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A review by lizziepurpleserenity
Private Keep Out! by Gwen Grant
5.0
*4.5 stars
This is a reread from my childhood. I have all three of the books, and I remember I used to love the colourful lettering on the covers!
It was so interesting rereading now as an adult and a mother, because parenting and childhood was so very different back then, in that place and time. It's about a big working class family in a Northern colliery town, six kids constantly rowing, a long-suffering mother (who must've been strong as an ox) who alternates between disciplining with threats and slaps and bursting into tears with both terror and empathy when bad things happen to her kids; a local quarry as a playground where you're always at risk of being beat up by other local kids (or even grown men, at one point).
The narrator is the protagonist, written a bit like a diary, it's a slice of life of this young girl fighting her corner (she is not what those around her think she should be, but she simply can't be anything else), and it is excellently written in terms of point of view - you really are inside a child's head and it's both hilarious and shocking (basically now, I can't see that what she is subjected to a lot of the time is anything but abuse, both physical and verbal), but it feels so real because it's a reminder of what it was like to be a kid, and what real kids (not storybook kids) can be like. Gwen Grant manages to pull this off without making the children in the book completely unlikeable. There are little moments of kindness peppered throughout, and that, along with your own honest memories of growing up, makes this a compelling read in the end.
This is a reread from my childhood. I have all three of the books, and I remember I used to love the colourful lettering on the covers!
It was so interesting rereading now as an adult and a mother, because parenting and childhood was so very different back then, in that place and time. It's about a big working class family in a Northern colliery town, six kids constantly rowing, a long-suffering mother (who must've been strong as an ox) who alternates between disciplining with threats and slaps and bursting into tears with both terror and empathy when bad things happen to her kids; a local quarry as a playground where you're always at risk of being beat up by other local kids (or even grown men, at one point).
The narrator is the protagonist, written a bit like a diary, it's a slice of life of this young girl fighting her corner (she is not what those around her think she should be, but she simply can't be anything else), and it is excellently written in terms of point of view - you really are inside a child's head and it's both hilarious and shocking (basically now, I can't see that what she is subjected to a lot of the time is anything but abuse, both physical and verbal), but it feels so real because it's a reminder of what it was like to be a kid, and what real kids (not storybook kids) can be like. Gwen Grant manages to pull this off without making the children in the book completely unlikeable. There are little moments of kindness peppered throughout, and that, along with your own honest memories of growing up, makes this a compelling read in the end.