Job Lot – 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.

Agatha Christie – Surprise! Surprise! | Review

Title: Surprise! Surprise!

Author: Agatha Christie

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 224

Rating: 3.5/5

This book is something of an oddity, and in fact I hadn’t even heard of it until I spotted it going as part of an Agatha Christie job lot on eBay. Essentially, because different publishers released different books in different regions, there are some unique USA titles that never came out in the UK, and vice versa.

That mostly applies to short story collections, of which this is the perfect example. In fact, to say that I read this is almost cheating because I only bothered to read the stories that I hadn’t read before, and so there were only four of the twelve or thirteen in here that I actually read. I remember the ones that I skipped, though.

In fact, this is actually a pretty decent little read, if only because it features a bunch of Christie’s most well-known characters, from Parker Pyne to Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. It also includes the title story of The Witness for the Prosecution, which I’ve seen performed as a play before. I think the play was a little better than the short story, but both of them are very much worth consuming. All in all then, I’d have to say that this one is worth reading.