Cider With Rosie (Vintage classics)
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Product Description
Review
`Lee describes the rhythms of village life...so every smell and sensation of his Gloucestershire childhood comes alive'
--Daily Express
--Daily Express
Review
one of Susan Hampshire's `Six Best Books': `utterly charming'
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
27 of 28 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
"They said: `You're Laurie Lee, aren't you? Well just you sit there for the present.' I sat there all day but I never got it. I ain't going back there again." This is Laurie Lee's unforgettable description of his first day at school.
I have a special affection for this book, as my mother grew up in the Stroud area and was only two years younger than Laurie. Even if they didn't actually know each other, it is very likely that they met.
The story manages to be both lyrical and realistic. One minute it presents a childhood idyll, next you are faced with death - sometimes sad, sometimes brutal.
The core of the story is the life of Laurie's large and boisterous family, living in cheerful poverty in their Cotswold cottage, and above all his mercurial, warm-hearted mother (his father plays only a bit-part in events). "She was an artist, a light-giver, and an original, and she never for a moment knew it."
It is a common tendency to look back on the period of one's youth as a turning point in history, but when you read the last chapter you will understand Laurie's claim "The village had a few years left, the last of its thousand, and they passed almost without our knowing".
Rosie really did exist. Indeed, she outlived Laurie, and only three years ago she was interviewed by BBC Radio Gloucestershire.
There have been two excellent TV adaptations of the story. Unfortunately neither is currently available on DVD. (Correction August 2008 - the more recent version starring Juliet Stevenson is now available.)
The book is as golden as the cider of the title - read it and delight.
I have a special affection for this book, as my mother grew up in the Stroud area and was only two years younger than Laurie. Even if they didn't actually know each other, it is very likely that they met.
The story manages to be both lyrical and realistic. One minute it presents a childhood idyll, next you are faced with death - sometimes sad, sometimes brutal.
The core of the story is the life of Laurie's large and boisterous family, living in cheerful poverty in their Cotswold cottage, and above all his mercurial, warm-hearted mother (his father plays only a bit-part in events). "She was an artist, a light-giver, and an original, and she never for a moment knew it."
It is a common tendency to look back on the period of one's youth as a turning point in history, but when you read the last chapter you will understand Laurie's claim "The village had a few years left, the last of its thousand, and they passed almost without our knowing".
Rosie really did exist. Indeed, she outlived Laurie, and only three years ago she was interviewed by BBC Radio Gloucestershire.
There have been two excellent TV adaptations of the story. Unfortunately neither is currently available on DVD. (Correction August 2008 - the more recent version starring Juliet Stevenson is now available.)
The book is as golden as the cider of the title - read it and delight.
26 of 29 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Although Laurie Lee preferred to write poetry, he is best known for his prose: the trilogy of memoirs he wrote late in his life. "Cider with Rosie" is the first, detailing his childhood from the time he moves into his Gloucestershire home to just before he leaves to seek his fortune. His prose is extremely lyrical, especially when describing nature, his beloved mother and his three older half-sisters. Apart from the quality of the writing, "Cider with Rosie" should be read for the poetic descriptions of an England with few motorcars "where the horse was still king", agricultural communities that were able to function independently and hardly any interference from "the outside world".
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
"Never to be forgotten, that first long secret drink of golden fire, juice of those valleys and of that time, wine of wild orchards, of russet summer, of plump red apples, and Rosie's burning cheeks. Never to be forgotten, or ever tasted again...."
I challenge any reader not be moved by the poetry and the passion of the prose in this work. Truly a classic of the twentieth century.
Deeply evocative, one can almost feel the weight of a thousand years of history, slowly disappearing while the young Laurie Lee grows up, in a chaotic house with his memorable mother and the brothers and sisters from his father's first marriage as well as the second (the father himself having left for London). We see the full, glorious spectrum of village life, almost pagan in the way everything is bound up in the seasons and the rhythms of the earth.
A book to read and read again.
"I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began."
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Wonderful sense of time and place
I first read this book in 1989 and loved it, so when it was chosen for my Book Group I was keen to read it again. Read more
Published 4 months ago by hiljean
Evocative and wonderful look back in time
Growing up in a small village in the early 1900's Laurie Lee describes how life could be simple, charming, wonderful, cruel and hard. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Johnson
Another world, another time, captured forever
I started reading the book thinking it might be a saccharine possibly too sentimental...instead all my senses were aroused to his Cotswolds valley at the begining of the C20... Read more
Published 7 months ago by SACB
Breathless
Poetic, enchanting, happy, sad, simply wonderful.
If there is a better book about childhood then I want to read it. Read more
If there is a better book about childhood then I want to read it. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Cad
smell the Cotswold countryside
The reader can virtually smell the Cotswold countryside from Lee's prose in this memoir of the authors' childhood. At times, so candid that it's disturbing. Read more
Published 8 months ago by incognito
experiencing Cider with Rosie
A charming life-story told with deepest affection, reality and loyalty starting from a child's point of view, through the mysteries of adolence to youth.. Read more
Published 16 months ago by kelly
A masterpiece
The opening page of "Cider with Rosie" describes the world through the eyes of a toddler - mysterious, unpredictable, worryingly large. Read more
Published 16 months ago by Peasant
Cider with Rosie
I have enjoyed this book for many years, and unfortunately had lost my copy in a house move so was glad to be reunited with a good friend
Published 17 months ago by Olivia R
be carried along on a wave of words
Evocatively portrays life in the country towards the end of the first world war. Without nostalgia or rose tinted glasses Lee captures both the beauty of the country and the... Read more
Published 20 months ago by Paul Hoffman
Magic realism
A charming life-story told with deepest affection, reality and loyalty starting from a child's point of view, through the mysteries of adolence to youth. Read more
Published 20 months ago by In-flight
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