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Rating: 
Summary: Yowtch! This is a hilarious, wicked, killer of a memoir
Review: Holy moly! You wanna talk about a dysfunctional family? Here it is. It's during the years of WWII. The author's father is off fighting for God and country, and her mother is having a delayed adolescence, so author Lorna Sage is shipped to her grandparents house somewhere in rural England. Her grandparents are weird, weird, weird, but it is their very faults that ultimately make Sage, a well-known and powerful literary critic, into the person she becomes.
Her grandfather is a debauched, intellectual, furious and infuriating vicar whose idiosyncrasies were seemingly limitless. Her grandmother's rage at her lot in life and the man who was responsible for it (and by extension, ALL men) never once abates - and you almost champion her for her constancy.
Bad Blood reads as wicked fun with a strongly feminist underlying message. I loved it.
Rating: 
Summary: Post War England
Review: I grew up in the same 1950's in England and apart from her randy grandad shared many of the same experiences, feelings and general discomfort with the miserable, narrow social conditions in England. Put another way a perfect breeding ground for the english character of inhibitions, repression of feelings, violence and fear of economic success riddled with Edwardian class distinctions of no value/relevance in the 50's. Jealousy of the American post war success and hide bound by genteel poverty everywhere it was not surprising that England's social scene exploded in the 60's and 70's. I left England for the US many years ago to escape the trapped kingdom of the mind and the pathetic lack of real freedoms, nostalgia is the UK's greatest industry and the more books like this that appear will help people understand that england's "ennui" is not that attractive after all !
Rating: 
Summary: boring
Review: I'm mystified as to why this book got the Whitbread Biography Award. It is stuffy, plodding and completely unrevealing. Maybe bc it was written by a British author? I nodded off after reading 5 pages and then skimmed it looking for juicier material. I found none. I'll stick with contemporary biographers such as Mary Karr, Kim Barnes and Dave Eggers.
Rating:
Summary: really interesting for 2/3 of book, but dried out at the end
Review: Lorna Sage has a great writing style as she tells of her childhood in Scotland, when she is raised by her querelous, vindictive and viceful grandparents (ironically, her womanizing grandfather is the little town's vicar.) This is where she gets her "bad blood". Lorna's parents also figure in (she writes extensively of each generation in this family) and they have problems galore as well. No one, writes Lorna, wants to be a parent in this extended family, teetering at the edge of poverty. The grandparents and parents are actually very lively interesting people (I don't want to say "characters" because this is a memoir, not fiction, and that is their real lives on these pages.) They are only human -- almost immorally and basely so, as they give in to all of their temptations and quarrel about others expecting them NOT to do so. It makes for colorful reading. Lorna herself is the most boring and trite, despite being the author. (However, when Lorna herself is a pregnant teenager with a shotgun marriage, her mom raises her daughter for her while she and her husband go to university. But apparently that is OK and not being a "perpetual daughter".) Furthermore, she has the nerve to write that she and her husband are the foretelling of the future as they, in the 1950s, were pregnant before getting married but went to university and graduated with honors anyway. The fact that they had not really had intercourse to get her pregnant, so she was pregnant without understanding how and why, hardly makes them rebellious daredevils -- just ignorant and ridiculous. Harsh but true.
Rating:
Summary: "breaking the rules"; one woman's story
Review: Lorna Sage speaks to us both eloquently and sparely in this story of her days as part of an unconventional family in the conventional Wales of the 1940s and 50s. A happy childhood she had not, and she was nearly doomed to "a lifetime of...impotent makebelieve" as a housewife,by an early pregnancy and marriage. Her intelligence and determination to avoid this fate was supplemented from unlikely sources, some of her 60ish spinster teachers. One of them said, "..at the top of her voice that seventeen was the ideal age to have a healthy baby and get on with your life."
Her mother also helped, by taking care of her daughter while she and her equally young husband attended university and became the first married couple of ordinary student age to graduate in the same subject at the same time, both with Firsts. Sage's engrossing story is jarring to readers like me, who enjoyed wonderful childhood days. It also will be jarring to childless professional women who today face a different set of conventions, and difficulties combining motherhood and career.
Rating: 
Summary: Readable - but not a must have
Review: The story of an unexceptional childhood - mild neglect, some poverty and a very filthy home - neither sordid nor tragic nor eventful enough to be compelling reading. Especially for a person raised in India the dysfunctionality level of childhood/family seems average. The only redeeming feature is Lorna Sage's writing style. Witty and insightful. Normally this should raise a book to atleast 3 and a half stars but somehow this one does not quite make it past "interesting enough to read when there's nothing better to do". To use review cliches since they work so well in describing a book, it is readable but far short of unputdownable.
Rating:
Summary: The Old Devil, The Harridan, and The Fairy Child
Review: These were the three who were the "parent" figures in this wonderful memoir of a child from the edge of Wales who through impressive intelligence and stony determination detoured her "lot in life" and became a noted critic, author and academic. The Old Devil was her maternal grandfather, an adulterous, hard living vicar who passed on his love of books and language to his granddaughter. He let down and disillusioned everyone who came into his life, but as Ms. Sage says, "he didn't live long enough to disappoint me," and she adored him. Her grandmother, the Harridan, despised (this really is not a strong enough word!) him and never let him forget it. She never kept house, nor cooked and mostly looked after her asthma. She never went near him "except feet first-when she was buried in the same grave with him." This unlikely pair produced The Fairy Child, the author's mother who lived in girlish wonder all her life. Valma had her mother's contempt for house work but also was imbued with the notion it was her "sacred duty." Consequently, her efforts were constant and the results indifferent. She could not bear confrontation, (small wonder!) and was timid to the point of exasperation. What was important was what was on show. Thus the public areas of the vicarage and the people in it were reasonably tidy, and the private areas of both body and home were filthy. Ms. Sage lived with head lice for over six years, because none of the household would admit that she had them. In this ménage, no one wanted to be a parent, the grandparents raged and rowed, the mother was a forever-helpless child. Ms. Sage freely admits she was an unlovable child. She whined and pouted and wept; her saving grace was her fierce intelligence and her luck was her beauty, both as a child and adult. Until she was six, she lived with her grandparents until her father came home from the wars. Her mother and father were perfectly matched. He needed someone to protect and she needed the protection, but parenting was not in the picture. I was amazed over and over at how Lorna persevered to get out of the stifling village life. She made the cardinal error of becoming pregnant at 15, then marrying her 17-year-old lover. She would not let even this become an impediment in her scholastic journey. Both she and husband graduated from Durham University with firsts. Ms. Sage's writing is so personalized, spare with the driest humor, she is a living presence. She died shortly after being notified she had won the Booker Prize for Biography for this book. I couldn't take in that this vivid presence was gone. I am so grateful she had time to write this fine memoir.
Rating:
Summary: Not only well written but an amazingly fine book
Review: This finely written memoir of her childhood as an Anglican minister's granddaughter. Today, or recently, [she died in 2001] Sage is an English literary critic and her memoir is both appreciably granular and endowed with a coherent overview. Highly recommended. Won the Whitbread Biography Award.
Rating:
Summary: I must be missing something
Review: This memoir seems just the sort of thing that I usually devour with great gusto, but somehow it didn't grab me. I had to push myself through part one, early life with grandfather, until the pages began to turn for me. The story and characters were fundamentally interesting enough, but I thought overly drawn out to the point that the liveliness was drained away.
Rating: 
Summary: wow
Review: tough childhood, I wish Lorna Sage would write another memoir telling us how she's doing right now.
I liked the book.
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