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rharris9585's review against another edition
5.0
Raw, honest emotion from a bereaved father. Searing and painful to read, but incredibly powerful and necessary. Thanks for sharing your story.
I salute you Sir.
I salute you Sir.
balancinghistorybooks's review
3.0
Harding's reflection on grief, after his only son, Kadian, is killed in a freak cycling accident, opens on that pivotal day. The family are cycling in the Wiltshire countryside, when he is killed; of witnessing the accident, Harding writes: 'He's suddenly way ahead of me. A hundred feet perhaps. He must have gathered speed. And then there's a flash of a white van, moving fast from left to right, at the bottom of the slope. It shouldn't be there. And the van hits Kadian. Driving him away from view, away from me.'
Much of the memoir uses this choppy narrative style, which works very well to describe the accident and its aftermath, but is not so effective at other times. For the most part, Harding's prose is both heartfelt and very matter-of-fact; the latter made me feel rather detached from the whole. It felt, at times, as though I was intruding upon somebody's personal diary, which I had no right to read. There was no real sense that Kadian Journal was meant for a general readership; it felt too raw, in many ways. Harding also uses rather a lot of repetition unnecessarily, which I did find wearing after a while. Kadian Journal is a nice tribute to a lost son, but it did not always plunge the depths or the despair which I would have expected from such a book.
Much of the memoir uses this choppy narrative style, which works very well to describe the accident and its aftermath, but is not so effective at other times. For the most part, Harding's prose is both heartfelt and very matter-of-fact; the latter made me feel rather detached from the whole. It felt, at times, as though I was intruding upon somebody's personal diary, which I had no right to read. There was no real sense that Kadian Journal was meant for a general readership; it felt too raw, in many ways. Harding also uses rather a lot of repetition unnecessarily, which I did find wearing after a while. Kadian Journal is a nice tribute to a lost son, but it did not always plunge the depths or the despair which I would have expected from such a book.
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