The Terraced House Diaries (Curmudgeon Avenue #1) in Get Reviews!

Nov 24, 2019 Kat rated it it was amazing

Absolutely. Freaking. Hilarious.

If you like dry British humor, this one is completely a hoot. Narrated from the point of view of an old house that changes hands from a respectable family couple to their ridiculous middle-aged daughters, each set of characters is more over the top than the last. It’s the dry acerbic wit and commentary on everyday social settings that make this really work. The author has good comedic timing and knows how to deliver a line. If you like authors like Sophie Kinsell ...more

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Aug 18, 2018 Paul Falk rated it it was amazing

Shelves: humor, general-fiction-adult

The author constructed a delightful storyline. It was well-written and rarely deviated from its single plot. The scenes maintained a steady pace with the storyline and were delightfully entertaining. Chortling from beginning to end, I remained captive of the book. It was a winner.

In Manchester, England, two sisters, Edna and Edith had moved in together to reclaim their parents home that had been crushed to death by an elephant. Yes, you read that right, and no, they weren't on Safari. I'll skip ...more

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Oct 14, 2019 William Cook rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

"On the day this all started, the sky was full of August apologies for a summer undelivered." From this calm and almost elegant first sentence, the unsuspecting reader is dropped through a trapdoor into near-total lunacy. The House at Number One Curmudgeon Avenue--"the sanctuary for grumpy geriatrics"--is the narrator of this farcical novella, in which the walls really do have ears.

Within the first few pages we learn that the owners of the house are tragically squashed by the usually placid elep "On the day this all started, the sky was full of August apologies for a summer undelivered." From this calm and almost elegant first sentence, the unsuspecting reader is dropped through a trapdoor into near-total lunacy. The House at Number One Curmudgeon Avenue--"the sanctuary for grumpy geriatrics"--is the narrator of this farcical novella, in which the walls really do have ears.

Within the first few pages we learn that the owners of the house are tragically squashed by the usually placid elephant Deirdre, as she is being transported to her new elephant boyfriend at Knowsley Safari Park. Overwhelmed by the body odor of the lorry driver, Deirdre breaks loose from her harness, and the vehicle crashes out of control into the hapless couple--"gone too soon in their early nineties." And then things get weird.

The couple's sixty-something-year old daughters, Edna and Edith, take up residence in the house. Since they are both penniless, they decide to rent out a room in order to pay for repairs to the leaky roof. Unfortunately, the ad for "Lodger Wanted" that they post in the neighborhood market gets changed to "Todger Wanted" (British slang for "penis"). And who should show up but the smelly lorry driver, Harold, along with a cast of other quirky characters vying for possession of the room? One such is Maurice, an ex-boyfriend of Edna's who tries to poison her with anti-freeze laced chocolates. Lucky for her, her cat has a sweet tooth. Not so lucky for the cat.

Ms. Henthorn has created a dizzy farce, impossible to read without smirking and smiling throughout. Some of the humor can be crude ("Ricky Ricketts was still hanging around Curmudgeon Avenue like a smell in a bathroom." or "...farts that sounded as though they had started in her throat.") but it's all in good-natured fun. Curmudgeon Avenue: Book One: The Terraced House Diaries is fast-paced, thoroughly engaging, and horribly British.

That said, it brings out the "Curmudgeon Grammarian" in me. I still believe conversations should be set off with double quotation marks, not the single marks the author uses throughout. I was also perturbed by her frequent use of run-on sentences, stringing independent clauses together with commas only. And can we authors band together and fight the spread of that awful British construction "was sat" for was sitting and "was stood" for was standing? Finally, although I liked the idea of the House being the narrator, I wish the author had stuck to it. Instead, the narrator becomes omniscient, knowing things the House could not possibly know, such as conversations in a distant tavern, characters thoughts and motivations, etc.

But I'm grousing. Book One of the Curmudgeon Avenue series is a fun, light, entertaining read. Enjoy!
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Jul 09, 2019 J. Marie rated it liked it

"ON THE DAY THIS ALL STARTED, THE SKY WAS FULL OF AUGUST APOLOGIES FOR A SUMMER UNDELIVERED." I loved that first line! (Sounds like summer in Newfoundland at times)
If you like offbeat, quirky British humour, this might be the book for you. The characters are colourful, odd, and sometimes downright hilarious.
I enjoyed the story of the two sisters who live in the house on Curmudgeon Avenue and the folks who come in and out of their lives. That said, I would have liked to see more of the house as ...more

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Jun 24, 2019 Nico Genes rated it it was amazing

Shelves: humor, fun

Great English humor.

