Paradise Lodge

Lizzie is 15 years old, bored at school and living in a dysfunctional family with no money to buy anything other than 'econo coffee'. This being the 1970s in the East Midlands, Lizzie decides to get a part-time job to buy shampoo and nice clothes from Chelsea Girl and that's how she ends up working at Paradise Lodge. The Lodge is a care home run on a shoestring and peopled by eccentrics, both staff and patients. Whilst at Paradise Lodge Lizzie falls in love, is removed from the 'O level stream', blackmailed by her Deputy Headteacher and grows up a little.

Nina Stibbe is a writer who has a very authentic voice which works incredibly well in this genre. She has a knack of picking out the cultural references that pepper her books, here show more referring to events (the deaths of Elvis and Marc Bolan), fashion (punk, hair dye and shampoo) and media (Starchy and Hutch) that resonate with her readers. No-one could describe this as being a deep and meaningful book, it is a series of amusing vignettes, but it it written with huge gusto and is laugh out loud funny at times. show less

Funny, weird, touching, and rude—sometimes all within the same sentence—Nina Stibbe’s Paradise Lodge is both a coming-of-age story and a tale about getting old. A sequel to Stibbe’s delightful Man at the Helm that can also be read as a standalone novel, Paradise Lodge focuses on a fifteen-year-old British teenager working as an auxiliary-nurse in a chaotic nursing home whose staff and residents are equally eccentric. At Paradise Lodge, laundry is left unwashed, dentures get mixed up, and the kitchen is always perilously close to running out of food, but both residents and staff feel they belong. As Lizzie explains, home is a place where “you’re able to rush in and go to the toilet and flop on the sofa and cry at the horror show more of the world, or laugh at the silliness of it, and not dread being there.” Stibbe’s Paradise Lodge manages to capture the attraction and the poignancy of just such a place. show less

I really liked Love, Nina (and am enjoying the BBC series with the same name), where Stibbe collected the letters she sent home during her years nannying to a literary editor with two football obsessed sons. Paradise Lodge goes for the same tone, but for me didn't quite have the same charm. Liz is a teenager struggling with her mother's remarriage. She wanders into a job as a carer in a failing nursing home, peopled with eccentrics characters including a unqualified Matron and an elderly man trying to escape the clutches of his stepdaughter. Her work means that she's cutting school and risks messing up exams and her assumed path to university. I wonder if it might be more appealing to younger readers closer to Liz's age and experiences.

I really enjoyed Paradise Lodge. It was an easy read and kept my interest. It follows the developments at a residential care home through the eyes of a teenager who works there and this provides an unusual perspective. It reminded of another book - 'Our Spoons Came From Woolworths' by Barbara Comyns which was also written in a similar diary style. Both are very matter of fact. The story progresses at a good speed which is always good. Whilst not as funny as the reviews on the cover would suggest, it was a thoroughly enjoyable read.

Good light read. Funny, but without a lot of depth.

Gently comic novel following the further adventures of now teenaged Lizzie Vogel working in a retirement home. See my full review at Shiny New Books: http://shinynewbooks.co.uk/fiction-issue-11/paradise-lodge-by-nina-stibbe/

Not a favorite of mine. Maybe you have to be British to enjoy this type of humor.