Review: A real nostalgia trip
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 02 16, 2014
‘Meggie Blackthorn’ is the story of a young girl growing up in the North East of England in the early 1960s. She is the eldest child of a family of four children (and another on the way). It’s a good life, or it would be if her father didn’t spend all his money on drink and gambling. But Meggie is a resourceful child. When they run out of coal she decides to collect some for free from the slag heaps near the mines, but it’s a dangerous enterprise. And so the story begins.Meggie lives through many adventures over the following months. Her whole life changes when she has to move to her grandparents’ house in the town so that she can attend the grammar school. She makes new friends and new enemies - the revolting Fish family - Billy and his vile mother, known as ‘the Codmother’, who works in Meggie’s grandfather’s shop. And she meets a rather special boy. . .I was enthralled by this book. For me, also born just after the Second World War and growing up in the North of England, it was a real nostalgia trip.  (I was, in fact, born the same year as Meggie, who was eleven when Elvis Presley’s ‘Stuck on You’ was released.)The music, the food, the prevailing culture are all those of my own childhood and Ms Jasper captures it beautifully.She is an accomplished writer with a superb command of the English language. And she is accurate. Not once when reading this did I stop and lose concentration because of some irritating grammatical error or typo – something that spoils so many books for me.Well done, Elizabeth. I am really looking forward to reading the sequel.