From the beginning, I liked the fact that the story was told by a house. How cool is that? The whole book made me smile and even laugh. I love English humor. None of the characters was meant to be really likable and that was what the story needed. Edith and Edna, the sisters that are constantly in argue. One strong and self-confident, the other bit silly and submissive are the heart of the whole story. Harold, well, a guy that no one would like but still matched perfectly in ...more

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Jun 30, 2020 Ron Miner rated it really liked it

Samantha Henthorn’s “Curmudgeon Avenue #1” was uncharted territory for me. It’s not a genre that I cross paths with often, and given that background, I admit to being short on qualifications here. Please forgive my own slow mind and inexperience.

I thought the premise of a house as narrator and storyteller was clever, despite seeming somewhat absent at times. This is a tale that rambles along in no particular hurry, peppering us with a profusion of characters as two sisters conspire to raise the ...more

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May 15, 2020 Jeff Chapman rated it it was amazing

A short, comic novel, Curmudgeon Avenue is narrated by a house, who frequently interjects its opinions. The story centers on two sixty-something sisters leading dysfunctional lives. They move into the house on Curmudgeon Lane after inheriting the property from their elderly parents who were crushed by an elephant. The roof is leaking and there is not enough money to pay for repairs. The pair decide to take on a lodger. A host of eccentric characters are soon traipsing through the sister's lives, ...more

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Feb 11, 2021 Samantha Henthorn rated it it was amazing · (Review from the author) · review of another edition

FIVE STAR REVIEW FROM READERS' FAVORITE

After an elephant crushed Mr. and Mrs. Payne to death, Edna and Edith moved back to their parents' house. The lives of these sixty-something-year-old sisters hadn't quite turned out as well as they had expected. As a result, relocating to Number One Curmudgeon Avenue was in the best interests of both of them. With their limited resources, they needed money to fix the roof of the house. The next logical decision was to take in a lodger, and they put an adv ...more

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May 05, 2020 Lynn Helton rated it really liked it

Shelves: humor, contemporary

Quirky fun!

Curmudgeon Avenue by Samantha Henthorn is an entertaining farce. I loved the idea of the house itself as the narrator. That’s what drew me to this book. I just wish the house had been more of a presence in the story – I had hoped for more-numerous pointed opinions from it. Still, this tale of fantastically eccentric characters, improbable situations and wildly intertwined lives is full of quirky fun, including some of the chapter titles (“The Collective Noun for Fugitives.” is my favo ...more

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Nov 09, 2020 K.S. Ferguson rated it liked it · review of another edition

I'm a US reader, and I would describe this book as a sit-com. I'm not a fan of sit-coms, but in these dark times, I've gravitated to lighter, funnier reads as a pick-me-up.

This is the familiar story of a bunch of misfits brought together under a single roof. Unlike sit-coms such as Big Bang Theory, where the characters are mostly professionally successful nerds, in Curmudgeon Avenue, we are faced with life's losers. Dysfunctional doesn't begin to describe it. I had trouble caring about any of t ...more

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Dec 12, 2019 Norma Nikutowski rated it really liked it

In Curmudgeon Avenue the house suffers the anguish of ruin and internal clowns dragging it down. That’s the reason it decides to narrate a diary about the lives of the inhabitants.

After the 90 year old respectable owners are squashed by an elephant, sisters Edna and Edith, in her sixties, move in. The house is devastated by this as it used to be a respectable house where everyone wanted to live in. The house fell into some disrepair.

The two sisters are very different and having to live under th ...more

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Mar 01, 2019 Deborah J Miles rated it liked it

The simplistic cover drew me to this book. To me it suggests a normal, ordinary street wherein we will find everyday people going about their own business, and I wanted to know what secrets the reader would find.

From the blurb, I had expected the house to set about bumping off the obnoxious inhabitants, one-by-one, or to somehow prevent them from doing something within its walls. But it was neither of these options. Curmudgeon Avenue is a record of how the current occupants came to be there, wi The simplistic cover drew me to this book. To me it suggests a normal, ordinary street wherein we will find everyday people going about their own business, and I wanted to know what secrets the reader would find.

From the blurb, I had expected the house to set about bumping off the obnoxious inhabitants, one-by-one, or to somehow prevent them from doing something within its walls. But it was neither of these options. Curmudgeon Avenue is a record of how the current occupants came to be there, with the occasional reference to events or back stories which obviously lays the groundwork for future instalments.

The story is told mainly from the perspective of the house itself, Number One Curmudgeon Avenue. The house has very strong feelings about its residents and its visitors, yet is powerless to do anything other than watch and commentate on events as they unfold.

