Review: The Great Godden by Meg Rosoff

Every summer, a family travels to the beach house that has been theirs for generations. For several idyllic weeks, they fill their days with easy summer fun, joined by their cousin and her beau, who stay at the neighbouring house. This year, however, something is different. First, cousin Hope is to finally marry her beloved partner Mal. And then the children of Hope's Godmother, actress Florence Godden come to stay. While Hugo is sullen and silent, Kit is charming. And utterly irresistible.

The question is, how much trouble can one teenage boy cause for one family over the course of a single summer.

This may be a big claim, but I think with The Great Godden we have a modern classic on our hands. The story is both familiar and unfamiliar in a pleasing way. In Kit Godden, we have a character who embodies all of the traits of narcissism. Handsome, charming, manipulative and most of all dangerous. And even though we know from the details given in the first chapter that things are going to go badly this summer, we don't know for sure what is going to happen. Just we know very little about our narrator--we know only for sure that they are the oldest of four siblings, that they intend to study at art school, that they don't really get along with the next youngest sibling, Mattie, an attractive and intelligent girl of about sixteen, and that like Mattie, they fall for Kit Godden. What we don't know is the narrators name, or their gender. (From evidence given in the book, I'm leaning toward the idea that they are a very tomboyish girl, or possibly non-binary. This makes sense on a number of points in the novel, for example where Hope tries to broach the subject of them being in the wedding, and, later, when they are not invited to the male bonding sailing trip, although Kit is. Hugo isn't invited either, but that may have more to do with his general lack of responsiveness toward group activities.)

Overall, The Great Godden is a well written coming-of-age story, describing the beauty of summer days, first loves and heartbreaks and the discovery that people are not always what they appear to be on the surface. Through Kit, the novel touches on the devastation that behaviours like gaslighting and treachery can do, and though our narrator, we see just how harmful obsession can be.

Every time I sat down with this book I found myself reading a chapter or two more than what I had initially intended, if not more. This is the second novel I've read by Meg Rosoff and I found this one to be the better of the two--and How I Live Now was a good book!

According to a recent interview Rosoff is intending to write two more summer books and is halfway through the second one, though it is unclear whether they will feature any of the same characters.

Overall, this is an exceptional read. Highly recommended. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more

Who Else Writes Like V.C. Andrews?

Image
Are there any other authors out there who write similar novels to V.C. Andrews? This is a question I see asked frequently in excellent fan run V.C. Andrews Facebook groups like Attic Secrets and The Dolls Club. In times gone by, The Complete V.C. Andrews webpage (which is no more, but the best bits are archived by Lorraine at the Attic Secrets blog,) had a comprehensive list. Today, I thought I would put forward a few of my own thoughts and recommendations. (Note: This will focus mainly on the series and novels written by the actual V.C. Andrews and not ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman, who has a distinctive writing style of his own.) The Classics This is probably the best place to start, as it is likely that some of these novels influenced V.C. Andrews herself. Andrews was a fan of Charles Dickens, mentioning the author in the prologue of her most famous novel Flowers in the Attic. I have yet to read all of Dickens novels (I've read about half,) but I can feel a slight V.C. Andrews vi
Read more