Coming Home by Rosamunde Pilcher Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Coming Home
Book Review: I want to move to Cornwall!
Summary: 4 Stars
Coming Home is one of those books best described as a "sprawling saga", starring the landscapes of Cornwall England. Coming Home is the story of Judith Dunbar, beginning with her girlhood in the seaside resort of Penmarron in the years before World War 2, her young adulthood during the war, and in its aftermath. The event that changed Judith's life was meeting Loveday Carey-Lewis at a department store kitting up in preparation for St. Ursula's boarding school. Judith has been placed in the care of her aunt after her mother and her sister moved to Singapore to be with her father. Loveday, spoiled and willful, but wild and fun, has special permission to go home on weekends, and she invites Judith to Nancherrow, the family estate. Judith is immediately enfolded into Loveday's warm family life. I wanted to resent the Carey-Lewises with their upper-class advantages, but Pilcher makes it impossible. In contrast with upper-class families as typically portrayed, they are a close family with good communication, physically affectionate and emphatically not snobbish. These advantages let the family adapt well to the harsh circumstances of wartime. Judith and her family moved around a lot, so Judith never associated any one place as the fixed anchor of "home". Nancherrow becomes that place for her. After reading Coming Home, I was ready to pack up and move to Cornwall, it sounded so idyllic. Palm trees, beaches, and English country estates - what's not to like. There's love and romance too, but Coming Home is more a woman's journey to adulthood than a boy meets girl story. As Judith grows up, she can transition from becoming the receiver of kindness and generosity to being a woman who is able to give to and care for others.
If you're an Anglophile with an appetite for big books, you'll enjoy Coming Home. If you like Coming Home, you might want to check out author Mary Wesley. Wesley also draws on her own experiences to write about the wartime period in England in a similar vein.
Book Review: I would give this book 10 stars if I could
Summary: 5 Stars
Rosamunde Pilcher is an inspiring writer. I have loved her books for years and have re-read this title so many times. Every time a character dies, I burst into tears as if I'm reading it for the first time. Judith Dunbar is such a strong character and her life is extraordinary. The Carey-Lewis's are also so well-written, you feel like you've always known them. There is not a page in this book that is not exquisite. When I read this book, I always come home again and again!Book Review: If I could give more then 5 stars I would!
Summary: 5 Stars
After finishing Coming Home by Rosamund Pilcher I told my husband that this book was so charming, so delightful, so very, very British that nothing else could ever compare! I was bereft when I read the last page and for about a month I couldn't settle into any book! It was that good!!
I loved the characters of Judith and Loveday and Diana and Aunt Biddy! I love the descriptions of the tables laid for tea, the Dower House that Judith inherited, the farm that was up the hill from Nancharrow where Loveday comes to live as a young adult. I could picture everything perfectly in my mind, and often find myself daydreaming...still...of this book and it's characters.
I enjoyed watching the girls grow up from 14 year old teens to twenty something adults and all of their trials and tribulations. The descriptions of the hardships of WWII made me appreciate what my own parents went through as youngsters, as they never talk about it much.
I feel that I could never, ever write an adequate review of this book, but if you have the chance, you simply must read it.
Book Review: It's a keeper. (spoilers)
Summary: 4 Stars
Being a re-reader, I have to say that Coming Home stands up to repeated readings, and the appeal of the main character, Judith Dunbar, does not fade. However, I seem to see the story in a different light than many people who have read and loved this book and ALL the characters in it. So here's my take on Coming Home.
Judith Dunbar is introduced at the beginning of the story as a fourteen year old girl in pre-WWII Cornwall, who is about to be left at boarding school while her mother and younger sister depart to Ceylon to rejoin Judith's father there - a common even in the days of the British Empire, where men worked in foreign posts and their children were sent "home" to England at very young ages. And before long, I became aware that poor Judith, a bright, sensitive, considerate and capable girl, is surrounded by schmucks, who lean on her terribly and hold back her development.
Judith's own mother is a completely useless weak sister, who is such a chicken that she's afraid to drive her own car. Judith's younger sister is a horrific spoiled brat that the reader wishes would be conveniently kidnapped. She has an aunt on her father's side who seems capable enough, but who is extremely obtuse when it comes to realizing that her "old family friend" is actually a pedophile, and who is also an inconsiderate and dangerous driver. Another aunt, on Judith's mother's side is supposedly meant to be an Auntie Mame type, but who is just irritating and abrasive, is incapable of even boiling an egg, and seems to do nothing but sit around, drink and try very hard to be outrageous.
So when Judith escapes this gang via a timely death in the family and a friendship in boarding school, I thought "thank goodness the girl will get to know some people who are not completely dysfunctional idiots". How wrong I was.
Enter the Carey-Lewis family. They take Judith under their wing at their estate, Nancherrow. On the surface, they seem very glamorous and kind. Under the surface, it's another matter.
Judith befriends a girl with the absurd name of Loveday Carey-Lewis, who seems to be the character intended to be the independent, impudent spitfire of a girl - but who is actually annoying, stupid, stubborn, spoiled beyond redemption and utterly selfish. She's consumed with a completely self-centered desire to spend her life on her family's estate (probably because she realizes that she's useless otherwise and would never survive in the outside world where she isn't petted and adored for no good reason), and she does endless harm to herself and others in her determined quest to stay there.
