Customer Reviews

The Exiles

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

 

 

This hilarious book is great for cheering anyone up. Ruth, Naomi, Rachel and Phoebe are the best characters in any book I have read. I have read The Exiles, The Exiles at Home and The Exiles in Love over and over again. I recommend this book to anyone who anyone with a sense of humour and fun, as it's one the most enjoyable boos I have ever read.

This is probably one of my favourite books and I've read it over and over again. It was really, really funny - especially Rachel, who's my favourite character. The Exiles at Home was also excellent! I just hope that Hilary McKay writes lots more stories about the Conroy girls!

The four Conroy sisters are all bright, silly, oblivious, friendly, impatient, in other words, they're people. Like the people we really know, the girls are upset when their parents decided to pack them off to their fearsome Big Grandma after an unexpected financial windfall allows their parents to improve the home. It's not so much their eccentric grandma the girls object to, its the unfairness of their parenets in not sharing the money! Sent to the northern English coast they manage to survive their vacation without the emotional traumas required of most current childrens books. There is plenty of adventure with fire, water, falls, the locals and the continuing search for reading material. Big Grandma considers her granddaughters to be far too self-centered and only permits them to bring two books a piece to her home. The continuing battle of wills provides amusement and horror to those who won't consider going out-of-town without three novels and a magazine.

A lovely and funny book for children. Many years ago, I got this very book as a reward, winning a reading contest in school. I loved it from the first to the last page, and re-read it many times. Unfortunately it got lost while we moved to another country. Now I have another copy, and still love it from the first to the last page. The sisters are funny, crazy and amazing.

I came to this book having found a reference to the series in one of the Penderwick books that one of the other reviewers recommends.
My point of view on The Exiles is a little different than that of the other reviewers. I read it out loud to my two daughters, age 5 and 7. The act of reading aloud is fundamentally different than reading silently. Some writers who read well silently are exposed when read aloud. Writing can be revealed as being needlessly ornate or clunky or even meaningless when read aloud. Not so McKay. She is a sly writer both in terms of the flow of her writing and her humor.
Her humor is her greatest strength. There was much that I found funny and other stuff that my girls found hilarious.
Her characters, at least in this book, feel very well thought out. And this is where she may be a better writer than Jeanne Birdsall who wrote the Penderwick books(which are great and should be read by girls age 6 through 13). The Penderwick girls are well-nigh flawless human beings. They are occassionally short-sighted but invariably they come around. The sisters in The Exiles come around somewhat but are also very self-centered, somewhat delusional (this is why Big Grandma basically keeps them bookless- to get them out in the world, a bit) and they can be disastrously stubborn or careless. There were times when I really didn't like them much and times when they were very charming. I am curious to see how they develop in the other two books in the series.
One last thing, which I will try to convey without giving any spoilers. Which age this book is appropriate for is up to your kid and whether or not you are reading to them. There are two incidents in the books, that if either of my girls had read to themselves, might have been too scary. However, when reading aloud to them, it led to some very good discussions. If you want your girl to read it for herself, you should probably read it first just to make sure that it is appropriate.
I do not want to leave off this review on a negative impression. I, as a doting 56 year old daddy, enjoyed this book very much. So did my girls. I very much want my girls to be readers. Books like this one make that goal seem easy.

Last night I read "The Exiles" by Hilary McKay, which had recently been recommended to me. And I'll agree with the others who enjoyed the story; while the book wasn't "laugh-out-lout" funny, the exploits of the girls were amusing. and it was a satisfying read.

That being said, I have to say perhaps I'm getting old (or just suffering from "cranky old git" syndrome), because I did identify much more with the long-suffering grandmother than I did the children. In fact, I rather act a bit like her when my young nephews come to visit! (The only exception being that I would love it if my nephews wanted to read all the time, like the girls in the book do. There don't seem to be any addicted readers in this family apart from myself.)

I wouldn't call it a problem with the book, exactly, but I didn't find the four sisters to be as appealing as the siblings in the two Penderwick books by Jeanne Birdsall (The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy (Penderwicks (Quality)), The Penderwicks on Gardam Street), or the Bastable children in the four books by Edith Nesbit (The Story of the Treasure Seekers: Being the Adventures of the Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune, The Wouldbegoods, The New Treasure Seekers (Illustrated Edition) (Dodo Press), Oswald Bastable and Others). If anyone has read and enjoyed "The Exiles," I would HIGHLY recommend they check out the other six books that I just mentioned.

I do have the two sequels to this book at hand, and I'm looking forward to reading them as well.

I'm not sure about the dust jacket illustration for this book, however. It's not bad, but it makes this title look like some sort of rather poignant story, rather than the comic story it is.