ostensibly is focused on Wilfred Price and his life in the small Welsh village, but turns out to be so much more
358155
An utterly delightful debut novel from Wendy Jones that ostensibly is focused on Wilfred Price and his life in the small Welsh village, but turns out to be so much more.  Wilfred is engaging, awkward, honest, shy and utterly enjoyable as he muddles through the aftermath from his one moment of spontaneity.

Caught in a moment between a romantic scene and his own confusion, Wilfred asks Grace to marry him in what he later determines was a mistake.  He thinks this isn't going to be too big of an issue  he can simply explain and move on.  But nothing is ever as simple as it seems with women, and poor Wilfred hadnt the personal experience to know this.  In fact, his relationships with women are all either professional or non-existent: his mother died when he was young, and his father never remarried. The two have managed to survive all of these years performing the timeless rituals required of their profession.

Wilfreds life was a contented one, or so he thought.  Enjoying his small corner of the world, where people, scenery and expectations are familiar and he has never quite been one to fall into the infamy spotlight as the subject of much town gossip.  Jones manages to incorporate the beauty and feel of this small town into Wilfreds thoughts and actions, which he passes along.  There is a deep and abiding love of place and the familiar from all of the characters we meet, yet a certain level of constraint that is present as well. The whole story manages to evoke a sense of time and place, with all of the good and bad.  Wilfreds unexpected proposal and the secrets that Grace holds deep inside add layers of the unexpected to the poor mans life, and forever changes his outlook on the world and his place within it.

I received an eArc copy of the title from the publisher via Edelweiss for purpose of honest review. I was not compensated for this review: all conclusions are my own responsibility.
211959
This quirky story is one which will give young people a window into the Holocaust, but without being exclusively about the subject, which might be too much for young readers.  The weaving of the three characters really works, including shoes as the thing which links them together.  Overall its an uplifting story showing you both the best and the worst in people.

The story jumps around from person-to-person frequently.  This might not be the most popular writing style for some readers.  But overall I still think its a great read.
2012368
The series provides an interesting look at the intersection of a small, subsistence farming hamlet and its neighbor, a village being slowly transformed by mechanization and links to the outer world. People work hard and must solve real survival and emotional problems, but there is no blood and gore. The pace is slow--like the daily life of the characters--but letting them grow as individuals is worth the effort. There is a strong emphasis on responsibility for one another and how we develop a personal sense of values to live by. but it's not prteachy. It's an engaging soap opera dressed up in BBC's finest staging, and an escape from today's terror and angst. You'll see lots of faces from other BBC productions, including Downton Abbey.
907012
In 1992 in a sleepy little town in NSW something very unusual happens. Young Rosie White disappears overnight, leaving her mother devastated and the townsfolk speculating. Just one week later another member of the community disappears; Bart McDonald, local butcher, upright citizen, all round good guy. He went fishing and never returned. Could their disappearances be connected, or is it merely co-incidental? And will the citizens of Goodwood ever know the truth?

In Goodwood there are a few shops, a couple of drinking establishments and just out of town, a lovely lake, perfect for fishing and boating. Seventeen year old Jean Brown introduces us to this small town, where everyone knows everyone. And where everyones business is kept by the whole town. Some people have learnt how to keep secrets, but eventually most secrets come to the surface. Jean lives with her mother nearby her grandparents, who have been in Goodwood forever.

A complex web of secrets and intrigues shrouds the members of Goodwood, which only start to unravel after the shocking disappearance of two very different people. Like an iceberg, much more lurks beneath the surface in Goodwood, hidden behind the public facade of each household. There is plenty of gossip, and just maybe some of it is true. Rosie works in the takeaway shop, having just left school the year before. Jean is a little bit in love with Rosie, who seems so cool and in control. In contrast, Bart is middle-aged and always has time for everyone, even the annoying old lady that visits his shop everyday mostly for a chat. They are very different people, superficially without a lot in common, just what is it that links their disappearances?

Goodwood sucked me in very early on. The plot was intricate, the characters interesting, and the pace moderate. It is a most enjoyable read about small town life and the impact that a sudden and unexpected event can illicit among the townspeople. It also has coming-of-age elements as Jean learns more about herself, her relationships and her place within the community.

