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Loading... The English Storiesby Cynthia Flood
No current Talk conversations about this book.  buriedinprint | Nov 10, 2010 | 
Flood recreates the cultural, social, political and economic tenor of the era by examining the lives of various middle-class characters. Through linked narratives, she develops the thematic complexity of a novel but gives readers the satisfaction of short stories – the more dense and intense art form. And by using several voices to narrate the stories, she achieves greater depth than the single perspective of her principle child-narrator, Amanda Ellis, would allow. The linked stories follow pre-teen Amanda Ellis as she and her parents end their final summer visit to the family’s Muskoka cottage and depart for the father’s two-year sabbatical in postwar England, a journey that parallels Amanda’s emergence into young womanhood.
Cynthia Flood's The English Stories offers a series of twelve linked fictions detailing the story of Amanda Ellis, a young Canadian girl who goes with her parents to England "for a year that stretched into two," and her life at St. Mildred's school. Flood's suite is not limited to first person narration by the heroine; rather, the author chooses to spice this collection with a wide range of perspectives and voices. The result is an intricate collage which gives a sense of English life as viewed by an outsider during the 1950s, as the country tries to dust itself off in both the aftermath of the Second World War and the collapse of the British Empire. The English Stories is an assured and mature collection by one of the best short-story writers to come out of Canada, pairing striking emotional depth with tremendous technical skill. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.83)
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Wikipedia in English
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Readers only met Amanda Ellis nine pages ago, so you might think that it doesn't really matter what she smells. And, the fact is that it likely doesn't, not to many readers: indeed, those who prefer their fiction plot-soaked would be best to look elsewhere.
But those readers who enjoy the interwar fiction of presses like Persephone and Virago, those who enjoy the short fiction of Alice Munro or Carol Shields, Rachel Wyatt or M.A.C. Farrant, those who appreciate a focus on the relational and the psychological, you'll be pleased. And even more pleased if you were raised on English stories as a young reader.
Amanda has read a lot of English stories and they inform her experience of England in a quietly amusing way. For instance, she expects Martha, the maid, to be like the maid in The Secret Garden (but that's not the case).
Having been born and raised in Canada, in the Colonies, she hadn't been expecting things in England, in the mother country, to be so different; she gets her words wrong and her schoolmates tease her about that and other innocuous but incongruent details (like the style of her dressing gown).
[Yes, she's at boarding school, which I would have assumed myself, thanks to years of Enid Blyton school school stories in my own younger reading years.]
Amanda's stories are fundamentally satisfying, individually and as a collection. To borrow an image from an early story, The English Stories begins when Amanda is little more than a "chicken that couldn't peck its way out of its egg", but the experiences contained in these twelve stories (although not all are rooted directly in Amanda's perspective) take her through the membrane and into the world.
I'm so glad that I finally read Cynthia Flood's work: I definitely want to read more. (Longer review can be viewed here.) (