Customer Reviews

Our Hearts Were Young & Gay

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

A long time hobby of mine has been to watch classic films, then scour used bookstores looking for the original work on which the films was based. When I first saw the film "Our Hearts Were Young And Gay", I knew I just had to find the book! Little did I realize that the European adventures of these two girls in the 1920s was actually not a work of fiction! There is even a line at the introduction of the book that reads "Lest the reader should be in any doubt, we wish to state that the incidents in this book are all true and the characters completely non-fictitious." I recently took this book on my first trip to Europe and found it delightful and funny. Great for those long hours waiting for and flying on planes. I must admit that this is the first book that ever had me literally laughing out loud.

Of course with any story turned into a film, it was kissed with a bit of Hollywood glamour and parts were left on the cutting room floor, but the story is truly witty, charming and fun and follows very closely to the book. See the movie if you can catch it on a classic movie channel! It hasn't been released on video or DVD yet. As for the book, the pages are worn and the dustjacket is ripped but it will always be in my library and I look forward to reading it over and over again.

I purchased a paperback copy of this book when I was in elementary school and have cherished it ever since. Even though I have read the book many times, I still laugh at the girls' many adventures. It's a joy to read a well-written book, and these two ladies know how to turn a phrase. Even the most incidental characters come to life - from Miss Mary in Canada to the French madam who is befuddled by the fact that her establishment has been recommended by a publication listing safe accomodations for well-bred young ladies. Cornelia and Emily, lifelong friends, will seem like your longtime friends after you read this book.

'Our hearts were young and gay' was the funniest book I had read for a long time when I came across it some ten years ago. Cornelia otis Skinner's adventures with her friend, Emily Kimbrough were really hilarious. I had always wanted to travel and this book (amongst others) only increased my determination to achieve that ambition which I did a year or two later. I even had the opportunity to visit a few of the places they mentioned such as Rouen and the beautiful seaside village of St Valery. Because of this book I have ended up collecting anything either author has written. Cornelia Otis Skinner has an easy going natural style which relies on the ability to tell a good story well. It is the way she wrote that makes the stories so funny and witty and it was a real shame that she did not write more in this way. Her stories of Paris made that city come alive in such a way that some sixty years later, even with so much social and political change, the Paris she first kne! w of can still be seen if one wants to look for it. I would certainly reccommend this book to anyone who likes to travel and can relate their own funny experiences with these two intrepid travellers. The book is not a conventional account of a journey with long descriptive passages but can be best described as a quirky and silly account that is good for a laugh and which can bring to mind our own quirky adventures.

At least once a decade since I was fifteen, I have re-read OUR HEARTS WERE YOUNG AND GAY, and the pleasure which I find in it never has diminished. Of course, by now, it's more like visiting with old friends than it is starting out on a brand-new adventure. Yet with the passage of years, the simpler delights--and values--which OUR HEARTS WERE YOUNG AND GAY displays so matter-of-factly appear even more touching than they once had. There are many scenes which are hilarious, and I can state definitively that these scenes have withstood the test of time. While OUR HEARTS WERE YOUNG AND GAY undeniably is a sweet story, it remains the best read ever. And it is a book that anyone can share with a teenaged daughter or an 80-year old grandmother without a second's concern about exposing them to ideas that may be unseemly.

This book is my favorite, and I read alot. I start to chuckle before I turn the page, knowing what I will read there. I loved the story about the rabbit fur coats, the stories of the theater, Cornelia and Emily's journey through France...the whole book was great and timeless.

Cornelia Otis skinner is the real comedienne of this pair of authors and injects a lot more humor into this book, as opposed to most of Kimbrough's solo works. You cannot imagine two more naive college girls traveling about Europe in the 1920's. It was a simpler time, and today has great appeal to one's nostalgic side. If you get a chance to pick up a used copy, do so!

I've never read the entire book (I'm working on it!) but just excerpts from my eighth grade lit. book, but what I've seen of it is FUNNY! Cornelia Skinner and Emily Kimbrough get into such hilarious circumstances! This is one of the few books I've laughed aloud with!

If you enjoyed Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but thought the heroines slightly too worldly, you may be delighted by this autobiographical account of two relatively naive girls off for their first continental jaunt.

It's a delightful, charming little book about their misunderstandings and misadventures, and certainly introduced me to historical ladies' undergarments in an unforgettable manner!

There are sequels (like "Forty Plus and Fancy Free") if you find you particularly liked this one, but the first is the best, as sadly firsts so often are. This is a funny little treasure of a book.

Note: a 3 star ranking from me is actually pretty good; I reserve 4 stars for tremendously good works, and 5 only for the rare few that are or ought to be classic; unfortunately most books published are 2 or less.

This book was very touching. It was also funny and made me laugh out loud at the things that two ninteen year old girls did. Although it was set in the 1920's and I could not catch every person to which they referred, I still got the point of the book and enjoyed it immensely. I would definitely recommend this book to other teenagers and older because this book was one of the best books I ever read. The things they did I would never have done and the people they met were werid, yet I felt that without being able to relate very much to the book made it all the more interesting to read. I hope this book is read by others so they can all laugh as much as I did.

A most delightful book. The movie is just the tip of the iceburg. Everything from a ship running aground trying to get to sea to Cornelia discovering bedbugs in France. A definite link to that bygone age when women didn't travel alone and parents worried about their children enough to chaperone them from a distance. I heartily recommend any of Cornelia or Emily's books. The two best friends from Bryn Mawr who stayed best friends all their lives. This book explains some of why they were so close. Zany, kooky, you'd not believe some people'd actually get themselves into the situations that they do...