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bekab20's review against another edition
5.0
Beautifully written tale of village life, told as only Laurie Lee can. Full of poetic beauty, quirky characters, and a passion for the written word unlike any other.
mezwise's review
2.0
This stingy star count is is probably attributable to listening to the audiobook ... The prose would have rolled better around my head than the slow drawl of the author down the Hume Highway
jenn756's review
4.0
Cider with Rosie was the set text for a generation of English Lit students. I did Lord of the Flies instead, but you could predict it would be one or the other. My husband managed to get through the whole English `O' Level without having read Cider with Rosie at all, just by relying on study aids. He's still puzzled by the story - like where does Rosie come in exactly?
Anyway it put me off reading it for years, as I thought it too school textbooky, which is a pity because its a lovely book. It's an account of Laurie Lee's childhood in rural Gloucestershire. Its a bit strangled by its success perhaps, too much the dream of an idyllic lost merrie England. Slad the village in which Laurie Lee lived is all holiday cottages and I bet Lee's cottage is worth millions. To be fair Laurie Lee is not sentimental, its a warts and all perspective of rural life, his family lived in great poverty in childhood. The pretty cottage he grew up had no heating and was deathly cold in winter. Its a memory of a way of life that's past, essentially a 19th century world that hung on into the 20th century. The book starts at the close of the First World War and finishes and the end of the 1920s. There's nostalgia for his lost childhood too, Lee recounts his sisters and mother with great affection. His sisters do sound wonderful! Its funny - the winters are always cold and the summers always hot, just like my childhood strangely....
Lee's great strength is his fluid, poetic way of writing. Obviously educationalists thought his literary style might rub off on all those teenagers (in fact my husband missed the point there completely).
It's closest to Flora Thompson's `Lark Rise to Candleford' which is another account of a rural childhood, this time set in the 1880s. Flora Thompson doesn't have that knack with words but she was more realistic I think and possibly a nicer person. There's a BBC TV series at the moment called the `The Village' which portrays the countryside in a much more grimly realistic way, with abusive parents and misery and poverty. What Cider with Rosie shows more than anything, it doesn't matter what time you live in, as long as you have a loving family. Or maybe I'm getting soppy in my old age....
Anyway it put me off reading it for years, as I thought it too school textbooky, which is a pity because its a lovely book. It's an account of Laurie Lee's childhood in rural Gloucestershire. Its a bit strangled by its success perhaps, too much the dream of an idyllic lost merrie England. Slad the village in which Laurie Lee lived is all holiday cottages and I bet Lee's cottage is worth millions. To be fair Laurie Lee is not sentimental, its a warts and all perspective of rural life, his family lived in great poverty in childhood. The pretty cottage he grew up had no heating and was deathly cold in winter. Its a memory of a way of life that's past, essentially a 19th century world that hung on into the 20th century. The book starts at the close of the First World War and finishes and the end of the 1920s. There's nostalgia for his lost childhood too, Lee recounts his sisters and mother with great affection. His sisters do sound wonderful! Its funny - the winters are always cold and the summers always hot, just like my childhood strangely....
Lee's great strength is his fluid, poetic way of writing. Obviously educationalists thought his literary style might rub off on all those teenagers (in fact my husband missed the point there completely).
It's closest to Flora Thompson's `Lark Rise to Candleford' which is another account of a rural childhood, this time set in the 1880s. Flora Thompson doesn't have that knack with words but she was more realistic I think and possibly a nicer person. There's a BBC TV series at the moment called the `The Village' which portrays the countryside in a much more grimly realistic way, with abusive parents and misery and poverty. What Cider with Rosie shows more than anything, it doesn't matter what time you live in, as long as you have a loving family. Or maybe I'm getting soppy in my old age....
magratajostiernos's review against another edition
5.0
Una gozada de principio a fin :3
Se va directo a mis preferidos!!!
Se va directo a mis preferidos!!!
needilup's review
3.0
This book takes you on a ramble through his life. I kept expecting something bad to happen and I guess bad things did, but they weren't the focus of the story. So it was a nice story, I could pick it up and put it down easily, but it didn't grab my attention.
trisha_thomas's review
2.0
I just found this book to be boring. I couldn't seem to keep my attention long enough to ride through all the little day to day stories to follow this one all the way through. It was tough to finish, even with skimming in areas.