Well that took a turn that I didn’t see coming ...

I really enjoyed this book, it was very atmospheric and dreamy. The descriptions of the french country side were so delicious, it felt like I was really there, reading my book and drinking coffee in the blazing heat. This was such a good summer read.

note: this book is a product of it’s time (c. 1958). There are racially insensitive comments and words. Be cautious if this is a trigger.

This 1958 novel is not the classic some reviewers seem to think it is in my opinion.

The premise of a young English family with five children aged 7-16 staying in a hotel outside of Paris for a summer, by adults not known to them, after their mother is bitten by a housefly and ends up in hospital, is interesting as a coming of age novel. The narrator is 13 year old Cecil, who happens to be a girl.

But the narrative never flows, the story is often convoluted and the dialogue is peppered with French that is rarely translated. There are some interesting bits, especially towards the end of the book with theft and murder, but overall I found the entire book a disappointing slog with a few high points.

2.5

Loved this book and the film of it when I read it many years ago...now find the relationships between the adults, both men and women, with the children very strange...

“I wondered what it was like to be buried and not to be sitting in this pretty satin-papered dining room, eating the things the visitors ate, hors d’oeuvres and pâté, poulet a l’estragon, veal and steaks, salads and greengages, and I hoped I need never be dead.”

A wonderful story about growing up but, I think because of how it was told, transcending childhood to become a story we can all relate to.

An English mother takes her five children to France to visit a war cemetery in order to teach them a little appreciation. Staying in a hotel along the Marne river, they learn alright, but probably not what their mother intended. It includes detailed descriptions of their impressions of this new world, and the reader joins them in finding their way through it.

Through the eyes of Cecil, the second eldest, the reader sees the hotel with all its bizarre characters and unfamiliar customs. There is an abundance of French phrases, but Cecil translates most of them for us and for her siblings. How each of the children cope in their individual ways is fascinating.

“At Les Oeillets we had adopted certain places for our own, each one of us had chosen one or two. Willmouse had the bank under the cherry tree, of course, but he also owned the little salon; though he had never been in it, it was his. Hester liked the conservatory and a certain small bed of picotees because its warm close smell reminded her of the carnation Eliot had worn on our first night that now seemed ages ago. Vicky had the vine arbour, perhaps because it was near the kitchen, and she said she liked the bidets—‘they are like dear little baths for dolls,’ said Vicky. I loved the wilderness; it was poetical with its white statues and the white jasmine and, for some reason, I loved the staircase, which was why I so much resented the machine-gun holes.”

The tension mounts as a mystery unfolds. The children have a unique viewpoint, and in that way children relate to animals, Cecil relays how they are herded like cattle, everywhere like insects, and chased and cornered like rabbits.

This was the perfect read for me in these uncertain times. Deep and light at the same time. Lovely.

Full five stars without need to round up. This 13 year old's (Cecil is her name) tale of a summer spent at a hotel in France during the 1920's is magnificent.

It has succulent fruit, ripe and golden, and all of it is not in the orchard. It has depth of change, childhood leaving. It has stunning elegance in parts. Cecil's favorite new word (elegance). It has the reality of parental absence and the fears of the unknown. It has the entire ambiance of the Large over the Small. It has intrigue and disguise. It has raw and exotic competitions on multiple levels. It all floats in an ocean of attractive and over-riding trust. It's as equally filled with fear and mistrustful alienation.

All amidst the supreme prose of a master for this in two languages. It helps very much to understand and be able to read the French, as well as the English.

Our 5 Grey children, such completely individual and different members, still knot tightly.

There are events, there are occurrences. All the long days glorious and yet nuance of difference turns tides and jolly outings of freedom to other more mature levels in some instants. And until the last few pages, there are 40 or 50 guesses and just a few straight answers.

Little pitchers, big ears. Cecil will know.

Lovely, lovely and incredibly realistic and yet heart leaping tale for many of our own memories of the wild summer days of freedom near the ends of our childhoods.

This would make a Motion Picture of the Year. The only one with such visuals I could think of in comparison would be "A Room with a View" filmed in Florence and Positano, Italy. This one, the Marne, the Greengage Orchards, the flower fields, that couple at the top of the stairs -meeting them for the first time in their Formal Dining Ensemble.

Joss, our Cecil, Hester with her Brownie, Wilhouse, and Vicky going to see the Champagne tunnels with Eliot. How did I ever miss this glorious, glorious Rumer Godden? The one with a plot better than Hitchcock's.

Chronological glory and I was never so glad to see Uncle William in my life.

Best quality of read in spirit and in lyrical prose for the year and exactly what I needed for a gloomy spring. Highly, highly recommend.

