It's been great to catch up with Elsie, Dot and Millie, the jam factory girls of the title, in this second instalment of what is going to be a series about them. Mary Wood is a lovely saga writer, and she always writes an engrossing story filled with ups and downs and highs and lows for the characters.

When we left the girls at the end of book one, they'd all been through quite an upheaval with their respective families and learned a lot about each other. Elsie and Dot are from quite a different background to the upper class, Millie, but they all get on like a house on fire. As always though, the author doesn’t want her characters resting on their laurels and getting too settled and there's a lot in store in this book for each of them.

At one point I exclaimed out loud as I thought a particular character just couldn't take anymore, but these girls are strong and I hoped she could get through it. It's difficult to write a review without saying too much about what happened in book one but I knew that if anyone could cope with all that life was throwing at them then it was these plucky lasses.

Wood's characterisations are always very convincing and I had such a sense of feeling that the good characters are ones I'd love to be friends with and the horrid ones are ones that I feel a very strong dislike for. The setting is portrayed well too with a big contrast between Elsie and Dot's tenement past and Millie's posh house with staff. Then there's the factory itself, which didn't play as large a part in this book as the previous one but which is still an integral part of the story. I also enjoyed the social history aspect, with the beginning of improvements in working conditions and women's rights becoming more prevalent.

I'm looking forward to book three now and to see if Elsie gets her happy ending and how Millie fares after the revelations in this book. I went from smiles to frowns many times as I read this story but one thing that I can always be sure of is that Mary Wood will produce something that is both heart-warming and heart-wrenching, tragic yet uplifting. I really enjoyed Secrets of the Jam Factory Girls. ( )