Loveday's mother, Diana Carey-Lewis, is something right out of an old thirties movie, complete with glamorous clothing, a big Bentley, a Pekingese that she drags everywhere, and an attitude that she is the bountiful lady who does everyone a favor simply by being alive. She is also a useless parasite. Married to a gormless man decades her senior, she is surrounded by servants and lackeys, and does nothing at all for herself, even letting her bloody dog out into the garden to take a leak! She spends considerable time on "delicious" jaunts to her house in London, leaving hubby and children behind, and spends her time there at nightclubs and "lunching clandestinely with another woman's husband". How charming. Diana has utterly spoiled her three children, and has handed their raising over to nannies and boarding schools. Diana seems to be a character that Pilcher set up to be admired, but I suspect in reality, Pilcher might just want the reader to feel uncomfortable with her, as Judith does when she first meets her, before she, in her inexperience, becomes overwhelmed by the veneer of glamour and elegance that Diana exudes over her useless true self.
Diana's other children, Athena and Edward, are similar parasites. Athena spends her life doing nothing but letting men pursue her and collecting the spoils of their pursuit - diamond jewelry, and bottles of "expensive scent" with which she is always "drenched". She is yet another useless woman, incapable of doing anything but looking decorative. Even when she marries and has a child, she is still frivolous and idle, names her baby something absurd and generally doesn't seem to know or care that World War II is raging, except that it's all dreadfully inconvenient, those clothing rationing coupons you know and no scent available to be "drenched" in.
Edward is a downright brainless cad, who is so superficial that he never stays friends with anyone for any length of time. Once he's presented someone to his family at their estate and claims them as "friend", he drops them and goes on to the next "friendship". His family and Judith worship him, and Pilcher seems to have tried to make him into much more than he comes across as, as she writes that he lightened the life of everyone who ever met him - but Edward's actions do not back up this statement, at all - particularly the way he ends up using and then dropping poor Judith. Thankfully, the obnoxious Edward comes a cropper, and is out of Judith's life.
I can't be sure whether Pilcher deliberately intended to write a book where Judith first becomes enamoured of and admiring of these people and slowly comes round to seeing them and accepting them as what they truly are, or whether she was trying very hard to make exotic, eccentric characters that everyone would fall in love with, and missed the boat. So many readers claim that they "loved" the Carey-Lewis family, and I simply cannot see it. It seems obvious to me that by the time Judith has served in the navy during the war and has sustained considerable loss, she is on her way to being far more realistic and less easily dazzled by the likes of these extremely rich, self-centered people. At one point she deliberately makes a decision, and sticks to it, despite what Loveday Carey-Lewis would like, and thinks it's about time Loveday didn't get everything her own way. She also loses much of her admiration for Diana Carey-Lewis.
So I see something different in this novel than most of the people who have reviewed it here. It's indeed a coming of age story, slow and a bit ponderous at times, but with enough movement of plot of characterization that the reader stays interested. Most importantly, despite the negative Carey-Lewis characters, there are enough minor characters who are decent, giving and capable people that the reader doesn't get overwhelmed with decorative and useless women and ineffectual or manipulative men. Judith's friend, Phyllis, is a rock of dependability; Mary Millyway, the Carey-Lewises' nanny, is a forthright and sensible woman who warns her in a timely way not to be sucked into the Carey-Lewis clan; her Uncle Bob is a wonderful capable and kind man, longsuffering too as he's stuck with Judith's hard-drinking and helpless Aunt Biddy; the decent and hardworking doctor that Judith finally learns to love is such a mensch that the reader just knows that everything between them will be all right.
I had the feeling at the end of the book that Judith was well on her way to being her own person, and was no longer seduced by the glamorous lifestyle of the Carey-Lewises, and basically saw through their blarney and shallowness - just as she survived the war and learned just how little a person can survive with and still have a good and happy life.
I would actually be interested in a sequel to this book, to see how things work out. Of course, the way of life the Carey-Lewises enjoyed collapsed almost entirely in England after the War, so that would be an interesting wrinkle. Like Judith, much of the working class who had labored for the ultra-rich survived the war and realized that they weren't about to be servants again and act as if their rich employers were God Almighty. There were pairings in Coming Home that are bound to end up badly, particularly the selfish and useless Loveday and her war-neurosis-case of a love interest. Someday Diana Carey-Lewis' elderly husband is going to kick off and leave her, incapable of even writing a letter without fussing about how hard it all is and such a chore, in charge of a large estate.
Considering all these possibilities, and knowing that Judith was largely independent of the Carey-Lewis clan by the end of Coming Home, and would survive the radical changes that came to England after the War unscathed is very satisfying indeed - and it would make a durn good book too. Possibly Ms. Pilcher could put in a sequence of Loveday being tossed by a prize bull. That would be ultimately satisfying.
Book Review: Like Coming Home
Summary: 5 Stars
This is my favorite book ever. By the end of the book, I felt so close to Judith, the main character. Ms. Pilcher does such a beautiful job of following Judith's life, you feel as if you know her. Definitely Rosamunde Pilcher's best.