I was perfectly content in this world of women. 'We lived where he had left us a relic of his provincial youth a sprawling cumbersome, countrified brood too incongruous to carry with him and I, for one, scarcely missed him. As his father was absent, the large family - five children from his father's first marriage and three from his second one - was brought up by his capable mother. One of eight children, Laurie Lee was born in 1914, in Slad, Gloucestershire, then a remote corner of England. Laurie Lee's matchless memories of his childhood, told in glittering prose and with a wonderfully wicked sense of comedy, have made Cider with Rosie one of the most famous of all autobiographies. Growing up amongst the fields and woods and characters of the place, Laurie Lee depicts a world that is both immediate and real and belongs to a now-distant past. Just because the assault doesn't happen 'to completion,' the planning of it makes me feel like I just got a pair of special sunglasses à la 'They Live,' in which the protagonist can finally see things the way the actually are and suddenly I don't feel so nostalgic for the small Cotswold village.Cider with Rosie is a wonderfully vivid memoir of childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a village before electricity and cars, a timeless place on the verge of change. And while 'nothing happens' from the author's perspective, what about the girl's? Did she still walk that path? Did she still feel safe going out alone? It breaks my heart to think about.

But the whole time they are plotting was just so unsettling for me to read because I read it from the perspective of the girl who goes walking along the same route, feeling perfectly safe, having no idea that the boys in her village are watching and plotting and think nothing about her. Some people think this is kind of humorous because the girl simply slaps the boys and they all run away like big scaredy-cats. I could then medium enjoy the vignettes contained within until.late in the book a group of boys plan to gang rape a local girl. But eventually I got used to the gravelly old man voice and even if I didn't grow to like it, at least it didn't bother me as much. Oh what a lovely description of growing up in a small Cotswold village after WWI, where times were simpler and-SCREECH-Hey lads, who wants to plan a gang rape! When I started this I thought the worst thing I would have to say about it was that 'authors shouldn't automatically be allowed to read their own works.' And how.

A cider with rosie