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

This is a lovely coming of age story in which our young British protagonists learn some valuable lessons over a summer spent in the Champagne region of France about new experiences, love, and deception. This story started out light and jovial with a mother wanting her unappreciative children to learn a lesson by visiting the French battlefields. We find out that things may not be quite as they seem even in such a luxurious and charming setting.

13-year-old Cecil narrates this extraordinary summer in France. She is the second oldest, 16-year-old Joss being the oldest. In their dull village in England, their family is viewed as a bit eccentric as they live with their uncle because their botanist father is always gone on expeditions. Once in France, mother is hospitalized for the duration, and they quickly figure out just how strange it is to live in a new country but to be abandoned without a proper chaperone on top of that makes their stay even more fearful and anxious and quite possible even freeing. When a strange Englishman named Eliot becomes their temporary guardian, readers begin to wonder if this was such a good idea. Also in the mix are the neurotic and jealous Frenchwoman, Mademoiselle Zizi and the hotel manager, Mademoiselle Coubert who dislikes having the children around. Problematic to everything else, Joss is on the edge of womanhood, and this complicates matters as she is rather beautiful. We begin to wonder whether the adults or the children are causing the complications.

When one came to know them it was surprising how childish grown people could be.

Godden has written an exquisite story of coming of age with a bit of a mystery and suspicious goings on. This is a perfect read for anyone who desires to be swept up to a different place who also enjoys a healthy character development in the midst of some intrigue. I can't wait for my next Godden story!

On and off, all that hot French August, we made ourselves ill from eating the greengages. Joss and I felt guilty; we were still at the age when we thought being greedy was a childish fault and this gave our guilt a tinge of hopelessness because, up to then, we had believed that as we grew older our faults would disappear, and none of them did.

This lovely book is coloured green and gold; it evokes the dappled light of a forest in a hot French summer, but shot through with darker, menacing undertones. Cecil is the 13 year old narrator who has found herself in a very strange situation. Her mother has been taken suddenly ill en route to a holiday in a rural hotel in France; leaving her and her 4 siblings to the mercies of the denizens of the hotel. Despite them having presumably booked rooms the unsympathetic proprietors behave as if the English children are an intolerable burden. the children have to fight for literal space and acceptance there with no where else to turn, as their feckless mother has forbidden them to send word to her brother at home, and has moreover asked a strange Englishman in the hotel, Eliot, to keep an eye on them all.
This book is in the same league as books such as The Go Between and What Maisie Knew, where an innocent child observes the decidedly less innocent goings on in the adult world around them, becoming changed in the process. Cecil and her younger siblings, including a fabulous gay little brother who wants to be a fashion designer, are resourceful and resilient, but they have an older sister, 16yo Joss, who falls to pieces under pressure. Moreover it is implied that she is extremely beautiful , in an otherworldly way, and is beginning to feel her powers. The book is permeated by an entirely creepy sense of illicit sex and danger…men of all ages who are attracted to Joss (clearly a vulnerable child), with Eliot’s intentions being a lot more sinister; the affair between Eliot and the hotel owner, the hotelier’s jealousy of Joss, Cecil’s own burgeoning feelings and her confusion, the sad character of Paul, an exploited war orphan who works in the hotel.
I can’t quite get over how clever this book is. Just a description of the ageing hotel owner’s ugly feet in their high heels, compared to Joss’s young perfect straight toes in their virginal sandals, conveys volumes. I need to read it again soon.
It lost a star for me just because of an abrupt, somewhat unsatisfying ending, probably bc it’s meant to be for YA. Otherwise, it’s a book wasted on the young!

AN interesting book that clashes a quaint idyll against as darker underground of secrets, all viewed through a piercing childhood lens.

I think, like many people, I find children protagonists very hit and miss. If done correctly they can be some of the most enchanting and funny narrators available, if done wrong the book is a failure. As this novel is based very heavily on an episode of the author's own childhood and real family members, here the narration succeeds. Cecil is a brilliant embodiment of a prepubescent young girl on the verge of womanhood. There is jealousy, there is angst, there are first loves, there are curiosities - all of these ingredients when set against a dreamy French landscape full of flavours, scents and sounds, result in a novel that is as much a discovery of childhood as it is a compelling mystery.

In a way, the first 150 or so pages buy into the whimsical summer novel feel - forests, lakes, catching fish, eating greengages - there's a meandering, indulgent feel to the writing which means it's the perfect choice for a summer afternoon. The last few pages up the ante, and a death and a diamond heist later and we're suddenly looking at a very different novel - one that artfully welcomes is in with its warmth to reveal sharp teeth underneath.

My only real criticism is more a lack of education on my part - a lot of this book is heavy in French phrases and I had to google bits repeatedly to understand. I think this is an authorial intention - the children are poor at French too, and it's meant to create this solid barrier between the children and the adults, but it did make for an interrupted reading experience.

Definitely worth picking up.