I found this novel quite nostalgic, pulling me back into my childhood. Through description and characterisation, the world as it was in the early nineties came flooding back. The writing perfectly captured that time, and I was left with a feeling of familiarity and contentment. It was like having a spotlight shone upon a time that I had mostly forgotten as a young child, and that brought pleasing memories forth. This helped me feel connected to Jean, and thus connected to the story. Goodwood was a delight to read.

Goodwood is reminiscent of Peyton Place and The Dressmaker; if you liked these, try Goodwood, Im sure you will not be disappointed! It is suitable for upper high school students and adults, particularly appealing to mystery fans and those that enjoy the complexities of small community life.

*I received this book from the publisher as an uncorrected proof through an online competition. I did not receive any other remuneration, and the review is composed entirely of my own opinions.
754268
First, let me say that I saw this manuscript when it was in development and made a couple of suggestions to the author, a wonderful gentleman, but even if that had not been the case, I would be overwhelmed by this book. I doubt there's anyone alive who could tell a similar story -- or as well. If you want to learn firsthand what it was like to be raised in a small town in the early part of the 20th century (and be charmed by the author's sly wit and writing style in the process), what it was like to caught up in that amazing, turbulent decade, the 1930s or to experience the devastating loss of a sibling in a war, a terrible war where too many young, idealistic people were sacrificed to a Nazi war machine that basically saw Spain as batting practice while the world's democracies ignored at their own peril what was going on before their eyes. Well, we know the result, but what John Kedzie Jacobs tells us is what we too often forget: about the individual toll of the war. Multiply it by a thousand times and you can almost understand the horrific events that occurred in Spain.

Sometimes, the best way to tell a big story, you have to tell a very small one, and this charming, lovely, horrific book succeeds beyond anything I could have imagined. I only wish this review could do it justice.
4053577
Felix Calvino, born in Spain, emigrated to Australia in the sixties where, according to his bio note, he worked for many years in the travel, restaurant and wine industry. He did not attend college until the late 1990s when he studied Spanish and English at the University of Melbourne and began writing. In 2007 he published his first book, a story collection, A HATFUL OF CHERRIES. As of this moment (February 2014) I'm not sure if Felix Calvino's ALFONSO is even available for sale in the United States, but I hope it will be very soon. Because I can't remember enjoying a first novel (a novella really, at just 117 pages) this much in a very long time.

ALFONSO is a deceptively simple story of the life of an immigrant worker, transplanted from his native Galicia in Spain, to Sydney, Australia in the early sixties. Having grown up desperately poor in Franco's Spain, left fatherless by that country's Civil War, Alfonso (there are no last names in the story) is fortunate enough to be apprenticed to a wise old woodworker/carpenter from the age of twelve. Several years later, armed with a skilled trade, an inbred sense of right and wrong, and a strong work ethic, the young man bids farewell to his mother and brother, and sets off for Australia. There he finds regular work with a Sydney construction firm, lives very frugally, saves his money and dreams of a house and family. He takes night courses to learn English and mixes shyly at the local Spanish Club, but fails to find the love he is looking for, feeling torn between the old ways of Spain and those of his newly adopted country, of which a friend says, "Australia had no soul, only overtime, beer, and poker machines."

But Alfonso perseveres in pursuing his dream, buys a ruined row house which he repairs and restores over a three-year period, as he watches his friends and co-workers begin to marry and start families - the part of his dream which comes harder. He listens to other friends complain about Australian women and struggles to slough off the Spanish idea of marriage in which the man must always be dominant and the woman submissive, and engages in a cautious and almost fearful chase-and-retreat courtship of Nancy, a strong young Australian woman. The story culminates with an extremely satisfying and exquisitely crafted scene suggesting rebirth and new beginnings.

Alfonso is a wonderfully imagined and fully realized character that will resonate with readers for a long time. I loved this book! Highly recommended.
2131069
Carbys Fate is the story of a family dispute over inherited property, though perhaps it is more accurately the story of a community struggle over land and its deep meaning for a long-time colonized people, in the spirit of John B Keanes play, The Field.

