Customer Reviews

The Kitchen Madonna

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Rumer Godden delivers another unsentimental children's story that explores the quiet devotion that Peter has to his Ukranian housekeeper. A solitary boy who does not liked to be kissed or hugged, Peter scours London for a "Kitchen Madonna " that will make his homesick nanny feel welcome. In the course of his search, Peter makes new allies and discovers that even he needs the warmth and companionship of his family and neighbors.

Let me put it to you this way...I am considering buying this book for $45 and I am a poor college student. The most touching story of childhood generosity ever.

Rumer Godden is a consummate storyteller--and this is one of her most accessible tales.

Peter is a very introverted little boy, perhaps because he has been taken care of by a string of nannies and housekeepers or perhaps he is just that way by nature. But his latest housekeeper/nanny is Marta, a Ukranian who barely speaks English. She is an unhappy exile from her homeland, and is sad because the kitchen has no "good place"-- an altar with candles and an icon of Mary and the Infant Jesus. At home, the kitchen would have been a warm and cozy place with a candle-lit icon twinkling with little jewels in a dim corner.

For some reason, Marta's inchoate expression of her homesickness touches Peter, and he goes about making an icon for Marta. The story of how he finds materials to make the icon including foiled toffee wrapper "jewels" is a great little adventure and the puzzlement of Peter's parents, who have written him off as cold and strange is delightful. In the end, both Peter and the family are changed by the "good place" in the kitchen but more so by the lesson that doing something wholly for someone else has rich rewards.

Heartwarming tale of a standoffish London boy who goes to great efforts to make his Eastern-european refugee housekeeper feel welcome in her new country.

This new paperback edition has a totally inappropriate cover for this incandescent story of faith and love and the incarnation of those gifts.

This is just as good a read for adults as for children. I don't think anybody under twelve will really understand the weight and complexity of the characters' emotions. They would still enjoy the "crafty" aspect of the story, though, so it could go on any family's shelf.

I LOVE this book and hope to find the old hardback with its simple blue cover, but I'll live with this *very* reasonably priced one in the meantime.

Rumer Godden's THE KITCHEN MADONNA wraps the reader into the (apparently) 1960's existence of a London family with two busy architects as parents of a nine-year-old boy named Gregory and a seven-year-old girl named Janet. Gregory and Janet aren't sappy or spoiled. They are a bit neglected by their parents though and as a result are remarkably self-reliant and what we now call "proactive."

The children, especially Gregory, are worried their current maid/cook/etc., an immigrant from the Ukraine called Marta, isn't happy and will leave, as so many of the previous "help" did. Marta thinks their modern kitchen is rather cold and she tells the children of the custom in her Ukrainian home to have a devotional nook with a special kind of icon. Gregory, who is a withdrawn, aloof young fellow, decides to find a picture for Marta like she had at home. He and Janet range farther afield in London than they have parental permission to do. They visit museums and shops to further this quest. They suffer some setbacks and have to stretch their ingenuity. Gregory is the artistic one while Janet provides back-up for her usually reticent brother and sometimes suggests practical ways to overcome a hurdle. Gregory's determination to give something truly special to Marta transports him from his isolation to a a more social orientation. He learns that giving is loving and that creating something beautiful and meaningful requires commitment and sacrifice.

THE KITCHEN MADONNA is a forty-five-year-old tale that has lost none of its charm and purity. Told unsentimentally but with precision and a touch of urban enchantment, it is as much, if not more, for adults as for children. It illuminates, as so many of Godden's books do, a resounding goodness that human beings carry inside but need a prod to develop. This is a golden piece of fiction.

By the way, I read the edition with the original drawings by Carol Barker, and I thought they flawlessly, colorfully accompanied the text.

Shy, possessive and tired of changes, Gregory is attached to the family's housekeeper, Marta. But Marta is unhappy. Will she go away like the others? Gregory fears the worst. Marta, a late middle-age woman from Polish Ukraine, is too grateful to the family to reveal the source of her unhappiness. Gregory thinks he knows the cause and along with his younger sister Janet, he hatches a plan to make Marta happy and keep her longer. Together they search for a Ukrainian icon to create a "good place" in Marta's kitchen.

Perhaps the only way you can get this now is to pay for a used copy. I don't know. I do know that if you're contemplating it, and you can at all manage, it is worth it. This is a gentle, kindly book. Doesn't it seem like there are very few of them being written any more? Instead of poking you, or dragging you, it takes your hand, as a friend does, and takes you somewhere wonderful, and says it's okay to believe in love. Okay to teach love.

I don't know about you, but to me, that's worth an awful lot.