Yay I've gone bronze and no tanning bed in sight!!
Thanks to everyone for your ratings and comments...
Yay I've gone bronze and no tanning bed in sight!!
Thanks to everyone for your ratings and comments.
I always try to return all ratings and if I promise an E and don't get back to you feel free to give me a poke.
Sue
I must say that I have always found Rose Tremain an excellent writer, and I think that this is her best book yet, quite a change from her more normal historical novel.
The Road Home is full of her usual wonderful elegant prose and imagery and is both funny and tragic.
It tells the sad and yet optimistic, story of Lev, a 42 year old widower who leaves behind his young daughter, Maya, with her grandmother in Eastern Europe (just where we never do find out) and makes the journey to London in search of a job that would let him send money home to make a better life for them. Lev is a likeable and hardworking man who quickly fits in to his new surroundings, but through his eyes the reader begins to see just what a strange place the UK can seem to outsiders, and it's not a pretty sight, as Christy - Lev's Irish landlord tells him -: 'Life's a feckin' football match to the Brits now. They didn't used to be like this, but now they are. If you can't get your ball in the back of the net, you're no one.'
As the book progressed, I felt an empathy with Lev and felt that I really got to know him - faults and all - and was desperate for things to go right for him. I did find it strange that Lev progressed from being hardly able to make himself understood into being quite fluent so quickly - perhaps this can be put down to poetic license!! This is a human story with a likeable and sympathetic hero who finds a lot more expensive and less welcoming than he thought - his budget of living on £20 a week is soon blown away. As Lev makes friendships and gets employment , it is far from an easy journey for him. Despite his circumstances gradually improving and the satisfying fact that he is able to be send money home to Maya and her grandmother, Lev begins to worry about his daughter at home and how she will feel that as well as losing her mother she may also have lost her father.
Very slowly, he Lev realises the position he is in; as he progresses from kebab shop to Ashe's restaurant , he wrestles with the thought that he doesn't belong in his new country--and so the story continues a its moving and gratyfying end.
Summary: A very satisfying read
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Jun 3rd, 2009
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