Showing 1-4 out of 7 reviews. Previous | Next

• There is something lovely about being guided through this novel. It's written in the first person, told by a woman called Sophia. She relates her unhappy early life in a simple, childlike (that isn't to say it's artless) way. She recounts her cooking and the traumatic birth of her first child with the same simple, truthfully voice. The story opens with Sophia's marriage at 21 to a poor bohemian painter with a family who hates her. There is the only account of birth I have ever read in a novel which is one of the most distressing things I've ever read. To here how poor women gave birth in 1930's London makes me glad that I was born a good 40 or so years later. The second, more comfortable, birth reads like a day in the park after that. The birth scene is a great example of what happens through the book. A simple childlike prose describes the big and little facts of life. The horror in the language doesn't even attempt to match the horror of the birth just as the joy of the language doesn't attempt to match the joy of falling in love. By not being prescribed an emotion we can feel it all the better.

  5.00 out of 5

  Staramber

• This delicious, daffy, and swift read is reminiscent of Catcher in the Rye in that the protagonist, Sophia Fairclough, speaks with a unique and captivating simplicity that is at once fresh, naive, and funny. Unlike Holden Caulfield, who lapses into pessimism, Sophia, with a detached but not-detached, Zen-ish shrug presses on - through Depression-era poverty, a marriage to a self-absorbed Bohemian artist, and domestic trials that would have some housewives shrieking, confessing, and swinging at spouses on the Jerry Springer show. She's that rare kind of person who seems to have an extra endocrine gland that secretes Prozac.Sophia not only sidesteps one calamity after another, at one point, she steps right out of the narrative, like George Burns used to do on the Burns and Allen show, and comments:"This book does not seem to be growing very large even though I have got to Chapter Nine. I think this is because there isn't any conversation....I know this will never be a real book, that businessmen in trains will read, the kind of businessmen that wear stiff hats with curly brims and little breathing holes let in the sides. I wish I knew more about words. Also I wish so much I had learnt my lessons at school. I never did, and have found this such a disadvantage ever since. All the same, I am going on writing this book, even if businessmen scorn it."And it's all presented with a very British sensibility."The woods were delightful all year round...When it was summer there would be wild raspberries, and we seemed to be the only people who bothered to pick them, and I used to make them into the most heavenly jam. There were blackberries, too. Everything that should be in a wood was there."And everything that should be in a charming book is in Our Spoons Came From Woolworth's.

  5.00 out of 5

  Ganeshaka

• This book will make you think twice about having children. And getting married. Well, to the wrong person, anyway. It can be very light and entertaining in places but it has some very sad and disturbing moments as well. There's a lot of poverty in this book and Barbara Comyns probably deals with poverty better than any writer I've ever read.

  5.00 out of 5

  DameMuriel

• There is something about Barbara Comyns’ writing that I find completely irresistable. I also find it difficult to explain, but here are three words to start with: clarity, simplicity, eccentricity. Our Spoons Came From Woolworths is Sophia’s story. It is set in the thirties, but told, some years later, to a good friend who didn’t know Sophia then. It was a simple, and very well executed, framing device. And I was very glad that it was there, that I knew Sophia would be alright in the end. You see, I liked her from the very start. She was engaging. naive, and yet terribly perceptive. And so wonderfully matter-of-fact. At the age of twenty-one, Sophia eloped with Charles, a struggling artist to live the Bohemian life in London. They were young, they were in live, and so. of course, they gave no thought to practicalities. Charles painted, oblivious to what was going on around him, while Sophia tried to keep house and earn enough money for essentials. Things like food and rent. I had my doubts about Charles from the start, but I hoped I was wrong. His family encouraged him to be selfish, and accused Sophia of dragging him towards domesticity and responsibility when he was far too young. But maybe, when the chips were down, his love for Sophia would make him do the right thing. Sadly, when Sophia fell pregnant I found that my fears had been founded. He hadn’t wanted a baby and so it was nothing to do with him. A son was born and the family had a few up and rather more downs. Poverty was never too far away. Eventually, inevitably, the marriage crumbled. Sophia had to find another life, for herself and for her son. And find it she did. She found a happy ending too. A simple story, but it was oh so engaging, listening to Sophia as she speaks of characters, incidents and spoke of people, places, events, the details of her life. It wasn’t quite perfect: the pace flagged at times, and the happy ending felt a little contrived. Not many authors could pull off a book like this, but Barbara Comyns could. It isn’t her best book (that would be The Vet’s Daughter) but it is well worth reading and, I think, the best introduction you could have to her work.

  4.50 out of 5

  FleurFisher

Reviews provided by Librarything.

No reviews here.