Review: Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee

4 stars for Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee.

I bought a total of sixteen books from my vacation to Scotland last month, mostly from secondhand bookstores in Edinburgh. Cider with Rosie is one of them books that I lugged back home from afar.

While holding the book and contemplating my purchase, I thought the author is a girl until I read the short introduction after the cover page. Then I started to wonder if author Lee's wife is someone by the name of Rosie. I decided there and then to buy the book, to read for myself and find out in good time.

The book is a recollection of early boyhood. Laurie Lee's account of his childhood is full of joy and gratitude for youth in a rich and sensuous world located in a remote Cotswold village. The writing is welcoming and fresh, of an era and landscape that has mostly vanished from today's world. Each sentence tells of first hand account mingled with the sense of hearing, touch, sight and smell. It is a heartwarming and wondrous record of a life lived.

Having finished Cider with Rosie, I can't help but consider if I want to pursue his two other autobiographies in the same series: As I Walked Out One Midsummer (1969) and A Moment of War (1991). But when I turn my head to look at my collection of books, I see the rest of those fifteen recently-bought books waiting for me, and I tell myself, I better read those first.


Publisher: Penguin Books; Later Printing Used edition
Publication date: 26 Oct 1978

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At all times wonderfully evocative and poignant, Cider With Rosie is a charming memoir of Laurie Lee's childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a world that is tangibly real and yet reminiscent of a now distant past.

In this idyllic pastoral setting, unencumbered by the callous father who so quickly abandoned his family responsibilities, Laurie's adoring mother becomes the centre of his world as she struggles to raise a growing family against the backdrop of the Great War.

The sophisticated adult author's retrospective commentary on events is endearingly juxtaposed with that of the innocent, spotty youth, permanently prone to tears and self-absorption.

Rosie's identity from the novel Cider with Rosie was kept secret for 25 years. She was Rose Buckland, Lee's cousin by marriage.

*Blurb from Goodreads*

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