3.5 upped to 4
It's a mixed bag: i loved some parts and descriptions of the places. Wasn't involved in the emotional part and as it was a really private travel into places and experience.
I appreciated them but i also felt like I was intruding at times, I think it would be different if your spiritual practice includes sharing this type of experiences in public
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

A woman loves where she lives with her five children but her husband is working away a lot and spends more and more time in America. He eventually suggests they all move to Washington. The first quarter of this story is taken up with her emotions regarding her green and pleasant land and the thought of leaving it. Nothing much is mentioned about her children which may have held my interest but by this time I’m afraid I didn’t care! Hate abandoning a story but am sorry to say I was bored.

I did finish this book but not sure if I enjoyed it. It's beautifully written with descriptions of all the areas and villages but I found Clover's situation annoying. Too much agonising about whether to join her husband who was working in the US and in the end I found myself just irritated.

This was a book of two halves for me. Clover Stroud is a very talented writer and I really enjoyed learning about the Ridgeway, Wantage and the surrounding area as I'm not familiar with it. I could have read a whole book concentrating just on this. The underlying story about the pros and cons of moving to the USA was less appealing to me. Whilst it was a very important decision for the family I have to admit that the amount of introspection lost my interest after a while and I ended up skipping bits towards the end.

Not a particularly enthralling book, an everyday story of a family living in a Wiltshire village under the shadow of a white horse. The struggles of a wife and husband separated by the Atlantic and growing more apart as time moves on. I gave up with it about a third through, not for me.

I have lived all of Clover’s memoirs and this was no exception. Her descriptions of her home and the English countryside were vivid and beautiful. I loved following her family’s journey from the UK to the US and her conflicting feelings about this. As always, the writing was exceptionally beautiful.

In The Giant on the Skyline, Clover Stroud faces the daunting task of uprooting her life to join her husband in America, and her emotional struggle becomes the heart of this evocative memoir. Stroud delves into the profound connection between her sense of self and her relationship with her home, reflecting on how the Ridgeway, a place she feels deeply attuned to, embodies her identity and memories. She muses, "I am certain the Ridgeway holds vibrations of my soul that I've not experienced in other places, and so it knows things about me, and is sympathetic even, to who I am."

Despite being labeled a memoir, Stroud's narrative transcends traditional boundaries with its prosaic, lyrical style and deep introspection. It reads almost like a modern fable, seamlessly blending historical insights, personal reflections, and a touch of mystical realism. Her ability to interweave the mundane with the profound creates a rich, resonant story that speaks to the universal experience of navigating change and understanding one's place in the world.

3.5/5.

I found this memoir fairly maddening - it's incredibly circular, with the author having the same arguments with herself and her husband over hundreds of pages. It's I'm sure a very true reflection of her state of mind about the proposed move from Oxfordshire to Washington DC but it's not particularly enjoyable to go along for the ride and I found it a slog to finish. Many thanks to netGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

I'm sorry but this was a huge disappointment! It sounded great, just the sort of book I love, but it didn't turn out that way.
Clover Stroud is roughly my age and I also have children. I cannot imagine any scenario where I would feel proud that my son was expelled from school. And I was amazed that she encouraged her children to hold illegal raves in the countryside. She even went along to them!
No consideration whatsoever for the trespassing, for disturbing birds and animals, and of course disturbing their neighbours who probably had to get up the next day to work, or have children who couldn't sleep, or people who were elderly, ill or vulnerable.
All she cared about was that her children could express themselves!
Such a shame because she can write, but unfortunately she is just plain selfish and annoying.

This book really wasn’t for me but having said that I’m glad I read it. Clover is living with her 5 children in the rural countryside of England. Within view of the famous chalk White Horse on the hillside. She has a remarkable affinity with nature and her local community and her love of this shines through in the book. However her husband is working in the US and it applying pressure to make the family move to Washington DC so they can be together. Although how that will make that much of a difference to them I don’t know as he seemed to be working all over the US.
I found both Clover and Pete very annoying people. He reckoned he couldn’t afford to keep a family of 5 children afloat by working in the UK…….really!! Plain selfish I thought, his career was far more important to him than his family or at least this is how it comes across. And Clover never seemed to be able to spell out how she felt, what sort of a relationship was that? In the end it all worked out for the man and I hope it works out for them.
Rounded up to 3⭐️

Thanks to NetGalley.co.uk and the publishers for this ARC

This is a beautifully written memoir. Clover loves where she lives and the house that she lives in, She has great friends and neighbour. You can visualise the house, the fields and the areas close to Clover’s heart, as she writes so descriptively. She has to decide what she wants to do when her absent husband wants her and her younger three children, to leave The Ridgeway, which has become close to her heart, and move to America, to a townhouse, and live their usually free life with more constraints, and a total change of life, all to be with him when he comes home from work.There would be a lot more opportunities in America…..She’s really torn!! I could really feel through the book that she was being pulled in two directions! It’s a fantastic read!! I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Many thanks to RandomHouse Uk for the opportunity to read this arc copy for review consideration via Netgalley. My opinion is my own.
#Netgalley, #RandomHouseUk, #Clover.Stroud.

