I'd never read any of Carol Ann Duffy's work, and this came highly recommended by my daughter, who did it for GCSE. If you still like something after dissecting it for an exam, it's probably good. This did not disappoint. I read it at one sitting, though I will go back to it and read at greater depth.
Familiar stories twisted and turned and retold from another (the woman's point of view). Clever, witty, ironic, cutting, funny, sad, revealing. Loved it.

I alternate between finding the premise of this book (Rosamund is good because although poor she has "standards"; Joan is nouveau riche and has none) appallingly snobby and saying, "oh well, it's a product of EBD's own class and time." On the whole, I come down in favour of the latter.
In the past, this has been one of my least favourite Chalet titles, but I liked it more on this re-read. Rosamund is a sweet little heroine, and (surprisingly, because she annoys me) I enjoyed the scenes with Joey. The descriptions of Basle read like a guidebook, there is altogether too much tennis, and I did wonder why the arrival of Simone's son should get quite so much airtime, but on the whole this was an enjoyable comfort read.

It might be heresy, but I think I would have liked this book better and given it 5 stars if I had read a printed version. It was lovely to hear Mary Oliver reading her own poems, but I feel I might have taken them in more if they had been written on the page.
Still, Mary Oliver is Mary Oliver, and I love her "pay attention, enjoy the moment, reflect" poetry. My favourites of this collection are "Wild geese"(which was my mum's favourite poem, we read it at her funeral, and I will always love it for her sake), "Her grave" (although that made me sad as well as happy) and "Peonies" (mostly because I love peonies).
Planning a re-read with a printed edition.

A book which is both exciting and eye-opening. For a book first published in 1940, the sympathy for the German people is extraordinary. And the mentions of anti-Semitism and concentration camps show that some people at least knew something of what was going on in Europe under the Nazis.
The school scenes are almost incidental. There's a secret document to be hidden, Nazi spies, a frantic dash over the mountains to Switzerland, Joey's triplets' arrival, a plane crash, and the return of old friends thought to he dead. But in among all this, it's good to see the Chalet School itself reestablished and going strong.

I received a free copy of this book via Voracious Readers only in exchange for an honest review.

CONTENT/TRIGGER WARNING: this book and the review contain mentions of mental illness, depression, self-harm, suicide, rape and domestic violence.

With the numerous content warnings above, it's no surprise that my first impression of this book is that it is bleak. Bleak, but very honest, painfully so. As the parent of a young person with serious mental illness, it made hard reading, and it's honestly not a book I could recommend to her or to anyone else whose own problems and feelings resembled Amy's. But the book did help me gain some little insight into how it feels to be seriously depressed, to want to hurt yourself, to think about suicide as a possibility.
The two interwoven stories and the numerous changes of point of view made this feel a little choppy and disconnected, although the segments hung together and all helped make sense of the whole. I would have liked to know more of the parents' story, and was not entirely convinced by the mother staying with the father for so long after Amy was born. Their backstory did help explain why they behaved as they did though: Amy's disconnection reflected in calling them "the mother" and "the father" only mirrored their own from her and from each other.
Mostly this book just left me feeling so sad for Amy and wanting to make things right for her. And sometimes you just can't.

Enjoyable page turner from an author I'd not come across before. The intertwined stories of three women - grandmother, mother and daughter - over two weekends 56 years apart trace a pivotal event in 1962, and how the mother and daughter find out what happened and begin to come to terms with it. Atmospheric and slightly claustrophobic, with likeable, believable characters whom I felt a great deal of sympathy for.

I feel I need to re-read this little book to even begin to get to the heart of it.
What I did get most of all on my first reading was a kind of quiet sadness that, "this is how the word is, and it doesn't need to be this way." It's almost acceptance, but it isn't because Baldwin is unrelenting in his assertion that things must change.
More than 40 years on, some things have changed, superficially at least, but it is a sad indictment of our society that so much of this book remains directly relevant today.
(This book also made me want to know more about James Baldwin, and also about the Nation of Islam.)

I adored this book. I loved the structure of the stories-within-story and how they all wove together to create the whole. I loved the whole premise of the labyrinthine library beneath the earth and those who loved, protected and LIVED it. I adored the protagonist. The cast of characters was fantastic.
Can you tell I liked this book?
I'm not sure I understood or "got" it all, and I will be re-reading. A favourite.