Really enjoyed this memoir of the authors life in England in a small village.A memoir of the people he knew the news the activities.Really enjoyed hgoing back in time to his world.#netgalley#troubador

The Boy from Rod Alley is an account of a 1930s childhood in Norfolk - John tells about his friends, his school days, the people who lived in the village and the everyday normal occurrences of a rural childhood between the wars. The book concludes in the early years of WW2 when John is a young man.
Unlike some similar memoirs, the book didn't read like a story. The sentences are short & choppy & thoughts fly around quite haphazardly. One minute he's talking about ice skating & seamlessly it's back at school with a memory of a boy with toothache. "standing, holding Dad's hand. It must have been a year when ice was thick and very safe. There were other people there, skating, sliding. Hart made me and someone else stand at the end of a long desk to wait while he decided, stick in hand, what to do with us. We were only about a yard from the door. The big latch clicked and the door opened. Reggie Elvin stood there, late for school ... ... He obviously had a good excuse. His face was swollen on one side, and he looked tired and unwell."

Some things are written in vivid detail, at other times his memory is fading "I can’t remember getting home, except for Mum saying about the people searching everywhere." "They were different colours. I didn’t remember which I had."

There style of writing made it quite difficult to get through, there were several misspellings & I disliked the scattering of coarse language, yet it can almost be forgiven because the more I read, the more it felt like I was sitting opposite John whilst he recalled snippets from his childhood - just like having a chat with your Grandad! Having said that, I would far prefer to have a chat with John than read any more of his writing.
The descriptions did make me want to see if anything of Old Buckenham still existed & I was delighted to see on Google Maps that Rod Alley Row was still there overlooking the pond (unfortunately the old name is long gone & it's known today by the hated name of Post Office Terrace "Post Office Terrace was to be written on our letters because that sounded posher in the opinion of Mrs Moore, who ran the Post Office, which was the tiny shop at the Green end of the road")

Disclosure: I received this book free from NetGalley for review, but all opinions are my own.

I usually really enjoy books which explore the past through the eyes of someone who lived it, and I thought this would be a good one, as the author was remembering his childhood experiences in Norfolk just before the Second World War.

Some of the stories he tells are incredibly strong, some are funny, and some are absolutely heartbreaking (poor Ferdy, living a nomad life with his grandparents, will haunt me).

However, I had a problem with the way the book was written - it is just a ragbag of memories as they came to him in a stream of consciousness. There was no attempt to impose any order, any chronology or even to put them into themes. The result is very jumbled, with the reader bouncing around from one event to another, only to resume that theme some pages later. Paragraphs have no relevance to those going before or after. It is like he dictated his memories to someone and they wrote them down. I find this a very lazy way of presenting a story; the reader deserves some coherence which could easily have been provided and it is not enough to say the author is presenting it as if he were a child remembering, without any adult intervention.

It is worth reading, but be prepared for a jolty ride!

Thank you to NetGalley and Troubador Publishing Ltd for allowing me access to the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The author wrote a memoir that perfectly captured the triumphs and setbacks of her life. It was easy to empathize with the author due to the raw writing.