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travelsalongmybookshelf 's review for:
Bournville
by Jonathan Coe
In Bournville, a placid suburb of Birmingham, sits a famous chocolate factory. For eleven-year-old Mary and her family in 1945, it's the centre of the world. The reason their streets smell faintly of chocolate, the place where most of their friends and neighbours have worked for decades. Mary will go on to live through the Coronation and the World Cup final, royal weddings and royal funerals, Brexit and Covid-19. She'll have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Parts of the chocolate factory will be transformed into a theme park, as modern life and the city crowd in on their peaceful enclave.
Although this is about Mary Lamb and her families lives entwined with the history of Britain, it is actually all our histories. We move through 75 years of huge social change in the country and I think what it did was really make me think.
It made me think of my own families history, my mums family were the first in the street to have a television, everyone crowded in to watch the coronation in 1953, my mum little at the time, sat at the very front.
It also made me think how poignant this story is, to be reading this at a time of upheaval in our country, more war in Europe, the death of the Queen and a financial crisis- it made me feel there is a cyclical nature to our history.
This is such a very wonderfully woven story, rich in detail but with gentle twists and turns bookmarked by huge events in British history.
This is a book that is really going to stay with me, the final chapters of the book got to me, I think a lot of us will be able to relate to the scenes in some way. It was heartbreaking and I had a little cry. We are all really connected to history and Coe has executed this in a completely genius way, this is full of emotion and I loved it, plus there is chocolate. Bourneville is incidentally my mums favourite.
Documenting our history through the lives of one family. Pertinent, poignant, with wit and British humour to boot, what a novel!
Although this is about Mary Lamb and her families lives entwined with the history of Britain, it is actually all our histories. We move through 75 years of huge social change in the country and I think what it did was really make me think.
It made me think of my own families history, my mums family were the first in the street to have a television, everyone crowded in to watch the coronation in 1953, my mum little at the time, sat at the very front.
It also made me think how poignant this story is, to be reading this at a time of upheaval in our country, more war in Europe, the death of the Queen and a financial crisis- it made me feel there is a cyclical nature to our history.
This is such a very wonderfully woven story, rich in detail but with gentle twists and turns bookmarked by huge events in British history.
This is a book that is really going to stay with me, the final chapters of the book got to me, I think a lot of us will be able to relate to the scenes in some way. It was heartbreaking and I had a little cry. We are all really connected to history and Coe has executed this in a completely genius way, this is full of emotion and I loved it, plus there is chocolate. Bourneville is incidentally my mums favourite.
Documenting our history through the lives of one family. Pertinent, poignant, with wit and British humour to boot, what a novel!