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margaret21's review against another edition
3.0
North East Scotland 1944. Tough, remote, isolated. Life revolves round little beyond keeping body and soul together: planting and harvesting potatoes and other crops: livestock. Bits of extra money are spent on essentials like worn-out work shirts, not on frivolities like new curtains. Three Italian POWs are billeted on the community. They're regarded with suspicion, but also with interest ....
Each carefully chosen word in this novella evokes the tough lives lived in this community, in which little out of the ordinary happens, and quiet suspicion can flourish. It's atmospheric too. But in the end, this slight story didn't truly engage me.
Each carefully chosen word in this novella evokes the tough lives lived in this community, in which little out of the ordinary happens, and quiet suspicion can flourish. It's atmospheric too. But in the end, this slight story didn't truly engage me.
lafee's review against another edition
4.0
My second Jessie Kesson, almost as beautiful as the first. Once again set in a farming community in the northeast of Scotland, Another Time, Another Place examines how that community is forced to change to accommodate three Italian prisoners of war who have been billeted in farm cottages there. The story is told through the eyes of an unnamed female narrator who struggles with the confines of her small community and its rules and boundaries, and imagines casting off the expectations placed on her. As in Glitter of Mica, Kesson's writing is dreamy, almost stream-of-consciousness, fragmented into vignettes that gradually reveal a plot. This is slow, sublime reading.
1siobhan's review against another edition
5.0
Excellent short book by the Scottish modernist Jessie Kesson, a friend and contemporary of Nan Shepherd.
Our unnamed narrator, called only "the young woman" throughout the book. She is newly (and unhappily) wed to a farmer and lives in a very rural Scottish community she does not really fit into. When three Italian prisoners of war arrive, the young woman's entire existence is called into doubt as she is removed from her harsh life and thus able to awake not only on a sexual level.
The writing is very beautiful & I loved how these three Prisoners of War make the young woman's world so much larger just by existing.
5 Stars
Our unnamed narrator, called only "the young woman" throughout the book. She is newly (and unhappily) wed to a farmer and lives in a very rural Scottish community she does not really fit into. When three Italian prisoners of war arrive, the young woman's entire existence is called into doubt as she is removed from her harsh life and thus able to awake not only on a sexual level.
The writing is very beautiful & I loved how these three Prisoners of War make the young woman's world so much larger just by existing.
5 Stars
lnatal's review
2.0
A haunting tale of love and war set in a remote Scottish village. In fact, quite boring....
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