It is a great story but, more important, it is a story that is well told. For it is clear that the author knows these country people of Ireland intimately: their lives, their thinking and their habits of interaction. It is also clear that he loves them by the ways in which he goes to the trouble of presenting much more than the drama but also the deeper hopes and fears that drive it.

His narrator reflects this love in the way he describes the characters, particularly the main character of the drama who does little to endear himself to anyone. You get the sense that there is more to this rather crude and unattractive person, which emerges finally as the story comes to a climax. You can certainly feel the pain he has endured since childhood and continues to endure from the scornful attitude of his neighbors. At the same time, lest he appear as simply a victim, the author also lets us see into the hearts of these neighbors who contribute to his pain even as they support his cause.

However, he has little sympathy for the character who proves to be the catalyst that brings the entire process to a head  perhaps because he is an outsider with no sense of the family dynamic that is at play  though he holds back from biasing us too much until the very end when the tragedy has run its course and it no longer matters.

I was deeply moved by the denouement which is really an unraveling that still leaves enough threads for a promising new tapestry. Not unlike the story of Ireland itself. In fact, this wonderful little vignette is a true microcosm and even a symbol of an Irish culture that the modern world is in the process of breaking into and breaking down.
Daniel Martin
3502278
Several attributes distinguish John Cowper Powys as a novelist, and the most prominent, as displayed by "A Glastonbury Romance," is his penchant for long, dense, erudite novels; he is fascinated with mythology and likes to instill his essentially mundane settings with the fantasy and mystique of ages long past; and he tends to be profoundly philosophical in regard to the First Cause.  This "Romance" is not a typical heroic epic; the characters are common people who live in the town of Glastonbury, in Somerset County, England, but, like Thomas Hardy's aesthetic successor, Powys creates with his townspeople a vivid microcosm, imitating their peculiar dialect and manners with formidable accuracy.
Structurally, "A Glastonbury Romance" is in the nineteenth-century English tradition of long, labyrinthine novels of the kind composed by Dickens and Eliot, containing dozens of characters and several concurrent plot threads, but it is updated to the early twentieth century with contemporary political and sexual issues.  Most of the action centers on a family called Crow who, at the beginning of the novel, have convened in Glastonbury for the funeral of, and to hear the will of, their recently deceased patriarch William.  The most successful of William's grandsons is Philip Crow, an industrialist who owns a dye factory and a cave complex called Wookey Hole through which flows an underground river and from which tin is mined.
The novel's conflicts are political, romantic, and spiritual on a grand scale.  The town's capitalism represented by Philip Crow is challenged by a small group of communists, led by the idealistic Dave Spear and a local churl named Red Robinson, who want to gain political control of Glastonbury and turn it into a worker-governed commune.  "Bloody Johnny" Geard, William Crow's former secretary, is elected Mayor through the support of the communists and becomes Philip's nemesis; although in the novel's concluding flood, a passage of enormous lyrical power and intense drama, the two men agree in a climactic scene on a surprisingly chivalrous course of action that reveals they are more heroic than their personalities originally suggested.
This modern story is immersed in the aura of ancient legends -- Welsh, Celtic, and Biblical, from King Arthur to the Holy Grail to Stonehenge, mystical ingredients in Powys's pungent narrative stew.  Perhaps reflecting Powys himself is a Welsh Arthurian antiquary named Owen Evans who has devoted his life to the study of local lore and is writing a history of Merlin the magician.  Despite his enthusiastic attentions to the mysteries of the past, Powys is not as much of a misoneist here as he was in "Wolf Solent"; he ungrudgingly allows airplanes in his novel, granting us a brief but wonderful bird's-eye view of Somersetshire.
Although Powys's weighty style greatly appeals to me, this novel is not something I'd casually recommend to just anybody because it does require a considerable investment of the reader's time and concentration, being nearly as long as "War and Peace" and featuring verbose prose that pushes itself to, and often over, the limit.  But readers who like to indulge themselves in the colorful and expansive potential of the English language will find "A Glastonbury Romance" a most enriching experience.
580587
The most interesting aspect of this book was how life really was lived in rural and small village pre-ww1 England.  The characters were well developed  and showed the strict mores of society at that time and also showing the levels of society very distinctly.  Though slow at the beginning, I found it enjoyable.
1987278
We are transported to rural England during the early 17th century where John Saturnall is having a difficult childhood growing up in a village where his mother is both valued as a healer and shunned as a witch. Meanwhile in the manor house some miles away, Lucretia, the unloved daughter of a stern nobleman whose beloved wife died in childbirth, dreams of being a queen.

