Read over many evenings while corresponding with my Welsh then-girlfriend. ( )

In the first book of this quartet, How Green Was My Valley, Huw Morgan recounts his childhood in a coal mining town in Wales. In this book, the last of the series, Huw has become a wealthy and bitter old man in Argentina, and he returns home to Wales when the Argentinian government starts causing problems for him. His homeland bears little resemblance to the country he remembers from his childhood, and the people distrust him as a foreigner. Huw regrets the many changes and does little to understand or adapt to the new political climate that includes bombings by the IRA and dissent from Welsh Nationalists. What he does do is use his seemingly unlimited wealth to buy as much property as he can, to employ the local people in rebuilding and maintaining it, and to give lavish gifts to pretty much everyone he encounters.

I absolutely loved How Green Was My Valley, but I only got through this one because it was only 200 pages. Some of my dislike may have come from the fact that I didn't read the two books in between these two, but Green, Green My Valley Now is just not good. There are no chapters, only random section breaks in the wrong places. The narrative jumped from one scene to the next with no transitions. Then the section breaks came at unnecessary places. This made it really hard to keep track of what was happening. Because the story is told from Huw's perspective and he doesn't really understand what is happening with the political situation in Wales and Ireland, Llewellyn never explains to the reader what's really going on. Obviously people living in Wales 40 years ago would be able to read between the lines, but the rest of us are left in the dark.

In addition, it's hard to like Huw as an old man. Everything has to be the way he wants it, and he has no problems spending as much money as it takes to get his way. What starts out as generosity becomes annoying after a while. He's so self-absorbed that he fails to recognize what everyone else around him notices immediately. He also has no problems going from one woman after another.

My recommendation is to just read How Green Was My Valley and ignore the rest of Llewellyn's books. ( )

En bok om ett litet gruvsamhälle i Wales i slutet av 1800 talet. Genom huvudpersonen i boken se vi hur hans vackra gröna dal sakta krossas under en växande gruvinsustri som skövlar allt han älskar.En klassiker för alla som är intresserade av Englands industrihistoria och dess betydelse för människors liv.