Crooked Pieces by Sarah Grazebook
6.5 out of 10
What I haven;t revealed so far is that I normally have 2 books on the go at a time. One is one that I read (paper-based), and the other will be an audio-book, in the car, to help make my commuting, or other long journeys, tolerable.
My supply of audio-books is my local library, so I am drawing from a restricted range. Also, I find that I can't listen to any book that is too complex, or requires totla concentration, because I have to negotiate my way, safely, through heavy, unpredictable traffic.
As a consequence, most of my audio-reading reverts to a kind of easy fiction, usually involving 2 poor sisters who come over from Ireland to Liverpool at the end of the last century, Ususally they are starving, then they meet a villain, they nearly die and then one of them falls in love, and they become wealthy through hard work or marriage. Or Catherine Cookson will do.
Anyway, this book wasn't quite like that, but it was about a poor girl from Stepney (Maggie) who gets involved with the Pankhurst family and becomes a Suffragette activist. It was a good book because it made me revisit the Suffragette history, and the dreadful things that women went through to win us our right to vote (or did they alienate the governement of the time and delay us getting the vote?)
I had just finished the book when I saw film footage of the student demonstartions this week, with police, on horse-back, controlling the demonstrators in London, and it felt like a modern-day replay of other protests and demonstartions through history.
There was some love interest in the book also - Maggie falls in love with a policeman - will she, won't she?
I didn't work out why the book is called Crooked Pieces.
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