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An Episode of Sparrows is a novel written in 1955 by Rumer Godden. It was re-issued in 2016 in The New York Review Children's Collection.
- Rumer Godden
- 1955
Someone has dug up the private garden in the square and taken buckets of dirt, and Miss Angela Chesney of the Garden Committee is sure that a gang of boys from run-down Catford Street must be to blame. But Angela's sister Olivia isn't so sure.
- (1.5K)
- Hardcover
May 10, 2016 · Miss Angela Chesney is sure that a gang of boys from run-down Catford Street is to blame. But Angela’s sister, Olivia, isn’t so sure. Olivia has always wondered why the neighborhood children—the “sparrows” she sometimes watches from the window of her house—are kept out of the private garden.
- (42)
- Rumer Godden
- $13.88
- NYRB Kids
- Is It Meant to Be A Children’s Book?
- A Post-War London Setting
- Lovejoy Mason and Her Indifferent Mother
- Thievery and Gardening
- “Mary, Make Me Cocky and Independent”
- More About An Episode of Sparrows
But despite having been educated at what is now the very posh Roedean School on the South coast of England and having then spent much of her working life teaching dancing in India, Godden wrote a coming-of-age novel about the contrast between middle-class orthodoxy and poverty on the streets of wartime London: An Episode of Sparrows, 1956, which wa...
An Episode of Sparrows is set in post-war London, on the borderline between a genteel, middle-class area and the much poorer houses nearby. Catford Street is on the poorer side, though it has working-class solidarity, making it rather like an urban version of the villages in Peyton Place by Grace Metalious and Shirley Jackson’s The Road Through the...
As Jacqueline Wilson says, Lovejoy Mason, although only eleven years old, is a terrific character. Her mother is a musical singer on the stage, a coloratura, as Lovejoy says and is almost constantly away. She has left her daughter in the hands of the kind and caring but financially imperiled Mrs. Combie, whose husband is ruining them by attempting ...
To make up for her loss, Lovejoy cynically and ruthlessly steals things, quite prepared to fight boys if she has to, though even she has her limits. ‘Lovejoy did not steal big things, nor money; she knew that to take money was wicked; nobody had told her that ice-creams and comics were money and she was adept in taking a parcel out of a perambulato...
And then it turns out that Lovejoy’s mother is not coming back; she has not been with the singing troupe she claimed and owes money everywhere, even to her own agent. The Juvenile Court very kindly try to find Lovejoy somewhere to live as Mrs Combie refuses to keep her on, now knowing that there will be no more money from her mother. ”It’s not that...
Feb 1, 1989 · An Episode of Sparrows. Paperback – February 1, 1989. In post-war London, two street-tough children attempt to build a hidden garden, an act that awakens hidden courage in the children and profoundly disrupts the neighborhood. Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
- (268)
- Paperback
- Rumer Godden
Miss Angela Chesney is sure that a gang of boys from run-down Catford Street is to blame. But Angela’s sister, Olivia, isn’t so sure. Olivia has always wondered why the neighborhood children—the “sparrows” she sometimes watches from the window of her house—are kept out of the private garden.
Someone has dug up the private garden in the square and taken buckets of dirt, and Miss Angela Chesney of the Garden Committee is sure that a...
