Reviews - Lowborn: Growing Up, Getting Away and Returning to Britain's Poorest Towns

269 reviews for:

Lowborn: Growing Up, Getting Away and Returning to Britain's Poorest Towns

I first heard Kerry talk at a Vintage Roadshow at Forum Books, Corbridge before Christmas, this didn’t put me off though ;) and I was really fascinated by the concept of Lowborn.

Earlier this year I went to another Vintage Roadshow and was pleased to be able to pick up an advance copy of this.

It didn’t disappoint. It had me in tears, angry, upset, sad, but also laughing a lot due to the humour that came through.

It’s taken me a while (and a second reading, well worth it) to get my thoughts together to write this review.

The voice in this book is so honest, and due to my own past, familiar. Kerry writes about her past in some of the poorest communities in the UK, growing up in a family that doesn’t conform to the norms as seen in all the media that children consume and having to survive and hopefully grow from this. Then once she has gotten out, returning to explore emotions, personal history, and memories.

There is a lot of wry humour in this book, but by far it is the raw imagery of a past coloured by emotional and financial difficulties, both systematic and familial, that took me straight back to my own childhood and will have you fearful the child in the ‘story’ and all the other children in stories like this all over the country now.

The return to these communities is a huge emotional commitment and again is approached with wry humour and introspection, but also massive bravery. It hurts to have to explore the past like this.

If you only read one book this month make sure it’s this one you will be amply rewarded.

sho73's review against another edition

challenging dark hopeful informative reflective sad medium-paced

Stories and books about poverty are unfortunately common, however this is my first time reading about a place next to where I lived

This book does a great job highlighting where the corruption and issues originate from

Very readable but obviously dark and somehow hopeful

joe_from_bow's review against another edition

3.75

challenging reflective

helena1357's review against another edition

5.0

adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring sad medium-paced

Content Warnings

lizandherworldofbooks's review against another edition

5.0

dark emotional informative reflective medium-paced

shannenlc's review against another edition

3.0

In this memoir, Kerry Hudson draws on her personal experience of growing up in poverty and living in some of the UK's poorest towns, to explore the sociological causes and effects of being poor. She traces her childhood and adolescent years describing the struggles and tragedies she faced including but not limited to her family's history of mental illness and addiction, being the victim of sexual assault and living in foster care. As part of her research, she revisits the towns she lived in throughout her turbulent younger years including Aberdeen, Canterbury, Airdrie, North Shields, Coatbridge, Great Yarmouth and Hetton. She investigates how these towns have changed since she lived there, the issues that they are facing currently, the type of communities that still live there and how much they resemble what they did when she lived there as a child.

It's raw, honest and eye-opening. There's a hidden class of people living in extreme poverty in the UK that are overlooked and forgotten, and we need more stories out there in the world. Hudson poured her heart and soul into writing this book and it shows. She acknowledges the privelege she has to be able to write about these experiences having escaped the poverty she was born into. Despite having climbed the social ladder, she's still aware of class issues in the UK and genuinely cares about the development of the poor communities she visits.

Whilst I do appreciate how much emotional and mental resillience and courage it must've taken for the author to write this memoir, it was a pretty average 3 star reading experience. It felt a bit meandering and lacked a central point. I also found the chapters where Hudson visited the towns to be uneventful and generally pointless in terms of what they brought to the book. I think this memoir is valuable to opening people's eyes to the class divide and extreme poverty that persists in the UK, but besides that I didn't take anything much of value from this and don't feel like it contributed anything new or unique to the discussion around class in the UK.