I didn't read the end because no clear questions occurred to me while reading that I wanted to answered, and um -- huh. That is not how I expected this book to end. You doing all right over there, Rumer Godden?

I have to state that this novel was much darker than I anticipated. This is not a light and frothy comic-of-age story. The entire book felt slightly sinister to me and I never felt fully engaged with our narrator Cecil. Willmouse, the younger brother, was by far my favorite character and his role is mostly incidental to the story.

Godden’s writing is pitch perfect in creating a tone and setting of ever-impending doom and guiding us through the innocence of childhood as that innocence comes screeching to a halt and explodes into an adult knowledge of a world much darker than was known before.

I can’t honestly say that I enjoyed this book though I am glad to have read it. It left a slightly bad taste in my mouth which, to Godden’s credit, is probably what she was setting out to do.

I'm so surprised that this book is not one of the Great Classics. I'd never even heard of it before I picked it up. This is one of my new favourite 20th century novels.

The book is narrated by 13 year old Cecil who, with her siblings and mother, goes to France for the summer. However, when her mother gets sick, the children are sent to stay in a hotel with an Englishman called Eliot. They spend halcyon days wondering the French countryside and villages, and Cecil observes the antics of adulthood (as the only french linguist). She sits in between adulthood and childhood this summer, in a very similar way to Leo in The Go-Between.

Can't believe I haven't read this? (love this author) - saw this on the "recommended" shelf at the library. Finished - it was good and I liked it but didn't love it. It did drive me crazy that there was so much French that was not translated or explained by other dialog. And all the characters were introduced in such a flurry it took me almost the whole book to get them straight. **see private note below

“I know now it is children who accept life; grown people cover it up and pretend it is different with drinks”
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“Mam” is exasperated. Her husband is in Tibet cataloging ferns and her five children are proving inherently selfish. She takes them all to France on a mission to show them the WWI grave sites, but a horsefly bite leaves her stranded in hospital for 2 months whilst the children stay at their hotel, Les Oeillets, and roam around the town of Vieux-Moutiers. As the greengages in the hotel’s orchard slowly over-ripen and rot over summer, so Joss and Cecil, the two oldest girls, start to learn about adulthood and the fallibility of the adults around them


I read this as part of an online book club and we had some fantastic group discussions about the transition from child to adulthood and the experience of being that strange “neither one thing nor the other” age, like Cecil at thirteen. Based on a real experience from Rumer Godden’s life, there was a criminal element to the story that none of us expected


The Greengage Summer has has almost replaced I Capture the Castle in my affections as a coming-of-age story. My abiding memories of it will be

Inspired by my re-reading of a childhood favourite, Rumer Godden’s ‘An Episode of Sparrows,’ I decided to read what is probably Godden’s best-known book, ‘The Greengage Summer.’ I figured that anything by Godden would be worth the investment, and as 'The Greengage Summer’ had been made into a film (starring a young Susannah York), I didn’t think I’d be disappointed. I wasn’t mistaken; ‘The Greengage Summer’ is an engaging read on various levels.
For me the most pleasurable aspect is Godden’s ability to perfectly conjure up what it feels like to be an English child from a drab British neighbourhood with its stodgy, lacklustre food to visit rural France. Cecil’s (the first-person child narrator’s) articulate impressions of their country hotel, the nearby greengage orchard, lavender beds, a meandering river, crisp baguettes, the fizz of champagne, etc. are full of wonder and sensuality that any kid might feel on their first experience of French landscape and culture. As Godden writes — in Cecil’s voice — early on in the book: “To wake for the first time in a new place can be like another birth.”
The reader senses a maturing journey ahead for Cecil and her four siblings, left alone by their sick mother, who has to be hospitalized in a nearby town as soon as they arrive at the idiosyncratic Les Oeillets, their country house hotel. (I wondered why Godden chose a difficult name to pronounce, even for a fairly competent French speaker. But I suppose it’s meaning — the eyelets — is vaguely appropriate. Perhaps there's a colloquial translation of which I'm not aware.)
As with ‘Episode of Sparrows,’ I was amazed and impressed by the adult issues that Godden was able to inject into this book without thrusting them — in an overly politically-correct fashion — in the reader’s face. Two main characters are obviously tempestuous lovers, although not married. Which might seem innocuous now, but ‘The Greengage Summer’ was published in 1958 when sex outside of marriage was still frowned on. The only boy of the five kids, Willmouse, designs clothes for his two dolls, Miss Dawn and Dolores. No gender stereotypes for Rumer Godden! Although she veers close to stereotypical characters when it comes to the French, but she ensures that every person is a distinct individual and each a genuine portrayal.
‘The Greengage Summer’ contains a credible cops-and-robbers plot involving bank robbery, but the book derives its real tension most effectively from a growing realization by the two older daughters (Cecil and Joss) of the power of Joss’s newfound sexual attraction — she becomes the centre of attention for most of the men in the book from a lowly kitchen boy to an elderly painter. Joss’s recent maturity is made obvious by the attentions of a louche and seemingly selfish Englishman, Eliot, who is one of the aforementioned lovers. His partner is the temperamental and jealous Mademoiselle Gigi, part owner of the hotel. Eliot cannot disguise his infatuation with Joss, with resulting disastrous histrionics from Mlle. Gigi.
To read 'The Greengage Summer’ is like spending a sunny Summer weekend in a beautiful French country hotel, with delicious food and drink, in the company of characters with faults, foibles and charms that make for most entertaining company.

So I really wanted to like this and it started strong with the beautiful descriptions of the French countryside and a rather odd family of children. But so much potential wasted by a rather pointless mystery. And the unbelievable characters and their actions. I couldn't buy the blind devotion of the children to Eliot. Appreciate it was written in the 50s but it seemed the author was trying too hard to make each of the children quirky. So two stars for the writing but not one for my taste.

