Lucy Wadham

I don't know. This book felt confused. Started with some lighthearted exploration of attitudes towards sex in French society (vs "Anglo-Saxon", as she calls Brits/USians) and then veers into discussion of their legacy of colonialism and inability to admit their problems with banlieues, with interviews with people high up in their justice system and secret service. I don't know what she was going for here, but it felt disjointed. I would have loved a deeper exploration of how French politics got the way it is, but this wasn't it. The stuff about collaboration in WWII in particular deserves more than a chapter or so. It just felt like an overly-long personal essay with speculation and political sentiments that I would leave out (if it were me).

I went in expecting a kind of silly holiday read with a few interesting tidbits about French culture, but that's definitely not what I got. I had fun in parts, but overall I'm not going to recommend this. I'm pretty sure there will be better observational books and serious historical/sociological texts rather than this one that doesn't do either particularly well.… (mehr)

Short, funny and sweet, by an author that I did not know of until this book kind of fell into my lap. It's a middle-aged person's recollection of her childhood and adolescence, growing up with weird parents (aren't everybody's) and a bunch of sisters, experiencing and thinking a lot about sex, drugs, family, relationships and some about the Circle Line in London, as this is, after all, a book that is part of the big London subway project that Penguin issued a bunch of books on in 2013.

All in all: sweet, heartfelt, made with sensibility and a lot of humor. One of the better in the bunch, so far.… (mehr)

Heads and Straights is a fantastic novella detailing Lucy Wadham’s family life growing up in Chelsea with her sisters in the 1970s. It’s semi-autobiographical (the names of her sisters are different), but I’m not sure about the content. It’s almost as though the family story is so outlandish that you couldn’t make it up! Anyway, it really doesn’t matter as the story is fascinating.

The sisters are into everything, such as punk and being as non-Chelsea like as they possibly can (drugs, protests, Mockney accents). Each of the sisters could have their own full length novel about their antics. What is just as fascinating is the story of the girls’ grandmother, who shuns wealth and marriage but reluctantly enters into it when she is given a riding school of her own. Desperate for a divorce, she commits adultery and ends up with a daughter who is her exact opposite – definitely a ‘Straight’, while the girls and their grandmother are all ‘Heads’.

The story moves at a cracking pace, discussing mental health, drug use, time in colonial Africa and the general problems of growing up, especially when your father loses his business. There are some sad moments, but overall the story is upbeat, witty and enthralling. I hadn’t heard of Lucy Wadham prior to this book, but if she writes more about her family I will line up to be the first to buy it.

http://samstillreading.wordpress.com… (mehr)