Life Among the Savages
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
A darkly funny account of family life from the author of The Haunting of Hill House and The Lottery
'Sometimes, in my capacity as a mother, I find myself sitting open-mouthed and terrified before my own children'
As well as being a master of the macabre, Shirley Jackson was also a pitch-perfect chronicler of everyday family life. In Life Among the Savages, her caustically funny account of raising her children in a ramshackle house in Vermont, she deals with rats in the cellar, misbehaving imaginary friends, an oblivious husband and ever-encroaching domestic chaos, all described with wit, warmth and plenty of bite.
'Jackson's family chronicles have a genuinely subversive aspect ... Read today, her pieces feel surprisingly modern - mainly because she refuses to sentimentalize or idealize motherhood' The New York Times Book Review
'Comic masterpieces, laced with hints of the discontent that lies beneath' Guardian
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Originally published as short stories in women's magazines in the 1940s, these funny, semi-autobiographical anecdotes from Jackson describe life with three young children in rural Vermont and were first assembled into a novel in 1952. Reader Lockford handles domesticity in just the right tones: you're hearing the inflections of the mildly sarcastic, self-deprecating, endlessly exasperated but always loving wife and mother. And Lockford's children's voices are age appropriate and believable. Laurie, Jannie, and Sally are alternately demanding, helpful, helpless, annoying, happy, disobedient, and perfectly wonderful in sickness and in health, in school, at home, in the department store, in the restaurant, or engaged in the complex lives of multiple imaginative friends. But this audio edition is best listened to one tale at a time, because literary life with children, like real life with children, can sometimes be repetitive and tiresome.
