Customer Reviews

Castle on the Hill

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Elizabeth Goudge is my favorite author, and this is one of my favorites by her. If you like Rosamunde Pilcher you will love Goudge! This book was written during the war (WWII), and takes place during the same time period. It was so interesting to read, knowing that the author was in the midst of that horrible event, not knowing how it would end. Like all of her stories, it is filled with love and the eternal optimism of the human spirit.

So many stories--especially stories written in or set in times of war--bludgeon a reader over the head with the horrors human beings commit upon one another. Goudge write stories where people struggle to be kind to one another, and given the setting of this book--England during the Blitz--their battles are eloquent, heart-breaking, and ultimately transcendent. Each of the many characters are vividly real in their distress and their desires, and each confronts a battle within that calls forth every resource of their humanity and strength. And all of this told with prose that evokes landscape and setting in ways astonishing and all too rare in fiction. Goudge deserves to be read, celebrated, and studied much more than she is. Her books are memorable, evocative; reading them is at once a humbling and illuminating experience, and this is one of her best.