At the beginning, the original owners meet with an unusual and unfortunate end. The house is left to their daughters, Edith and Edna. Circumstances now mean that they will have to live together, something they have not done since childhood. Edith and Edna are quite different in every way. Both, however, have limited means, and as the house is in need of repair, they decide to take in a lodger. An array of unsuitable candidates arrive and are sent packing before Harold Goatshead - and he is the most loathsome character too - and Georgina Foote take up residence - not one lodger but two! And of course they come with their own baggage!

I found the story frenetic, quirky and mildly humorous - my biggest smile came from the card in Mrs Ali's corner shop window advertising for a lodger. The ad was worded in such a way as to have attracted completely the wrong sort of person, before the vandal changed a single letter on it, thus altering its meaning completely!

This is the first in the series, and I feel that readers will need to have read this book before reading any of the others, as it has set the scene for future stories, telling us what we need to know about these characters. ...more

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Jul 10, 2019 Ahava Trivedi rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Most of us have had those moments in life where conflict with someone is so intensely entrenched in the dynamic that we’re thankful our interactions aren’t overheard because it would shame us to ever re-live the sting and juvenility of our own words. Well, Curmudgeon Avenue is told from the point of view of a house where everything that happens under its’ roof is recorded and retold without censor!

The story is about how the house is inherited by two sisters, Edith and Edna who represent the epi ...more

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Aug 14, 2020 Sharley Scott rated it it was amazing

There is such a quirky and fun narration from the house. It tickled me. Some of the characters are as mad as a box of frogs, which makes this such an amusing read. A tale of many lodgers or should that be todgers? Fab.

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Feb 22, 2020 Bruce Perrin rated it liked it

A British Farce about “nincompoops and intertwined lives” Told by a House

The author of Curmudgeon Avenue #1, Samantha Henthorn describes her work as a comedy-drama. Drama, for example, comes in the form of the death of the parents of our two protagonists, the elderly sisters Edna and Edith at the start of the book. Comedy comes in the form of the parents dying by being crushed by an elephant thrown from a lorry driven by one of Edna’s exes. The elephant broke free of her constraints because the A British Farce about “nincompoops and intertwined lives” Told by a House

The author of Curmudgeon Avenue #1, Samantha Henthorn describes her work as a comedy-drama. Drama, for example, comes in the form of the death of the parents of our two protagonists, the elderly sisters Edna and Edith at the start of the book. Comedy comes in the form of the parents dying by being crushed by an elephant thrown from a lorry driven by one of Edna’s exes. The elephant broke free of her constraints because the driver smelled so bad. Even so, he later becomes Edith’s romantic interest when he rents a room in the sisters’ home after a long, roof-sitting protest over being evicted from his own. Yes, it’s pretty difficult to find much drama in this book that’s not wrapped in total absurdity. It is truly the story of a group of nincompoops whose worlds never generate enough momentum of their own to escape each other’s orbits. And if that silliness isn’t enough, the story is told by the house, a Victorian terrace. The book even has some house humor. Speaking of the “tiresome” process of evicting someone, the house notes that it’s “… enough to make one's front bedroom windows glaze over.” Drama? Maybe. A farce? Without a doubt.

My primary word of advice to the potential reader is check out the book’s preview online so that you can judge the humor for yourself. Humor is, in my opinion, idiosyncratic. Not everyone finds the same things funny. And while I count satires as material I usually enjoy, I couldn’t figure out what was being satirized in this book. The British form of welfare and how it affects their society? Rather, I found humor based largely on peculiar personalities, bizarre relationships, and bodily functions. It wasn’t material that I found greatly entertaining, which is not to say others won’t. Like I said, humor is personal.

There are also a few minor detractions, the grammar and punctuation being one. The book is filled with run-on sentences and missing punctuation. It’s surprising how confusing one missing period can be in the middle of a long, winding thought. I found myself re-reading sections, which made the book feel somewhat slow. There is also some repetition, which adds to that problem. Additionally, the (over)reliance on British slang and custom affected the flow of the story for me. Just what does it mean to order a “shandy” and get “watered down slops?” What is the old saying about “chalk and cheese?” Why were the sisters upset when their ad for a lodger was changed to an ad for a todger? Of course, I expect and enjoy some exposure to another set of customs and forms of expression when reading an author from another country, but too much of this book felt like inside jokes told to someone, me, who isn’t part of the in-crowd.
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Nov 15, 2021 Ann Birdgenaw marked it as to-read · review of another edition

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