Life Among the Savages
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4.4 • 7 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
In a hilariously charming domestic memoir, America’s celebrated master of terror turns to a different kind of fright: raising children.
In her celebrated fiction, Shirley Jackson explored the darkness lurking beneath the surface of small-town America. But in Life Among the Savages, she takes on the lighter side of small-town life. In this witty and warm memoir of her family’s life in rural Vermont, she delightfully exposes a domestic side in cheerful contrast to her quietly terrifying fiction. With a novelist’s gift for character, an unfailing maternal instinct, and her signature humor, Jackson turns everyday family experiences into brilliant adventures.
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.
Customer Reviews
Life Among the Savages
Completely unexpected warm and hilarious romp through Shirley Jackson’s family life. Written with bright humor and many relatable moments hapless parents will recognize. Thoroughly enjoyable book.