City – DaneCobain.com

Title: Mill Girl

Author: Sue Reid

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 224

Rating: 3.5/5

I read this book because it came with a whole bunch of others that I bought as a job lot on eBay. It stood out because it’s part of a Scholastic line that focusses on historical fiction, and it’s also pretty cool because it takes the form of a diary.

We’ve got a young female protagonist living in Victorian Manchester and who works in a Mill, and so you know going in that she’s going to have a pretty tough life. At the same time, the book’s clearly aimed at younger readers and so there’s nothing here that’s so intense that it would stop a parent from reading it to their kids.

But to be honest, the point here is more to educate kids about what it was like back in the day, and I think it does a pretty good job of that. Even though it’s written the way it is, in an episodic format based on diary entries, the author actually manages to do an impressive job of worldbuilding, and so it’s easy to feel as though you can smell the city.

Plus I’m originally from the Midlands, which makes me an honourary northerner. I was always going to like it. A nice find!

Learn more about Mill Girl.

Janis Jonevs – Doom 94 | Review

Title: Doom 94

Author: Janis Jonevs

Type: Fiction/Non-Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 258

Rating 4.5/5

This book was fantastic for two simple reasons – objectively, because it’s different, and subjectively, because it reflected my own childhood. It turns out that the Latvian city of Jelgava in the mid-nineties had a lot in common with the British town of Tamworth in the mid-2000s.

As you’ve probably guessed from that, Jonevs is a Latvian, and I actually met him at a party/networking event when I was invited to Riga to learn more about Latvian literature. This book wasn’t out at the time, at least not in English, but I’d heard enough about it to think that I was going to like it. I just didn’t expect to like it this much.

It’s basically a coming of age story, following Jonevs and his fellow metalheads as they finish up at school, discover drink, drugs and cigarettes and get into the Latvian metal scene. I hadn’t heard of most of the bands, of course, but there were mentions here and there of those that I had heard of. Kurt Cobain’s suicide plays a part in the plot and there were shoutouts for bands like My Dying Bride, Mayhem and Burzum. There was even a mention for Cynic, who are probably my favourite out of all of the heavier bands that Jonevs talked about. How Could I? and Veil of Maya in particular.