What makes a place a home.

I wasn’t sure about this book at first but I really enjoyed it.

Slow paced but beautifully written and very descriptive, I really was taken into the book.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the e-ARC. I love Stroud's style of writing but I just really struggled to get into the narrative of the book and struggled to finish it.

Clover Stroud brings us into her world with incredible range and emotion, honest and bittersweet she remains a must read

In a world where many of us no longer live where we grew up, or indeed moved around as a child, where is home?
As Clover strives to find roots for her children in Wiltshire, near where she grew up, her husband is working in America. But where are her roots, where are her children’s roots, where is her home and where is home for her children?
The descriptive writing is very evocative and so striking, I was transported to areas I’ve visited on holiday.
Easy to read and engaging, if a little thought provoking - I was left wondering where is home for me?

Beautifully descriptive language, the meaning of belonging, home and love. Surprising novel with lots of insights.

Memoir of a real-life decision influenced by the spirit of a landscape.

Initially at sea in (not-very) rural England where she is driven by the need for affordable living space, Clover has adapted to the life, even though her partner is largely absent, travelling abroad and increasingly working in the United States, to pay the bills incurred by bringing up their five children. One might note at this point that a house-price boom which consistently outpaces even the cost of living crisis is the G7’s version of the Chinese Communist Party’s demographically-catastrophic “One Child” policy, now abandoned as one BILLION unlived-in apartments are being blown up to make space for new building which is also not needed by the dwindling population.

Clover’s partner, Pete, finds himself unable to make a good-enough living to support his partner and offspring outside of a corporate setting in Washington DC (only those in elite jobs can afford to reproduce) so he wants Clover and the children to abandon the life they have, in order to join him in making a new life there. Clover has come to love the landscape of the English-Welsh borders which she initially found very alien, but she’s still desperate to live with Pete full-time, so she is torn and even frightened by his plans to move the family to America.

The thing is, in that landscape she is surrounded by people making very much less money than Pete, who somehow manage anyway: mostly by doing things of such direct practical value to others that the others are willing to pay cash-in-hand for them! The gulf between Pete and the people Clover deals with on a daily basis is a great deal wider than the great circle route from Swindon to Washington DC.
Not only does he feel that he needs much more money, he can only hope to earn that money within a business model that separates him from most contact with or awareness of those at the base of the economic pyramid: the people who help Clover every day and care for her and about her.

Just as Pete cannot make his way in rural England, it is very unlikely that Clover’s friends who can manage that without much complaint, would last long in Pete’s world. Perhaps Clover’s friends and neighbours cope by lacking the same sense of entitlement which Pete NEEDS in order to survive in a more privileged, but cut-throat and rule-bound, corporate environment?

Clover manages to say goodbye to the landscape she has come to love and takes her youngest children to be with the man she can’t stop loving. The two older children seem to be left to make their own choice and make their own way.

My first book by Clover and not my usual go to genre, but something about the description of the book…What is it that makes a home? What is a home without the roots that tie you to a place? What is a home when a fall is split? … resonated with me. I’ve lived apart from my husband with my children in the past, I’ve taken my family abroad to be together as a family, I’ve moved from the place I grew up and yet my roots still remain strong and deep inside me. So I very much felt for Clover as she struggled to find her peace with the decision to move to America. I loved her descriptions of the countryside and the feelings it evokes for different people. I very much enjoyed her journey and the images she creates. All in all a beautiful read.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher, Random House UK for an arc in exchange for a review.

Thank you to the author and publisher for the chance to read this ARC, in exchange for an honest review. This was heartbreaking, contemplative, moving, fantastical. A stunning read.

At its best, this book is exquisite. The writing about place, about the tiny changes in a hedgerow or the sound of children rushing in and out of the kitchen pulse with extraordinary reality. I grew up almost within sight of the Uffington White Horse, so the connections and wide wide differences between my experience and Stroud's were all fascinating, and the book kept me thinking long after I'd put it down. What didn't work so well was the overall premise of the book. The thread about moving to Washington was so very stretched that it became quite irritating, however profound the emotions which such a move might provoke. I also didn't find that the mystical elements (the man in black, the man like a fox, the whole giants in the landscape bit) landed particularly well, and the sections of verbatim dialogue were clunky. The positives do very much outweigh the flaws, though, and this is a very good read.