Minnie's Room [Paperback]

Mollie Panter-Downes (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Persephone Books (June 22, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 190315524X
• ISBN-13: 978-1903155240
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,429,505 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Short stories/vignettes: life in post-WWII Britain, November 19, 2010

By 

The Compleat Anglophile (Yardley, PA, United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Minnie's Room (Paperback)

I recently "discovered" Mollie Panter-Downes and quickly became a fan. Primarily a journalist, Ms. Panter-Downes was a regular contributor to The New Yorker for decades, and is best known for her "Letters from London" and "London War Notes." Her fiction output was small.

This slim volume contains short stories, or vignettes, of ordinary people dealing with the economic and social changes of post-WWII Britain, where life was even more austere, if quieter, than during the war. (I have childhood memories of my mother sending food and clothes to our family in England.) Panter-Downes was a fine observer of human nature and she made her characters come alive with a few light "brush strokes." Her main characters are women, and I like that she has captured the domestic, private-life aspects of the time. History so often dwells on great events and people, leaving everyday life (especially of women) to our imaginations.

I hope I have not made the book sound like a depressing read; it's just that the stories chronicle how people overcame - or not - trying times. And that is something that we can emphathize with today.

Anglophiles and readers who like people-centric stories (without a great deal of plot) will love this book. I've gone on to read her other work and in fact paid rather a lot of money for an out-of-print copy of a 1970s collection of her "London War Notes." These last will interest students of WWII history...but that is another review.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars lovely writing, stories are incidents, April 2, 2011

By 

Curtiss A. Matlock (Mobile, Alabama) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Minnie's Room (Paperback)

I love the writing in this collection, but the stories are not real stories with a beginning, middle, end, and where we see what happens to a character, some change. They are more like photographs of a scene in time.