Customer Reviews

L-Shaped Room (Imprint Books)

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

 

 

I stumbled upon a copy of this book in a Goodwill store and purchased it for a whopping $0.50. What an investment! It is obvious that Ms. Banks was testing her writing mettle when she penned this story. Some of her amature enthusiasm does show through--but it is rare. For the most part, this is a brilliantly written book about love, fear, shame and redemption. None of the characters in this book is a sketch--each is full-bodied and bursting with life. Each person has problems, real ones we can all identify with, and each must work out the solutions for him/herself. But they are all the better for it.

Our heroin is not quite the model of viture we are used to: She is pregnant from a brief encounter with a man whose name she doesn't even mention until half-way through the book. Because of the ignorance of the times, she is forced out of her father's home, out of her job, and into a small and strange apartment. The people she meets in this apartment building help shape her, help make her realize that her life is not over due to one mistake. Her life has just begun--and there are plenty of mistakes yet to make.

The book is filled with memorable scenes and passages. For me, the passage where she finally reveals the name of the baby's father sticks in my mind. Not because it is such a big revelation. Quite the opposite. It is something tiny, trivial. He has changed her life forever, and yet he is nothing. Just that once sentence produced a cold lump in my stomach.

Please, if you can find a copy of this book, buy it. Unfortunately, the sequel does not live up to its predecessor. The sequel does have its moments, and I enjoyed reading it, but for my money, "The L-Shaped Room" is in a class of its own.

This story has everything behind it - love,hate, shame, compassion, sympathy, loneliness, understanding. It shares the troubles of a rejected young hopeful being who struggles through a pregnancy without the people she thought had loved her, her father, her friends, her family. Through the want of no help, she finds in a place of shabbiness called home, the L-Shaped Room, true friends, true love and the love for a child she never thought to be a reality.

Poignant story of a young women who had to make some tough choices. The author takes her readers on a journey of shame, forgiveness and an unbreakable spirit. Truly timeless.

I've spent the past day or two reading The L-Shaped Room obsessively. I wonder if I'm the only man who's ever read it. Something tells me it was primarily a woman's book, but I don't know, plenty of boys read The Indian in the Cupboard, Reid Banks' famous book for kids, and they lived to tell about it.

Jane, an unmarried mother-to-be, loses her job in a posh London hotel, when the manager finds out she's pregnant. Just like that, she's out of a job. She has saved her money wisely and now has about 53 pounds, which in 1960 terms must have been a pretty good deal. The rent to her new place is ten bob a week, whatever that is! But it is a squalid flat in a terrible neighborhood, and it's a fifth floor walk-up, and the chatty, neurotic landlady has furnished the tiny, L-shaped room with hideous furnishings anyone would despise.

But this is the extent of Jane's world now. She has not even told the father of her baby that their brief affair has produced a pregnancy. Why should she? She didn't love him, she just wanted to try her hand at romance. A former actress, Jane knows how to theatricalize herself, and in this novel Lynne Reid Banks shows how a woman gains her independence, even in the worst circumstances imaginable. Well, it doesn't take her long to find Man #2, another tenant at the rooming house, Toby Coleman, one of the most dashing heroes since George Knightley swept Emma Woodhouse off her feet. Toby's a wouldbe novelist writing a book with a title Jane hates, "Brave Coward." It is pretty silly, but Reid Banks makes us believe in Toby. And then there's John, the Caribbean-born calypso guitarist half in love with Toby and Jane equally.

I fell in love with all of them and laughed and cried all the way to the end! But then, reader, I grabbed The Backward Shadow and Two is Lonely, the two sequels to this great novel, and that was a different kettle of fish entirely. Reid Banks can make you believe in just about anything, and even the casual racism and homophobis and anti-Semitism of the main characters I can sort of forget about while I'm soaking in it. It's really a one of a kind book (the sequels I will discuss separately, and with grave concern.)

This has become one of my favorite books and should be on every teen reading list.

I had to read this book for a high school English class six years ago. I have been looking for it ever since. Unforgettable.

this book is excellent and everybody should read it! i am 13 and i enjoyed it

this book is excellent and everybody should read it! i am 13 and i enjoyed it