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3.76 AVERAGE
3.76 AVERAGE
Delightfully effervescent satire.
The twist is that there is no twist!
The twist is that there is no twist!
This was such a laugh! The characters are all wonderful in their horridness, the plot is a total riot, the pacing is perfect, and the heroine is both the worst and the best. It's like a 20th century Emma, with extra helpings of mansplaining, awkward sex jokes and over the top dialect. But the cherry on top of this book is just how well put together it is. Not a single character or plot point is left unresolved, with none of this nonsense of introducing characterisation points that don't add to the book as a whole. I'm so surprised this is her first novel given the technical skill here.
A wonderful marriage (!) of humour, plot, characters, pace, structure and style in one fun book.
A wonderful marriage (!) of humour, plot, characters, pace, structure and style in one fun book.
funny
lighthearted
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
this book was really boring and i struggled to finish it. the plot was bad and there was no real climax in the novel.
I sort of enjoyed the book; it's a bit of absurd fun. But I gather now from Amazon reviews that this is an abridged edition, so I'm not sure I can say that I've really read it. (There's no indication of this at Amazon or in the book itself.) Plus the Kindle rendering was incredibly poor. (E.g. "littered" appears as as "Uttered".) The reading experience was really poor.
"Like all really strong-minded women, on whom everybody flops, she adored being bossed about. It was so restful."
Funny
I'd seen bits of the movie and wasn't all that interested in trying the book... But another book I liked very much was pointed out to be a bit of a nod to Cold Comfort Farm. And thus I was intruiged enough to hunt up a copy of Cold Comfort Farm and read it... And I very much enjoyed it! I loved the tongue in cheek management of people and situations, the figuring out what people were wanting, and helping organize it so they achieved their dreams... And I very much liked the point of how someone can hold others hostage by emotional blackmail and enjoy it -- it's very true and I dislike it enormously when it's being played out. So I enjoyed that the author pointed it out. And Flora was slightly terrifying, but very fun and good at what age was doing. Good reading!
I'd seen bits of the movie and wasn't all that interested in trying the book... But another book I liked very much was pointed out to be a bit of a nod to Cold Comfort Farm. And thus I was intruiged enough to hunt up a copy of Cold Comfort Farm and read it... And I very much enjoyed it! I loved the tongue in cheek management of people and situations, the figuring out what people were wanting, and helping organize it so they achieved their dreams... And I very much liked the point of how someone can hold others hostage by emotional blackmail and enjoy it -- it's very true and I dislike it enormously when it's being played out. So I enjoyed that the author pointed it out. And Flora was slightly terrifying, but very fun and good at what age was doing. Good reading!
One of the nicest things about having rediscovered the ability to read books at a reasonable speed is feeling that I have the time to re-read old favourites rather than having to keep making progress through the pile of new-to-me books waiting to be read. New books are all well and good, but there's a lot to be said for revisiting an old friend, particularly at this time of year, and Cold Comfort Farm is always a joy.
First published in 1932, Cold Comfort Farm parodies the novels of rural hardship that were popular at the time, setting its heroine, the wonderful Flora Poste, down in the middle of the decaying farm owned by her cousins the Starkadders and ruled over by Aunt Ada Doom, who saw something nasty in the woodshed when she was a little girl. In only a few months Flora's common-sense, no-nonsense approach sorts out all the Starkadders' problems and sees everyone set on a much happier course in life. It's a wonderfully funny book (my favourite bits are the parts dealing with Mr Mybug, a DH Lawrencian writer who is working on a life of Branwell Brontë which will prove that he wrote all of the books usually attributed to his sisters, and Amos Starkadder's preaching to the Church of the Quivering Brethren) but also makes some quite serious points about women's autonomy and its relationship to happiness (I love Flora's championing of contraception to Meriam, the hired girl, whose susceptibility to long summer evenings when the mysterious sukebind is in bloom has resulted in her becoming the unmarried mother of four children).
Although I know the book so well I could almost recite bits of it from memory (helped, I suspect, by having listened to tapes of the 1981 Radio 4 adaptation on many long car journeys in my childhood) I always forget just how science fictional it is; it's set about 20 years after publication, in an England where videophones and air travel are common and where Lambeth has replaced Mayfair as the fashionable heart of London, although the mores and social structures remain those of the early 1930s and the SF elements don't really make much difference to the story (both the radio adaptation and the 1995 TV adaptation leave them out completely). The book is also a bit spikier than both of the adaptations, which are definitely gentle comedies and don't have nearly as much of a feminist slant as the book does.
