Name: The Children's Book
ISBN: 9780307473066

Antonia Susan Byatt

A tale spanning the end of the Victorian era through World War I finds famous children's book author Olive Wellwood taking in a runaway and exposing the boy to dark truths about her family's summer bacchanals at their rambling country house.

The Children's Book

A Novel

Pavonini

I knew this was my sort of book from the Lalique on the cover, and the jewel colouring. I couldn't resist. It started slow, weaving together different families, and at points I felt I could take it or leave it. The descriptions of the social history and art really captivated me, but the plot... not so much. Then something happened, and I was invested in the characters (and could suddenly remember who they all were - I'm really bad for that). I raced through the second half of the book, to be inevitably destroyed by it. It left me in bits, but in a good way. I felt like I'd been through whole lifetimes.

It worked beautifully as a story, and made me want to read more about the period. There were all kinds of tantalising details about changes to law and the founding of various institutions. It just confirmed to me what a fascinating time it was.

When Olive Wellwood's oldest son discovers a runaway named Philip sketching in the basement of the new Victoria and Albert Museum--a talented working-class boy who could be a character out of one of Olive's magical tales--she takes him into the storybook world of her family and friends--a world that conceals more treachery and darkness than Philip has ever imagined and that will soon be eclipsed by far greater forces.

Sabine Delorme

Die Booker-Preis Gewinnerin und „Dame Commander of the British Empire“ erzählt in diesem opulenten, mehr als ein Vierteljahrhundert umspannenden Roman, der im Jahr 1895 beginnt und kurz nach Ausbruch des 1. Weltkrieges endet, über die sozialen, politischen und künstlerischen Bewegungen die in dieser Zeit aufblühten, als die verschiedenen Utopien, Ideologien und -ismen (Fabianismus, Freudianismus, Feminismus etc.) darum wetteiferten, eine schönere und bessere Welt entstehen zu lassen.

All das endet mit dem 1. Weltkrieg, als Millionen von Menschen in einem sinnlosen Krieg getötet wurden und halb Europa in Schutt und Asche liegt.

Die komplette Rezension findet ihr hier: http://bingereader.org/2014/12/31/the...

Maelys

Jane Mount

Ipek

Clare B

Lyn Pritchard

Susan Beddes

Kwan Ann Tan

Jessica Brown

Kelsi Proulx

Claire Taylor

James Haliburton

Rose Stanley

Deborah Meades

Jennifer

Eleanor 

Olive Wellwood is a famous writer, interviewed with her children gathered at her knee. For each of them she writes a separate private book, bound in different colours and placed on a shelf. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world - but their lives, and those of their rich cousins, children of a city stockbroker, and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries their own secrets. Into their world comes a young stranger, a working-class boy from the potteries, drawn by the beauty of the Museum's treasures. And in midsummer a German puppeteer arrives, bringing dark dramas. The world seems full of promise but the calm is already rocked by political differences, by Fabian arguments about class and free love , by the idealism of anarchists from Russia and Germany. The sons rebel against their parents' plans; the girls dream of independent futures, becoming doctors or fighting for the vote. This vivid, rich and moving saga is played out against the great, rippling tides of the day, taking us from the Kent marshes to Paris and Munich and the trenches of the Somme. Born at the end of the Victorian era, growing up in the golden summers of Edwardian times, a whole generation were heading to the darkness of the First World War; in their innocence, they were betrayed unintentionally by the adults who loved them. In a profound sense, this novel is indeed the children's book.

The Children's Book

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