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Average Customer Rating:

A real mixture

Customer Rating:

I have never read any of Josephine Cox's novels, but was given this. It's a strange hybrid. It's not an auotbiography - Josephine's voice is heard rarely, and mostly through the voices of her characters. It's not a biography either; Gus Dudgeon has clearly read the novels, but there's little in depth analysis of Josephine. Instead, there are large chunks of passages from the novels (which seem very samey to me). There is some social history, in an interesting chapter about the roots of Blackburn's cotton trade, which even manages to include the story of the Pendle witches. The last chapter is mostly full plotlines from recent novels, which would spoil them for new readers. Yet there's little genuine literary criticism. I found it quite enjoyable, final chapter aside, though I imagine anyone who has read the novels and is looking for a little more, might be disappointed. Even the excellent photos have captions lifted from elsewhere in the text. Browse before you buy!

Time Out Review

Customer Rating:

Since 1987, Josephine Cox has been a prolific and successful spinner of yarns, weaving memories of the Blackburn of her childhood and emotional attachment to this 'town of soot and grime and dreary, closed-in streets' into textured backcloths for her sagas. Blackburn's rise to 'cotton-weaving capital of the world' in 1907, when 79,403 power looms enslaved a workforce of fleet-footed lip-readers, had declined by the 1950s. In Child of the North, Piers Dudgeon, inter-lacing dialogues with the author, personal comment and quotation from the novels, explores the relationship between personal experiences of hardship and deprivation that motivate Cox's writing and the transformation of these memories into fiction. The book expands into an involving history of a town where weaver poets wrote in celebration of the handloom weaver tradition and railed against the poverty, misery and exploitation engendered by the rise of the mill. A town where 'the Industrial Revolution squeezed nature out of the town' and dark acrid smoke shut out the sunlight. The poignancy of the narrative is enhanced by the apt choice of photographs. For one who, as a child, spent many a wet Saturday afternoon over a poached egg on toast in Booth's café, gazing down through the window at the market below or at the customers in the Palatine café opposite, this is more than a walk down memory lane.

dissapointing	Customer Rating:
Very dissapointing, coming from the north myself I was really looking forward to reading this book but it is mostly made up from passages of her novels. As I have read most of her novels, finding her biography made up mainly from these was a huge letdown - I stopped reading halfway through and will probably never pick it up again.