Intense – 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.

Isaac Asimov – Where Do We Go From Here? (Book #2) | Review

Title: Where Do We Go From Here? (Book #2)

Author: Isaac Asimov

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 200

Rating: 3/5

This book was interesting enough, as most Isaac Asimov books are, but it’s also true that he was a better writer than he was an editor and so I would have preferred a collection of his own short stories as opposed to those by other authors.

Still, there are some decent enough shorts in here, and we also have an introduction by Asimov and a little additional context on what we’re reading thanks to his notes on each story. Perhaps more unusual was the fact that he also included a bunch of questions for his readers to try to answer. Some of them were so intense that I couldn’t even understand the question and would have had no hope of answering.

Overall, this is probably the weakest of the Asimov books that I’ve come across so far, and even a contribution by both himself (a story I’d already read) and Arthur C. Clarke wasn’t enough to save it. Glad I read it, but I won’t re-read and it was eh.

Learn more about Where Do We Go From Here? (Book #2).