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nigellicus's review
5.0
Behind the gentle, pastel children's cover and between the slim pages of this little book lies a story that is at once small and personal and yet enormous in impact - but enormous is the wrong word, completely the wrong sort of language, there is nothing crude or outsize in this. It is written with elegance and feeling, delicate yet exact, from the opening walk through a garden that mingles childhood memories with adult distance and unspoken experience lost in the mysteries and difficulties of memory.
Edward and Jane grow up in the idyllic house and gardens of Medleycott at the outbreak of the Second World War. Their mother is dead, and their father is distant and difficult, and soon is mostly gone altogether, leaving them to run wild, playing together in their private world, cared for by the housekeeper, with the gardener, the farmer, the land girls and the Conscientious Objector billeted in the attic, their own perfect world. Every now and then their father intrudes, and it is his exasperation with Edward that will threaten their idyll.
Written with extraordinary beauty and intensity, evoking the Somerset countryside and the childish emotions and the adult regrets. It is warm, funny, fierce and ultimately heartbreaking. A brilliant, beautiful book, gorgeous to read, rich in feeling and vivid in setting and time.
Edward and Jane grow up in the idyllic house and gardens of Medleycott at the outbreak of the Second World War. Their mother is dead, and their father is distant and difficult, and soon is mostly gone altogether, leaving them to run wild, playing together in their private world, cared for by the housekeeper, with the gardener, the farmer, the land girls and the Conscientious Objector billeted in the attic, their own perfect world. Every now and then their father intrudes, and it is his exasperation with Edward that will threaten their idyll.
Written with extraordinary beauty and intensity, evoking the Somerset countryside and the childish emotions and the adult regrets. It is warm, funny, fierce and ultimately heartbreaking. A brilliant, beautiful book, gorgeous to read, rich in feeling and vivid in setting and time.
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