Anyway, re-reading it was definitely a good way to spend a January weekend, and I always enjoy the idea that all it takes to change everything for the better is common sense, compassion and a determined refusal to believe that things can't be improved.
First published in 1932, Cold Comfort Farm parodies the novels of rural hardship that were popular at the time, setting its heroine, the wonderful Flora Poste, down in the middle of the decaying farm owned by her cousins the Starkadders and ruled over by Aunt Ada Doom, who saw something nasty in the woodshed when she was a little girl. In only a few months Flora's common-sense, no-nonsense approach sorts out all the Starkadders' problems and sees everyone set on a much happier course in life. It's a wonderfully funny book (my favourite bits are the parts dealing with Mr Mybug, a DH Lawrencian writer who is working on a life of Branwell Brontë which will prove that he wrote all of the books usually attributed to his sisters, and Amos Starkadder's preaching to the Church of the Quivering Brethren) but also makes some quite serious points about women's autonomy and its relationship to happiness (I love Flora's championing of contraception to Meriam, the hired girl, whose susceptibility to long summer evenings when the mysterious sukebind is in bloom has resulted in her becoming the unmarried mother of four children).
Although I know the book so well I could almost recite bits of it from memory (helped, I suspect, by having listened to tapes of the 1981 Radio 4 adaptation on many long car journeys in my childhood) I always forget just how science fictional it is; it's set about 20 years after publication, in an England where videophones and air travel are common and where Lambeth has replaced Mayfair as the fashionable heart of London, although the mores and social structures remain those of the early 1930s and the SF elements don't really make much difference to the story (both the radio adaptation and the 1995 TV adaptation leave them out completely). The book is also a bit spikier than both of the adaptations, which are definitely gentle comedies and don't have nearly as much of a feminist slant as the book does.
Anyway, re-reading it was definitely a good way to spend a January weekend, and I always enjoy the idea that all it takes to change everything for the better is common sense, compassion and a determined refusal to believe that things can't be improved.
Fun satire book which you'll probably spend most of the time trying to spot which book or author she's taking the piss out of at any time.
What did happen in the woodshed and did the goat die?
What did happen in the woodshed and did the goat die?
Somehow, this gem has passed me by. I knew of it, of course, by title - but appreciated little beyond that. Well, it is a delightful discovery. Published in 1932, it seems hardly dated, especially in its humour. It is LOL hilarious, replete with innuendo which must have been risqué for the time. Originally meant to be a parody, it transcends that. Flora Poste is an inspired invention, a Mary Poppins for the rural Sussex Starkadders, a far more eccentric, exotic and extended family than the posh London Banks.
It's a 4.5 rather than 5 star book, for a couple of reasons. In the forward addressed to Tony Pookworthy (yes!), she writes:
Subsequent ***-marked passages are actually quite jarring, interrupting the otherwise fantastic cadence of her style. I disliked this contrivance, probably just preferring Gibbon's genius sheer flapdoodle.
I also felt that is ended too neatly, and although that outcome is what Flora is for, I finished anticipating one last comic climax.
The great unanswered question is, of course, ‘And did the goat die?’ Highly recommended.
It's a 4.5 rather than 5 star book, for a couple of reasons. In the forward addressed to Tony Pookworthy (yes!), she writes:
And it is only because I have in mind all those thousands of persons not unlike myself, who work in the vulgar and meaningless bustle of offices, shops and homes, and who are not always sure whether a sentence is Literature or whether it is just sheer flapdoodle, that I have adopted the method perfected by the late Herr Baedeker, and firmly marked what I consider the finer passages with one, two or three stars.
Subsequent ***-marked passages are actually quite jarring, interrupting the otherwise fantastic cadence of her style. I disliked this contrivance, probably just preferring Gibbon's genius sheer flapdoodle.
I also felt that is ended too neatly, and although that outcome is what Flora is for, I finished anticipating one last comic climax.
The great unanswered question is, of course, ‘And did the goat die?’ Highly recommended.