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A Long Way From Verona (1971)

by Jane Gardam(Favorite Author)

3.92 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1609451414 (ISBN13: 9781609451417)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Europa Editions

review 1: Having had the great luck to discover Jane Gardam earlier this year, I was happy to pick up this book, which I've learned was her first novel. What a talent! Gardam's ear for the thoughts, emotions and speech patterns of a 13 to 14 year old is quite remarkable. Jessica Vye, our delicious heroine, narrates the book. We learn she is destined to be a writer, has a very quirky family, lives in the years of WWII in England and goes to a very mediocre school with tiresome teachers and silly arbitrary rules. During the course of the novel Jessica visits what would be today called a slum, writes a poem, suffers the indignity of illness, learns more than she wants to know about some of her teachers, has a visit with the upper-class and has her first crush. She is spunky, smart and ... morenearly fearless. I liked her so much for those traits, but my admiration grew even greater when she describes how she set out to read, in alphabetical order by last name, all the authors in her local library! After this Gardam went on to write many other books. I've read three others (The Old Filth trilogy), and they are excellent.
review 2: What a pleasant surprise! Thank you, public library! This was on their new books shelf, but it turns out this is a re-issue of a novel published about 40 years ago. It's about a girl growing up in a town by the North Sea during World War II. She has a very distinct personality and voice, and she begins by telling you that she would have been normal except for something terrible that happened to you, which was that an author told her she is a writer. Plus she said she has the ability to know what other people are thinking. Take these ingredients and put her in a whole lot of different situations, like interactions with the teachers at her school, going to a tea shop with her friends when they don't have enough money and the people in the tea shop are completely oddball, being sent to the home of someone in the upperclass and falling in love with a boy she meets there, and all sorts of other adventures while WWII air raids are going on and every once in a while bombs are dropped, and you get this delightful, enjoyable book. I plan to read many other books of Jane Gardam's. less

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