In the village, John wins some grudging acceptance but strange, fanatical religious stirrings are making themselves felt. After a plague kills some villagers, he and his mother are driven out to fend for themselves in the forest and the mother dies during a brutal winter -- but not before she has imparted to her son the secret of a mysterious feast.

John, who has a preternatural ability to identify tastes and smells, winds up as a kitchen boy at the castle and comes into contact with Lucretia. As he grows and advances in skill, she is betrothed to the weak and unworthy Piers. But we know that John and Lucretia are made for one another.

The English Civil War breaks out and John is on the losing side. The victorious Puritans wreak their revenge on both John and Lucretia, their religious fanaticism now set free to reign without restraint. And John has some old enemies from his childhood to reckon with. Further I will not go for fear of spoiling this rather lovely book.

The descriptions of feasts and cooking are wonderful -- but one has to wonder how such a rich culinary tradition gave birth to British food. The history is interesting and the love story is also very touching. My one reservation concerns the feast around which the plot revolves.

As I understood it, the back story of this feast concerns an age before the advent of Christianity when pagan deities ruled in a kind of proto-socialist nirvana and where everyone -- master and servant, rich and poor, man and woman -- sit down together to enjoy the bounties of the earth. But then came Christianity which introduced the concepts of guilt and of rigid class distinctions. Now, the poor, who have to scrabble for food, serve the rich who have a surfeit.

The difference is explained in the Biblical story of Adam and Eve. In the pagan version, Eve hands Adam an apple in the Garden of Eden -- thus inviting him to share with her in perfect equality the first feast -- a perfect meal. In Christianity, the same moment represents the introduction of sin into the world. Food, enjoyment and the equality of the sexes, become intertwined with guilt.

Christianity may have driven this pagan tradition into the shadows but it is never quite extinguished. And it is John and Lucretia's task to recreate the original perfect feast in their own lives -- through sharing the good things of life equally between them and with their fellow men and women.

At least, I think that's what it's about. To me, this obscure theology is the weakest part of the book. However, it does not seriously mar what is a tremendously interesting and enjoyable read.
852965
This touching coming of age story benefits greatly from an unusual setting, the tiny British Channel island of Sark. The three main characters are all appealing and the setting with its rocky cliffs and beaches is invoked with care. Jude, a new graduate, is hired to tutor Pip who is preparing for his university entrance exam. Sofi who cooks for Pip's family is the most exuberant character, always looking to push the envelop.
The book is strongest when depicting the hopeless longing of first love - a love none of the characters is brave enough to act upon. Jude longs for Sofi but cannot express her feelings. Pip loves Jude but is several crucial years younger and is similarly tongue-tied. Sofi has guts and courage but seems to hover in the middle of a triangle that exists for this single summer in a delicate world of its own, almost dream-like in its intensity. Of course the end of the summer brings an explosive climax, after which the characters stumble through their lives trying to recapture the magic of those days. It's a touching hynm to the innocence and the intensity of first love and the tragedy of lost youth but with a surprising and redemptive twist at the end.
597476
The small Welsh village of Penmorfa is the main setting of the story which revolves around Coralie Casey and Gethin Lewis. Coralie is a newcomer to the village, she has left behind her busy corporate life to set up a small business selling her own range of natural beauty and cleaning products - inspired by her late Grandmother. Gethin, on the other hand, is a native of Penmorfa. He left the village many years before and is now a successful artist based in New York. Gethin has returned to refurbish and sell his childhood home after the recent death of his father. Gethin doesn't have happy memories of the village, and many of the residents seem to resent his success, especially as they feel that his most famous painting does his home village no favours.