4 stars

Rumer Godden can write a story like no other. Her prose kept me wrapped up and unable to escape from this story as it all unfolded - right to the very last page. Maybe all of her books don't technically deserve 5 stars but I can't resist handing them out like nobody's business.

This was a nice lazy summer read. I blew through it in a couple of days. It's about five English children whose parents are unavailable. Father is in Tibet collecting plants and Mother is in hospital. The children spend the summer at a little country hotel in France and get a worldly education they weren't expecting. They discover just how dastardly grown-ups can be.

The funniest character is Willmouse, the only boy in the family, who is more like a girl than any of his four sisters. Willmouse is quite a dandy in the making. He spends the days with his dolls in his atelier under the cherry tree. He loves Vogue magazine and seems destined for a career as a fashion designer.

The one irritating thing about this book is that there are places with French dialogue and no translation. Crazy French people hurling insults at each other is no fun when you have no idea what they're saying.

Today's vocabulary lesson:
A greengage is a plum, named for its green-gold color and for Sir Gage, who first brought the fruit from France to England.

[3.5 stars]

1920's France
A coming of age story of Cecil (a girl) and her three sisters and one brother.
"We were Mother, Joss, I—Cecil—Hester, and the Littles, Willmouse (brother) and Vicky." The Littles were called that because they were the littlest ones.
They are on vacation in Paris when Mother becomes extremely ill. The children are left to the care of the hotel staff of Les Oeillets.

Hotel Staff and Guests
Mademoiselle Zizi, the proprietress of the hotel
Eliot, her English lover
Madame Corbet, the hotel manager
Paul, a young kitchen worker
Monsieur Joubert, a guest and an accomplished painter

Eliot takes a liking to the children. In fact, he was the one who convinced Zizi to take on the responsibility for their care. Joss, the eldest and 16, is exceedingly beautiful. Eliot is inappropriately attracted to her.
The book is a slow mover at first. There are threads here that only became apparent to me later. There is something sinister about Eliot. What exactly is he doing when he is gone from the hotel for long stretches of time.

Sooo.. a coming of age AND a mystery. Very good.

4 stars

The Greengage Summer is about children but not a children’s book. I’m not sure how to classify it: it’s somewhere between YA and general fiction. In a nutshell, Cecil (Cecilia) Grey narrates the story of what happened the summer she and her siblings spent at a hotel in the Champagne region of France.

There’s no one to supervise them because their father is absent on an expedition and their mother falls ill as soon as they arrive in France and spends several weeks in a French hospital, leaving the children in the care of an Englishman staying in the hotel, Eliot, who turns out to be a rather unsuitable guardian.

The children are spoiled and insular, and their mother intended to educate them with visits the French battlefields and war graves. In the event they don’t go near a battlefield and their education comes through the discovery of alcohol, cigarettes and adult sexuality. That makes it sound a more racy book than it is: the narrative brilliantly evokes the significance of small milestones like a first taste of champagne.

The book was first published in 1958, but I wasn’t convinced that the setting was the 1950s. The references to the war could as easily mean the First World War as the Second World War – appropriate enough to a book which is all about ambiguity.

While England and the English are repeatedly associated with the colour grey (the family’s surname is grey; the children arrive at the hotel dressed in their grey flannel school uniforms; the wallpaper in Cecil’s bedroom at home is a ‘grey-blue pattern’) France is associated with the colour green. Green is associated with fertility and, by extension, with sexuality. The hotel proves to be a hotbed of various passions and the cat is put among the pigeons when Cecil’s beautiful sixteen-year-old sister, Joss, comes downstairs after a period of illness and immediately attracts the attention of Eliot – to the fury of his lover, the hotel owner, Mademoiselle Zizi. Which brings us to another thing associated with green – jealousy.

Instead of doing the sensible thing and poisoning a greengage, then dressing up as an old crone to get Joss to eat it, Mademoiselle Zizi starts to let herself go – drinking too much and forgetting to put blush on – which doesn’t help matters. But if she is playing the Wicked Queen to Joss’s Snow White, then Joss (who in two scenes admires her own beauty in the mirror) begins to aspire to queenship herself.

Joss’s discovery of her new power is very quickly followed by the discovery that it has limitations. She can’t make Eliot commit to her – he continues to play her off against Mademoiselle Zizi. There are ways to deal with this kind of behaviour: you can turn elusive, ending phone calls after a few minutes by gaily announcing that you have ‘a million things to do!’ Or you can drop the man in question. (Moppet recommends dropping him). Joss makes a different choice – a choice which will have far-reaching consequences for all concerned. She and Cecil learn the hard way that (to use another food metaphor) they can’t have their cake and eat it – the privileges of adulthood come with dangers and responsibilities attached.

Bottom line: insightful and evocative coming-of-age story.

Cross-posted (with additional material) to The Misadventures of Moppet