reviews
Peter Ho Davies
2008
NUTSHELL: Two plots - one plot = enough plot. This one's more of a 5.
Who's the Welsh Girl? That would be Esther Evans, living in Wales in the 1940s. Her sweetheart's off to war and she and her father have an evacuee child. Esther also works as a barmaid in town.
What's her plot? <spoiler>She falls in love with a prisoner of war named Karsten.
But that's not so awful. Um. World War II? And the POW is German?
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I think this is the sort of book that will mean different things to different people, and that I will perhaps get something different out of it, if I come back to it in a few years. I enjoy More...
A couple of times I think Davies lost control of More...
The book is beautifully written. Th More...
This was a great book that I raced through and couldn't put down. I've read about a hundred good reviews of it and no one seems to have a bad word to say about it - at this point I would be disappointed if it doesn't at least make the shortlist. It's the third book I've read from this year's longlist, and so far it's my favourite.
The setting is the end of the second world war, the location is a small remote village in Wales and the central character is really Esther, the Welsh girl of the titl
More...Peter Ho Davies's two short-story collections, Equal Love and The Ugliest House in the World, met with critical acclaim, and reviewers generally enjoyed his first novel as well. Yet while they praised the book's complicated character portraits and its complex themes, many felt that the Rotheram-Hess subplot, while fascinating, was tangential to the novel's main triangle. And, despite the title, Esther does not appear to be the novel's protagonist. Perhaps the troubles begin with the prologue, in
More...The first couple of pages (prologue) were a bit dry, but I was glad that I pushed through it because I discovered a gem when I got to Esther’s perspective of the story. The book follows the perspective of three char More...
But. As a lot of reviews have said, the subplot of Rothe More...