Christine Stovell gradually introduces other characters into the story, and although they do not take centre stage, their personalities and complex lives are just as entertaining and often as intriguing as the two main players. The essence of village life is captured very well, from the gossipy old women, to the handsome young surfer and the modern-day worries of marriages, business and how to raise funds for the much needed new Community Centre.

As the story unfolds and the reader gets to know both Coralie and Gethin, my initial impressions of them changed. Gethin starts out as something of a cold and distant character, often appearing arrogant and uncaring. Coralie has an air of mystery to her, and at times appears quite vulnerable. As their relationship with each other develops, so does the relationship between their characters and the reader.

Move Over Darling is a traditional romance with a modern twist, and a hint of suspense and mystery running through it that makes for a satisfying and entertaining read.
164407
It's slightly miraculous to see how a time and place come alive through the words of a fine writer, and Clifton Meador performs that magic with this memoir.  As others have noted, it reads as much like a collection of connected short stories as it does a memoir.  He completely captures the town, its people, and the time with his graceful, kind, funny, and honest account of life in a small Alabama town in the 1940's.
3044107
The life and loves of  a father and son Doctor team in a small English village, with all of the hopes, dreams and general life goings on. In addition to the family dramas and joys are the usual eccentricities of the diverse trials and tribulations of the mixed bag of villagers.
2966759
Miss Read has a wonderful way of taking everyday life in a small village and making the reader care and be interested in all of the characters. Thrush Green sounds like an idyllic place. It's a small village in the English Cotswold's and everyone knows one another and all of their family. Most of the residents were born there and secrets are difficult to keep.

In this story, we have an elderly and wealthy lady who enjoys shoplifting! Her sisters are very embarrassed, but, can't seem to stop her. Two of the former residents are visiting, Miss Fogerty and Miss Watson. They had both taught in the village school and are respected and admired by everyone. The town has a new school headmaster, but his wife seems to have a big problem and the villagers know that something is wrong.

Once you read a Miss Read book, you won't forget it!  The author's real name is Dora Saint and she's written more than 30 stories. This book is also embellished by the touching illustrations of John S. Goodall.
2390908
This is a series of vignettes of life in a small town in the south that span 40+ years. They build upon each other to tell a story of prejudice, loyalty, trust, betrayal, love, abuse, and murder. It moved slow and was hard to get into, but Im glad I stuck with it. I am enriched for the time spent sharing the lives of these characters.
4189990
Like Russell T. Sharpe, I spent many of my formative years growing up on Crompton Avenue in East Greenwich. Naturally I was eager to read about what life was like for a boy residing there a half-century earlier. East Greenwich is well known for its wide-ranging collection of village characters, and Russells extended family contributed more than its share. The only one of them I can remember is his cousin of some degree or other, Ray Crompton, from a branch of the family for which the avenue was named.
When I was a kid Ray ran Sharpes Hardware (founded by Russells grandfather) and for years served as president of the Town Council. To me he was an old fogey, and I would have shaken my head in disbelief had I known his strange marital history that Russell reveals in this book. (Youll have to read the book yourself to find out what it was.)
Russell was a decent and responsible boy, but he had his share of fun. His mentioning an old summerhouse to which he retreated as a boy to think long thoughts and where he wrote a novel on some cheap pad of paper, brought to mind one of my favorite books as a kid  Penrod by Booth Tarkington. Tarkingtons protagonist, who lived in the identical period, was a middle-class boy much like Russell and he also had a secret retreat where he wrote a novel on a pad of paper. Maybe thats what boys did then.
The way of life among the Sharpes and their friends and family members was quite different from my own. We had no crystal and cut glass and sterling silver. And there were certainly no cooks, maids, or coachmen. However, everyone who lived on Crompton Avenue shared one thing, no matter what their social status or family income. When a train loudly rumbled by on the tracks paralleling the road, we had to stop conversing until it had passed.
This is a great memoir, not just for Townies, but for anyone interested in family life during the early twentieth century.