Things a Bright Girl Can Do: Sally Nicholls

This novel taught me more about WW1 and the suffrage movement than I had gleaned in the previous 50 odd years of my life. I was engrossed by the story and fully engaged with the characters. The book is well researched and brilliantly written.

An excellent book and a great introduction to the suffrage movement and the reception to and consequences of the outbreak of World War I in Great Britain. Having previously read My Own Story by Emmeline Pankhurst, I was aware of a lot of the events of the suffragette and suffragist movement and whilst this would be a much better introduction to those events for children, I do think that it could have been made a bit more accessible still for younger readers. It seemed to me that in order to provide a detailed and properly authentic depiction of the era, the author has perhaps made the book a little too long, slower paced and with too much period language to really engage younger girls and particularly boys. For YA readers (and indeed adult readers of character-driven historical fiction), it is great.

Another really interesting novel from Sally Nicholls, this time about the suffragette movement in the UK and the First World War. Don't be put off by the cover - the novel is much better than that! Also the rather misleading title - it is taken from a real book of the time called patronisingly "Things a Girl can do" which presumably didn't even dream of all the things that women really can do, like voting, running a business, becoming First Minister of Scotland... As usual Sally Nicholls is excellent at getting under the skin of all her varied characters and making the reader anxious to find out what happens to them. There is a wide mixture of people across the classes, from the very poor to the prosperous middle class, which the writer handles skillfully.

Things a Bright Girl Can Do looks at the suffragette movement from three different perspectives and at what girls in that period of post-Victorian change would do to get equality. It is still a fight that we are striving for today but it is interesting to look at a fictional account of what suffrage meant during its hey-day. We get to look at how the different classes were affected by the need for equal rights and how even with the onset of the Women’s Vote some people were still excluded. We see it from the perspective of a well-to-do young lady whose desperate need to fight the cause ended up with a prison sentence and a hunger strike. We see the Sapphic love between two girls from different classes, and we see how they both want the same thing when it comes to freedom and rights but how they both try to achieve it in different ways. Things a Bright Girl Can Do is an interesting read and one that still holds relevance in modern society where the battle for total equality is still happening. Things a Bright Girl Can Do by Sally Nicholls is available now.

This is a story that must be told for modern readers and Sally Nicholls has achieved a marvellous, engaging narrative with just the right balance of story and fact to keep us hungering for more. Through the energies, loves and tribulations of three teenage girls...two of whom are in love with each other... Sally Nicholls draws a huge canvas of Suffragette activities and the horrors and frustrations of the Great War. This is a book for any reader from twelve onwards. Thoroughly recommended.

This book is a tremendous read fir teens abd young adults. it accounts many events based off of true stories. It brang light for me in one of my grey areas of knowledge, snd gave a tremendous insight into the Sufregette movement. I would say however that it veers a little of-course from the topic but the quality of writing remains throughout. Contains mature themes.

A fantastic YA novel giving a glimpse of the underground queer scene of 1914s London. The story is given in three strands, the three characters representing upper-class women, working-class women and the pacifist movement. The author has done a great job of putting us into the minds of each girl and showing their unique perspectives. I really enjoyed this book and couldn't put it down!

This is a Very Good Book. It begins in 1914, in London, around the women's suffrage movement. The three teenaged protagonists (two definitely women; the third might be a butch woman or a trans masculine person if she was living a century later) are rounded and believable, and their stories are compelling. Highly recommended.

Geared to the Young Adult reader, this historical fiction sets its heroines in varied real settings that occurred in the fight for Women's suffrage. We follow the exploits of Evelyn, an upper class rebel who finds herself in the middle of a hunger strike; May, a Quaker, to whom peace is non-negotiable; & Nell, a lower class girl defying tradition by wearing trousers & trying to survive in war torn impoverished household. A very piercing account on many levels.