story also focuses on LGBTQ+ issues, homophobia, racism and the dangers of radicalisation. However, the book also focused quite heavily on Maeve's love life, which I felt wasn't woven into the story and detracted from the other aspects of the plot.

The characters in All Our Hidden Gifts are well-written and ground the story into feeling very real and immersive. Maeve, particularly, feels like a very real teenager, with her impulsivity and vibrant emotions. However, the book had a very juvenile feeling with the characters feeling more like 13-year-olds than 16-year-olds. The story feels caught in a limbo, being too safe for YA paranormal, but handling too heavy topics for Middle Grade. It makes it difficult to decide who this book should be pitched at.

Overall, this is an enjoyable paranormal story that touches on several important themes, but overall doesn't pack the punch I wanted it to.

This was one of the best YA books that I have read in a long time. It's a mixture of contemporary and witchcraft set in Ireland.
I found the characters very interesting and the author developed them perfectly throughout the story. Not only does the protagonist have to deal with her new found talent as a sensitive but there's a lot of racial and gender issues brilliantly written in too.
I definitely recommend this book if you like your YA books to be extremely interesting and well written.
Thank you to Walker Books and Netgalley uk for providing me with an arc of this book for my honest opinion.

I loved this book, scary, witchy but also dealt really well with well with sexuality, and the classic teenage angst of trying to fit in at school when you really don’t.

Maeve Chambers is the main character, typical badly behaved teenager who whilst being punished at school stumbles upon a pack of tarot cards. This puts into motion a series of events which Maeve gets swept up in and which ultimately puts a lot of people in danger.

Can Maeve make it all right again...??!!

This felt like a really short book, I picked it up at every opportunity, and struggled to put it down again. The characters are likeable, interesting, and it’s a really enjoyable book.

My thanks to Netgalley and Walker Books for the advance copy.

When Maeve finds a dusty, old pack of tarot cards, she feels a connection to them that she can't explain. She sets up a business giving tarot readings to the girls in her school, enjoying the attention she gets from her classmates, and the energy she feels from the cards. However, when her ex best friend Lily is pressured into a reading, draws an ominous card, and disappears soon after, Maeve realises that her new hobby might be to blame. She teams up with Lily's older brother Roe to try and find Lily, while trying to keep her possible involvement in the disappearance from him.

Although I felt that I couldn't connect with Maeve, I LOVED Roe. What an amazing, well-rounded character. I was living for the will they/wont they aspect of their relationship. I really liked the start of this book, but once the paranormal element came to the fore I kept wanting rational explanations, so I guess magical realism isn't for me. I know that this will be a five star read for a lot of people, and with that cover a lot of people will be picking this up.

Thank you #NetGalley and Walker Books for the free copy in exchange for an honest review.

It's a real shame that this book isn't available to be sent to Kindle, as I read approximately 100 pages of it on the NetGalley app on my phone and thought it was brilliant. However, it was too much of a strain to continue reading on such a small screen.

I primarily downloaded this YA book to test out its suitability for buying for my school library, I absolutely loved the premise, and the first 100 pages were wonderful. I can't review the remaining 3/4s but I will definitely be checking it out when it comes out for real!

I was looking forward to this but I could not send to my kindle as the option wasn't available. This is a filler review sorry.

This is a paranormal YA book set in a school. I knew nothing about this before I read it and I ended up enjoying it way more than I expected. I read this book really quickly and the writing style was so easy to read while also being descriptive enough to pull me in and keep me captivated by the story.

I really liked the overall story with the tarot cards and then the missing girl. I like a good mystery but I didn’t enjoy the paranormal aspect as much as I thought I would. I also adored seeing the diversity in this book! The diversity really stood out and I would recommend this book just because of that. The pacing was a little inconsistent and there were times when I wished it had moved a little quicker.

I didn’t like the main character, I couldn’t connect to her and she annoyed me in places. I just disliked her. The other characters were all okay, again I didn’t really connect to them but I find it hard to connect to YA characters these days.

Overall this is a quick read with a paranormal things and a school setting. If you like paranormal mysteries then this is for you.

All Our Hidden Gifts, Caroline O’Donoghue. 4/5

When Maeve discovers a dusty old pack of tarot cards at school she finds she has a gift for something she didn’t even know she understood. After she starts giving readings to her fellow students she finds herself haunted by a mysterious card that doesn’t quite fit the deck and after giving a dark reading to her former best friend Lily two days before Lily vanishes, Maeve finds herself entangled in something much darker.

I’ve powered through this little corker in 3 hours. I said this about both of O’Donoghues adult novels and i’m pleased shes brought this gift to her first YA fiction as-well, Caroline fleshes out characters so well. You know each and every one of her leads and understand their motivations because she writes them so brilliantly.

Clever YA fiction is hard to write, you have to tap into a very specific market and not pander, All Our Hidden Gifts is a dark little gem within this genre. Not at all what I expected, a mixture of mystery is woven in between layers of stunning magical realism and yet, at the heart O’Donoghue is still writing about basic issues that teenagers (and beyond) face every day.

A little dash of the Craft, a little dash of Skins against an Irish backdrop and all brought together with O’Donoghues remarkable skill.

Maeve feels, as the youngest of five siblings that she is also the least talented. Not even at school can she thrive as she struggles to keep in with the cool gang. She pushed away her former best friend - Lily, but needs that peer assurance that she has something to contribute. As a punishment at school she was asked to clean out ‘The Chokey’ - a cupboard used by teachers. There she find a pack of Tarot cards which she pockets as she’s drawn to them without previously knowing much about this art. She soon learns. Offering to do readings for her peers’ she soon attracts a following and finds power in what she can do. However, after reading Lily’s cards and shocking them both, Lily disappears and Maeve feels responsible.
Although Maeve had realised she was starting to fall for Lily’s brother Roe before Lily disappears, their relationship becomes more complicated afterwards. So too is Maeve’s relationship with the Tarot cards as she becomes more and more involved in the mysteries of the cards, convinced they can shed light on where Lily has gone.
Pairing up with a new friend who sticks by her when everyone else blames her for Lily’s disappearance, Maeve, Fiona and Roe become entangled with a growing group of young people, seemingly working for charity, but mixed up with hate for others different from themselves.
This is not a book I would normally read, but it is very powerful and I was compelled to finish it. The big picture is more than schoolgirls dabbling with the occult, it’s about differences and hate around us, but unnoticed by those who follow the ‘norm’.

All Our Hidden Gifts is a novel aimed at young adults about a schoolgirl called Maeve who acquires a set of tarot cards that have magical properties. She gives a tarot reading to her ex-best friend Lily that descends into a harsh argument where Maeve wishes she would disappear and Lily goes missing after it. The story follows Maeve as she tries to come to terms with her relationship with the tarot cards, Lily’s brother and a new found friend in Fiona - all whilst she tries to find out what happened to Lily and get her back. As a woman in her late 30’s, I am not the target market for this book but I found it immensely readable. As in Scenes of a Graphic Nature, O’Donoghue combines a great narrative with an examination of how Ireland is changing but also how it wrestles with its past and those who do not accept the changes. The major villian in the piece is Aaron who is a poster boy for the far right movement and takes advantage of young people seeking a movement to be part of and weaponises them against the LGBTQ+ community. The pace of the story is excellent - I think young adults will really enjoy this story and will identify with many of the issues the characters face albeit in the realm of fantasy. A great read and one which I can see will easily turn into a successful series.