Customer Reviews
A real mixture - By: Archy, 23 May 2008 
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, & 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 & 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 - By: Chris Read, 03 Nov 2006 
Since 1987, Josephine Cox has been a prolific & successful spinner of
yarns, weaving memories of the Blackburn of her childhood & emotional
attachment to this 'town of soot & grime & 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 & quotation from the novels, explores the relationship between
personal experiences of hardship & 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 & 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' & 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 - By: C. P. Kurzfeld, 04 May 2006 
Very dissapointing, coming from the north myself I was reallly 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 & will probably never pick it up again.
