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thepassingfancy's Reviews (335)
Gerald Durrell's account of his family's adventures on Corfu is thoroughly charming and delightful. Admittedly, my interest in the book was piqued after watching and the PBS/ITV adaptation and absolutely loving the family and their interactions on that series. I found the family as portrayed in the book to be the same family I loved from the series. In fact, what would have made me love the book even just a bit more would have been even more of the inter-family dynamics that are so well-captured by Durrell. The sense of place that Durrell evokes through his descriptions of Corfu, and it's scenery, flora, and fauna is stunning, though I have to admit that I found some of the more detailed descriptions of the wildlife that so fascinated Gerry to be occasionally a bit dry for me (just a personal reaction, certainly). That said, this book is an absolute treasure.
I expected that I would enjoy this book, but I didn't anticipate liking it quite as much as I did. It's certainly packed with pop culture references, and though a lot of them were just a few years before my time, plenty of it was familiar, and it was a lot of fun. I found the pacing of the story to be pretty good throughout, and it was interesting to think about the cultural "artifacts" that we are leaving behind for future generations to discover. It's also a bit daunting to consider how far off we may be from a society like the one depicted in the book. We may not be involved in a worldwide treasure hunt in a fully virtual world, but how much of our daily lives are obsessed with living in an OASIS of sorts? How much of ourselves do we willingly and/or anonymously share, and with whom? The book doesn't really spend much time moralizing on how our increasingly digital lives affect us, but for me, at least, it did provoke some thought on the subject. For every time I thought "this is so cool!" it was tempered by another thought of "this is kind of scary." All in all, a nostalgic, energetic, thought-provoking adventure.
