Simon

Lovely - a Sutcliff I hadn't read before. Her usual fascinating characters, major and minor. This one is set during the English Civil War - a period I know very little about. I found I had some of the same problems I do with stories set in the American Civil War - there is a great deal of moving around the countryside, from place to place, none of which I'm familiar with. There's also references to important people - generals, mostly - who I don't know at all, or at most know their names. So the story, for me, took place against a very blurry background - but the important parts did not require me to know either locations or historical people, the main story was Sutcliff's own characters and their interactions. Simon was great; Amias show more was less well drawn, but clear enough. Zeal-of-the-Lord was fascinating, if annoying; and Wainwright was just annoying (nicely handled, at the end). I now understand the period a lot better - not battles and so on, I'm forgetting already, but the feel of the period and how fortunes seesawed through that time. Nice. show less

Lovely, lovely book; one of my favourite books ever. It's about the English Civil War, and manages to convey information about and the perspective of, both sides pretty fairly, which is rare in books on the subject. Although popular history (and the course of history) tends to be pretty firmly on the Royalist side (well, they did have better clothes and were more fun), Charles I was kind of a fool, and Parliament had a very genuine grievence, and you can learn all about that here, as well as meeting some of the colourful and interesting characters on the Parliamentary side (they weren't all like Cromwell--not at all).

Simon is one of those nice books where you can learn a great deal painlessly--it's books like this that consisted my show more entire pre-university history education, and I was definitely in the top ten as far as what I already knew, in most of my history courses. show less

I never read this one as a child - I was really only interested in Sutcliff's Roman novels. This is a pity as I would have loved it. It's set during the (English) Civil War, and is a story of two friends. It has the somewhat hackneyed plot of them being on opposing sides, but the treatment is intelligent, and it didn't seem hackneyed while reading it.

Ich bin ein wenig überrascht, dass im Verlag "Freies Geistesleben", dem friedlichen Waldorf-Verlag, ein so kriegerisches, kampferfülltes Buch erscheint! Freilich, Frau Suttcliff ist eine tolle Autorin, sie kann schreiben, sie bringt Geschichte menschlich nahe und es war ja so, historisch ist das Buch sicher ok.
Mir ist es eher um die menschliche Seite zu tun: Zwei so gute Freunde, die auf verschiedenen Seiten kämpfen, die sich auch mal raushauen, aber wenns dumm gelaufen wäre, auch getötet hätten.
Und sicher war das auch in Wirklichkeit durchaus der Fall!
Ich finde, dass das Buch in dieser Hinsicht zum Nachdenken anregt, auch wenn es für Simon gut ausgeht, so war es sicher nicht für alle Leute so.