3.5*

A look at English village life in the 1920s. Quite charming but I think that I preferred Flora Thompson's trilogy Lark Rise to Candleford which I found similar. ( )

I didn't really find the content all that interesting. The writing style is acceptable most of the time except when it slips into fantastically well-crafted. Seriously, there are some exceptionally well-written paragraphs and even chapters here.

I had planned on passing this book along to a young author I know until I arrived toward the end and read his accounts of the sexual crimes he and his friends committed against a few of the young women in his town. Like most of his life in this account, he simply records the events without much reflection, without showing how he was changed (for good or ill) by his experience.

A quite passive read. ( )

3.5-stars Rounded Up.

Cider With Rosie is a memoir of Laurie Lee’s life in the Cotswolds immediately following World War I, and reminded me of A. J. Cronin’s The Green Years, being told by a young boy of a poor family. I thought this book was quite lovely in places and a bit bogged down in others. It had marvelous potential that it dropped just short of reaching.

There is a story about two “grannies” who live next door to the Lee family, rivals and grudging enemies, their story made me think of two elderly women I knew when I was a child myself.
Speaking of Granny Trill he says, ”although she had a clock, she kept it simply for the tick, its hands having dropped off years ago. This seemed to sum up a lot of the aura around this book, a kind of unmeasured timelessness.

Another story of an elderly couple who were removed, quite against their wishes, to the workhouse, dredged up shades of Dickens and the cruelty of age in a society where few could care for their own needs and even fewer could take on the burden of caring for another. These stories were marvelously written and poignant and gave me a true sense of the life in this small village before the advent of machinery and automobiles opened it to the greater world.

On the other hand, there are long passages about church festivals and group outings that, while interesting, seem to plod on past their necessity. It is this disjointed meandering that keeps this book from earning a higher rating from me.

I must say that this is a rather short, quick read and has enough to make it a worthwhile read. I would never discourage anyone from reading it and would wholly recommend it as a nice way to get a true feeling for life in a small English village in the early parts of the twentieth century. ( )

A true glimpse into an English rural life, which now seems as distant as the days of the Romans.

I was born and have lived most of my life in the country on the edge of the Forest of Dean, separated from the Cotswolds by the Severn and by the way of life of the inhabitants - mostly mining, when I was a boy. The last national pit closed in 1965, link below. Hard to believe that in the early 1960's, the price of a cottage was around £150, virtually no one had a telephone in their house and cars were for the well-off only

The past is a foreign country, but you can't go there on a plane to experience it for yourself - reading a book like this is the nearest you will come to a journey in a time machine.

https://forest-of-dean.net/gallery/cinderford_2/pages/page_21.html ( )

There’s some beautiful writing in this (fictionalized) memoir. of a much slower, simpler time. Lee was a poet who knew how to perfectly convey a sense of time and especially place.
The author takes us through his poverty-stricken childhood and youth in rural England in the first decades of the last century. While the book is quite endearing, the author is a little too accepting of some very seamy, indeed criminal, behavior.
I did enjoy this one, but was disturbed by parts of it. ( )