Lucy Strange has a gift for creating unusual, layered characters which hook the reader in. “I have to watch for when a thread snaps and fix it fast-before the great metal frame of the spinner comes clattering back towards me,” Bess explains. The hazardous world of the cotton mill is quickly evoked with well-chosen details and language. The story is told in the first person, using simple sentences close to the voice of a child-ideal for reluctant readers. But soon Bess meets the mermaid and realises that she too is an unhappy prisoner… Beaten and under-fed, the child-workers are told by the ‘gaffer’ there is a vicious mermaid living in the weir pond, so that they don’t try to escape. Eleven-year-old Bess, who has just lost her mother, comes to work in a rural cotton mill where conditions are desperate. ‘Sometimes the only way to save yourself is to save someone else’ is the theme that flows through this mystical story set during the Industrial Revolution.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |