The Greengage Summer

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Five children are put up in a hotel in France after their mother falls desperately ill and is hospitalized. Through the eyes of Cecil, the second eldest, the reader sees the hotel with all its bizarre characters and unfamiliar customs. The Greengages Summer is the story of Cecil, a young girl who, with her brother and three sisters spend one glorious summer in France. Told to us by an adolescent, this is the story of five British children stranded in France at a hotel. I’ve never tasted fruit like it – I daresay time has enhanced the flavour, but they were large and sticky and sweet with a wonderful flavour.

Madame Zizi, the owner, is obsessed with her handsome, well-dressed English lover, Eliot, who, when he is the mood, takes the Grey children under his wing. Gegen Ende entwickelt sich das Buch aber fast zu einem Kriminalroman und lässt die Lesenden dann doch regelrecht durch die Seiten fliegen. And, amongst the gnarled trees of the old orchards, thirteen-year-old Cecil watches from the side lines as her achingly beautiful sister, Joss, is drawn into the heart of a toxic affair.Paul sorts it out for them in chapter 6: Madame hates them because Eliot has arranged for them to stay. McSherry in The Hartford Courant, April 6, 1958: Rumer Godden’s children are wise beyond their years, and their observations in this enchanting novel solve much of the mystery that eludes their elders, even the detectives.

Eliot catches Paul and gets Zisi to fire him, but Joss's 13-year-old sister Hester ( Jane Asher) has taken a liking to Paul and begs Joss to get Eliot to reconsider, which he does. While it seems like this is a book for kids, it's not really, as it deals with some rather adult themes. Eliot is an interesting, mysterious character, by turns warm and inscrutable whose motives remain hazy to the children. Although Rumer Godden’s story is, by her own acknowledgement, semi-autobiographical, the truly artful bit is the way she probes the ambiguous margins - between innocence and experience, between England and France - and reveals such a rich seam of mingled pleasure and pain.I forced myself to pick this up before August ended because I knew it'd be a perfect summer read (and it was! The narrator, 13-year-old Cecil Grey, is in a unique position to observe adult behavior, though she does not always interpret its meaning correctly. However, as the plot develops, it becomes increasingly clear that the adults at Les Oeillets cannot be trusted, and their intense, secret and passionate lives impress themselves strongly upon Cecil, whose innocence is slowly eroded by seeing the baser side of human nature.