Subject matter may not have a wide appeal, bit disjointed in parts
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
Julie Myerson is a novelist living in Clapham, South London. Whilst researching for one of her books set in Victorian London she came across the home, she and her partner and three children were living in, listed on a census and started on a remarkable labour of love researching its history. As I enjoy researching my family history I thought this sounded a very interesting read. The book is basically a biography of her home.
She starts in the logical place, with the family they bought the house from and tracks down their adult children and asks them for their memories regarding their former home, and invites them for a visit. Obviously as time goes by it becomes harder and harder to track down past residents or their descendants and Myerson and her long suffering partner, Jonathan, send out lots of speculative letters to people and Julie spends many hours in various public records offices.
Whilst I knew this was about the people in the house, I wasn't sure how she would be able to write that much about ordinary people and their everyday lives, particularly once you go back more than 50 or so years. From researching my own family tree, I know that ordinary people are often quite boring (or maybe that is just my ancestors!). However the book is also about her past homes, as she is inspired to go back and try and visit all the homes she grew up in as a child. At times it feels like the book is almost in diary form, except no dates are mentioned, as she describes visits to records offices, phone calls received as a result of her speculative letters and dead ends found. Sometimes this does feel a bit unrelated, but I think this is also a record of Myerson's 'journey' (I hate the term, but there is no other suitable word) in undertaking such a mammoth task in trying to uncover the secrets of a house over 130 years old. The house had many residents, as it was a fairly large Victorian house, rooms were often rented out with shared bathrooms which meant there was a jigsaw to be solved of past residents, and not all owners actually lived in the property. One of the most interesting segments is where we meet some of the post-World War 2 residents: the house was one of only a handful in the area prepared to rent to the new black immigrants arriving from Jamaica.
Myerson generally writes reverse chronologically - the chapters work backwards in time - but because her breakthroughs in the research did not happen in order, the book sometimes gets disjointed when she writes about letters and phone calls relating to a different resident than the one she had just been writing about. They were still relevant to that chapter (the right period in time) but the multiple residents and their descendants (often with different surnames) meant it occasionally got a bit confusing and I found I lost the plot a bit if I hadn't read the book for a while (not because I didn't like it, but because my copy is one of the over-sized paperbacks that are too bulky to carry with you). One aspect of the book I had mixed feelings about was when Myerson fictionalised the stories. As a novelist, she writes very nicely, and has a wonderful imagination but personally I don't really like speculation in biographies. I didn't really mind her describing what the rooms might have looked like in certain eras (many people sent her family photos taken in the house, so she had a good idea), but I didn't like the imagined conversations between residents. However, this is only a small part of the book, so it didn't bother me too much.
I was glad to see an Appendix at the back listing residents in chronological order but would have liked to have seen it in a time line format rather than a list as you had some people who were there for decades and some who stayed less than a year.
Generally I enjoyed the book; I found it an original read. Whilst I occasionally found it disjointed and frustrating, this didn't hamper my overall enjoyment. I think it has definite appeal to people interested in family history, and indeed social history - the people who lived there would be typical of most UK city suburb residents. It would also appeal to biography fans who want to try something a bit different.
Regarding the criteria that Ciao seem to think worthwhile: I read this book because I think it is interesting, I'm not sure it is intended to be useful.
Evaluate this review
How helpful would this review be to someone making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
This product has not yet been reviewed. 
