Customer Reviews

Cider with Rosie

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book was required reading during my childhood and, of course, I couldn't have dragged myself more slowly through it. How wise we become with age. This is an astonishing book. Lee is such a master of description that, after only a few pages, you slowly start to smell the fresh country air and hear the languid sounds of summer as you are inescabably drawn into the world of his childhood - a world that you realize has already faded into the mists of history. But this special time has not been lost - it has been captured forever in this irreplacable series of pictures. The people in these stories become more real than seems possible with only pen and ink: his characterizations are as clever as anything by Dickens or Dostoevski, and he catches the very essence of the sights, sounds and people around him with a charm unmatched by any other English writer. But this is not a story-book universe: the people in his young life have all the frailty, vanity, delight and tragedy that you would expect in any small community - but what other has been crystallized with such talent and wisdom. A wonderful work of art.

I was introduced to this book in a recent class taught by literati Doug Marx in Portland, Oregon. The book was the summit of 10 weeks' studying how to read good works to learn to write masterfully. Cider with Rosie was introduced as the penultimate example of the fusing of poetry, prose, nonfiction, and personal essay. Laurie Lee tells the tale of growing up in the last of the feudal villages in the post WWI Cotswolds. He paints with luxuriant language his single mother of seven, scatterbrained and cloudminded, his older doting sisters, a dottering squire, feuding spinster neighbors, seasons of pure hot and pure cold, whole village excursions by omnibus...all simple and quaint, but heartbreaking in their recent passing into history. Sensuous, breathtaking, heartstopping in its ability to pluck that which is familiar and delicious in the human experience. The poetry is Dylan Thomas made understandable. Recommend this book above almost any other.

Rooted in the earth and shining with long gone summers and freezing winters this is a beautiful and poignant flower of a book. Written in a sensuous and lyrical poetic prose it tells the story of the authors's boyhood in the Cotswolds of the West of England. Spinning round the great orb of his clutter-minded and loving mother are his sisters and wider village life. There is Illness, murder, private sorrow, boiling summer and frozen winter and finally the running down of the feudal clock as long awaited change comes to the valley. A book, more even - a place to be visited again and again...

There should be more than five stars for books like this one. All the reviewers who wrote about how poetic yet concrete, magical yet real this account of boyhood in the Cotswolds have said it much better than I can. It is pure magic. I wish it was 20 times as long. You might also find this book under the title "The Edge of Day". If you loved "Cider With Rosie" you might also enjoy "Lark Rise to Candleford", "The Golden Evenings of Summer" and the movie "A Christmas Story".

A book to read & re-read. Finely crafted & evocative of a now long ago & far away time and place.

I happen to live in the Cotswolds, the setting for this beautiful book, this Monet of literature. And, complying with the below reviews, I have to say that Stroud has become a concrete river, choked with litter, sidelined with Burger Stars, neon lights; a MacDonalds is in the blue print stages. Hills are lined with new developments. It's like, and I quote my mother, "A disease is spreading."

Yet there are places untouched by Americanisms, consumerism, electricity (and here I apologise, as this becomes less of a review, more an account of personal experience). But there are still rivers afloat with leaves, valleys deep that welcome sunsets. They frost the sky in winter, burn it by summer.

"There's beauty in decay," as someone said. Haven't got a clue who. But there you go. Although dying of shallow needs and commercial interests, snippets of the old way can be found. And in all their glory, too.