This was such an evocative book! I feel like I just spent a summery month in a French hotel... with a charming yet creepy man and enigmatic staff.

So... the story was quite different from what I was expecting! I mean, it wasn't at first. But then it started to turn around, after Joss started to feel better. I rather enjoyed the family's dynamic without her. Such can be the fate of the eldest child, I suppose.

Maybe I'd give this 3.5 stars, and I'm rounding up because I love Rumer Godden. (I've been reading her books since before I can remember!) While I don't always enjoy these types of coming-of-age novels, this one was different enough to still be rather fascinating, though it did feel a bit slight. Especially regarding what happened in the end.

Apparently some editions of this book have a preface by Rumer Godden which explains "how this book came to be written". I don't have that, which is quite disappointing. I gather it was somewhat autobiographical. (I've read her memoirs, apparently, but considering the fact I just had to look up whether or not I had, it's not surprising I really can't remember if she addresses the story behind this book.)

Not having read anything by Rumer Godden before, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from The Greengage Summer; a richly and possibly romantically realised portrait of a place and a formative period in a young woman’s life perhaps. Well, the reader certainly gets all of that (Godden’s portrayal of a languorous French summer is so vivid and all-embracing that you put the book down surprised to find yourself in an overcast English April), but what I hadn’t reckoned on was the Sparkian approach to character, plot and perspective, which turns it into a distinctly more disturbing affair. The Greengage Summer turns out to be a darker and rather more chilling novel about human venality and selfishness than I had expected, and more akin to The Go-Between and Le Grand Meaulnes than a A Year in Provence.

Wonderful. One of the best 'child as unreliable narrator' tales I've ever read.