Rumor Godden had a talent for being able to see the world through the eyes of somewhat odd, very intelligent children. In "The Greengage Summer," she accomplishes the task of presenting a family of such children against a backdrop of abandonment, a foreign land, awakening sexuality and criminal activity.
As I read this book, I was drawn back to my own childhood in the character of the narrator, the oldest child but one, who often has to be the responsible person in the face of flighty, immature behavior of the French innkeeper adults who neither want nor handle well these "wild" English children thrust upon them when their mother ends up hospitalized at the start of their summer holiday abroad. Godden made me feel the joys of summer freedom, the playfulness at trying out forbidden adult behaviors, and the terror and confusion when it all starts to go wrong.
I was an advanced reader as a child and read as many of Rumor Godden's novels as I could lay my hands on in my small town library. Sadly, "The Greengage Summer" was not there.

“On and off, all that hot French August, we made ourselves ill from eating the greengages.”

What exactly is a greengage? Maybe you know, but I asked myself that question when I saw the title of this book. According to Wikipedia, they are a green-fruited plum noted for their “rich, confectionary flavor.” And the “we” in that quote pertains to five siblings from England on a holiday in France. After their mother’s sudden illness, they are left in the care of a charismatic Englishman staying at the same French pension along the Marne River. The children do what children do best while left to their own devices too much. They land in the middle of things they don’t quite understand! The narrator of this story, thirteen-year-old Cecil, was perfectly charming. She’s a dreamer; she’s also sharp and inquisitive.

“Our surname was Grey; I wished it had been Shelmerdine or de Courcy… Cecil de Courcy, de Haviland, Cecil du Guesclin, Winnington-Withers… Winter. That was a beautiful name and I thought, I shall use it when I am a writer, or a nun; Cecil Winter, Sister Cecilia Winter; but I was not yet a writer, or a nun, nor did I know that I should ever be either. At the moment I was more like a chameleon, coloured by other people’s business…”

This is a lovely coming-of-age story with all the wonderful sights and sounds and smells one is later nostalgic for after a memorable holiday. There’s also a mystery surrounding the French pension, its owner, Mademoiselle Zizi, and the Englishman. Going into detail would ruin things for the reader a bit. This book might not be considered deeply insightful, but where it succeeds for me is in the pointing out of those feelings one experiences at certain transitions from young child to adolescent and from adolescent to young woman. I dare you to tell me you’ve never related to any of these little revelations yourself.

“It was odd – and annoying – that I always wanted us not to be ordinary but, when we were a little extraordinary, I blushed.”

“Most grown people are like icebergs, three-tenths showing, seven-tenths submerged…”

“To wake for the first time in a new place can be like another birth.”

“What has made you so unhappy?”… “Being perfectly happy for two days.”

Rumer Godden was an English author who wrote quite prolifically from the 1930s through the 1990s. She has numerous adult and children’s novels to her name, and some of her work was adapted to the screen. She is a new-to-me author, and I’m happy I’ve finally listened to my trusted friends here who have been reading and applauding her work for some time now. If this introduction is any indication, I have much to look forward to!

“There was peace in the overgrown grass walks and heavy bushes, in the long orchard alleys where the greengages ripened in their own time and were neither forced nor pruned; here everything was itself, exactly as it seemed.”

I first read this book as a teenager and was happy to find the audio version on the library shelf so that I could renew my acquaintance with this author and her work. I found I had forgotten the details of the story but had a sense of the atmosphere which comes through. The characters are well drawn and there is a fine sense of place. This might appear to be a story about children on holiday but there is a sense of menace that comes through and the end of the novel comes as a surprise.

Beautifully written summer story by Rumer Godden, a genuinely great writer. A group of children find themselves alone in a hotel in the French countryside for a summer.

4.5 stars.


Greengage plums

In this 1958 novel by Rumer Godden (one of those once well-known authors that I’d never heard of before I started hanging out online with GR friends who love older books), five English children, ages 5 to 16, are taken by their mother to France for an educational vacation - touring the battlefields of France so they’ll have more appreciation for the sacrifices of others. The kids will get a life lesson, all right: it’s just not the one their mother intended.

Their mother is bitten on the leg by a horsefly just before the trip and winds up in the hospital; the children end up living largely unsupervised at their hotel for a few weeks. A gentleman who’s sleeping with one of the proprietors of the hotel takes them under his wing, at least to some extent, but it’s clear from the start that he has his own reasons for keeping them around.

The Greengage Summer is a coming of age story, narrated by 13 year old Cecil (a girl), that starts out very languid and slow-paced, but then the tension starts building as they realize something is very off with one of their friends at the hotel, and some horrifying events happen. I couldn’t put it down for the second half.

The greengage plums used in the title have an interesting symbolism: they're so sweet, but these phrases and words were typically used in connection with them:

"we made ourselves ill from eating the greengages"
"as if the first greengage had been an Eden apple, I was suddenly older and wiser"
"There were a few, on the trees, overripe in the sun but still firm under the leaves; I ate both kinds and they added to the chaotic feeling in my stomach."
"Greengage indigestion!"

This summer was a definitely a loss of Eden experience for the Grey siblings.

It’s a rather sobering look into human nature and our weaknesses. The characterization is excellent, subtle and with depth, and sometimes disturbing. If you like I Capture the Castle, give The Greengage Summer a read.

Well worth reading, but there’s a ton of mostly-untranslated French in it. Good thing the Kindle has a translation feature! I used it constantly.

January 2019 group read with the Retro Reads group.

Content notes: some adult material, though not explicit, including lots of swearing in French that mostly went over my head because the Kindle translated it into pretty innocuous words.