Christmas With the Savages

By -
Christmas With the Savages, by Mary Clive

This was a Christmas present!  It's a novel presented as a childhood memoir, based on the author's life, of a Christmas spent at an Edwardian country house.  Young Evelyn is about 8 years old, and her parents are detained in Scotland, so she is sent to the home of a family friend for the holiday.  It's a gathering of a large extended family with three sets of children, with the largest and loudest set named Savage.

The great thing about this memoir is how completely honest and unsentimental it is about what she thought as a child.  Evelyn, and all the other children, are show-offy, quarrelsome, self-centered, and ignorant enough to sound snotty when they're trying to sound sophisticated and knowledgeable.  They are hilarious.  The whole thing is a laugh riot.

There are also some nice details about everyday life during the Edwardian period--clothes, domestic items, and so on.  In particular, it's amazing how off on their own the children are; the adults just don't pay very much attention to them.  The nurses are mostly busy caring for the tiny children, and although they certainly give admonitions and so on, the children are unsupervised and on their own a lot of the time.  It's a bit stunning if you're a modern parent, used to our current norm of knowing where your child is at all times.

Very fun.

Comments

  1. CleoDecember 28, 2014 at 9:33 AM

    Wow, Jean, you find such obscure yet interesting books. My daughter has reached the point that she's read everything I can think of, so now I'm going to start to go through your blog and pick from there. I should come up with some gems!

    Thanks for the review!

    ReplyDelete
  2. CleoDecember 28, 2014 at 9:33 AM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  3. JeanDecember 29, 2014 at 8:45 AM

    Hey Cleo, how old is your daughter? My 14yo thought this story was a lot of fun....

    ReplyDelete
  4. CleoDecember 31, 2014 at 10:38 AM

    My daughter is turning 16 on Monday! I'm going to point her in the direction of this book and get her scrolling through your blog.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more