I find books like this--the Rough Guides to various sorts of books, including cult, come to mind--fun to read, despite their being pretty lightweight and very much subjective. (Given the premises for them, subjectivity and absence of serious criticism would I suppose be difficult to avoid.)
McKinnon divides her books into 10 categories, like the seedy, young adults, sci-fi, one-of-a-kind and doesn't make a bad job of it in commenting on the books, although I would never have bothered looking at some of the ones I quite liked on the basis of her summaries. For each book she lists a few other supposedly similar ones, and here she strays a bit. Well, a lot, at times. Only the most relaxed sort of free association leads from Hero with a Thousand Faces to Babbitt, surely. . . But balancing this drawback is that non-fiction and comics are scattered freely through the various categories.
The photographs of the different covers many of the titles have been issued with are very interesting. There is, though, a serious problem with the book's layout. The margins are cluttered with whacking great labels for suggested reading ages, book titles, chapter titles, and more still. It's visually confusing and this matters. When the pages stick together (they often do) or when is looking for a specific page, one's eyes dance about looking for the page number somewhere amongst all the other numbers in the margins. And I was nearly 100 pages into the book before I noticed that amidst the marginal clutter were star ratings given to the books.
Undemanding and, disappointingly, it didn't leave me eager to hunt down any of the books discussed, but it's a book better for the time being on my shelf rather than Oxfam's.