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The descriptions of the land,weather and farming tasks were vivid and well written.I had to skip over the many passages describing the inevitable sad endings for many of Amy Connell and Lan Honey are having the best childhood, growing up on a West Country farm - three families, a couple of lodgers, goats, dogs and an orphaned calf called Gabriella Christmas. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Not much seemed to happen but there was a feeling that something would. The friendship between Amy & Lan is poignant, but doomed. I did like the parts where Lan finds joy in small things, and when he explained that the past and present are real but not the future. Sometimes hard to work out which of the children was narrating the story, which couples were together and who their children were. I am not sure that Amy and Lan have distinctive voices, but perhaps they just wouldn’t. Nor is there an obvious development in their world view until they move to secondary school – but again maybe there wouldn’t be. It is not to be read as a comment on the viability of communal living – there being at least as much good as bad in Frith. Good and bad in all things and everyone.
For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.A gently episodic and humorous tale whose sharp-eyed, effervescent child narrators entertain... Beguilingly readable' Daily Mail The adults are far too busy to keep an eye on Amy and Lan, and Amy and Lan would never tell them about climbing on the high barn roof, or what happened with the axe that time, any more than their parents would tell them the things they get up to - adult things, like betrayal - that threaten to bring the whole fragile idyll tumbling down...
No one conjures the magic of place like Sadie Jones ... A beautiful, haunting novel about the limits of love and the loss of innocence' Clare Clark It was not credible that the supposedly feisty Harriet would allow her husband and best friend to conduct an affair for five years without taking any action. Jones's evocation of childhood is spot-on- its fierce passions, disaffections, loyalties and suffering' Financial TimesThe chapters alternate between Lan’s voice and Amy’s. It takes a bit of getting used to. Working out who belongs to each child and who the others were took me a long time. They are definitely childish voices, with childish interests. We get clues to what are the issues with the adults through their childish observations, which they patently do not understand. Lan says that Amy never thinks that her mum ’might just go off one day’, which is a hint at what his mum has already done and so might do again. He catches his mum and Amy’s Dad kissing and ‘it wasn’t a love kiss because they aren’t married’. He dismisses it because he does not understand.
The references to popular music helped to set the era and mood, it is easy to identify with particular songs evoking memories. Initially I found it quite difficult to follow and without any direction, one chapter being written as ‘Lan’ , the next as ‘Amy’, which made it a bit more difficult to follow which parents/family belonged to which child, but it’s worth persevering with. It took me sometime to get into the flow of reading this book, perhaps the build-up of the story line was a bit slow for me! But the last third of it, the move/ the parting was quite gripping and made me emotional.
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Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Amy and Lan live on a communal farm in Herefordshire, their parents having taken a leap in the dark just before they were born. They came into the world and Frith, the farm, just days apart. So, they are kind of twins, but not brother and sister. The story is told by them alternately from 2005 when they turn 7 to the cusp of adolescence. So not [quite]a coming-of-age.
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