Book review
4.5
I’ve never been the kind to read a book before bed, either it’s bad and so I don’t feel compelled enough to read it anymore and it sits by the bedside for months on end until I feel too guilty and put it somewhere else, or I read it all in one sitting and end up not going to bed until 5am because I told myself ‘one more chapter.’ If that also describes you, I would totally recommend this book so you can read at night and NOT have either of those problems. This book is in a league of its own in that it’s a very good book and I wanted to continue reading it regularly, but I was never in danger of staying up forever (though on occasion I did do ‘just one more chapter’ though I shouldn’t have.) Think of it like a really intriguing TV show, each episode has a plot, you want to see what happens next, but you aren’t left feeling strange for turning it off in ‘the middle’ and patiently waiting until it comes on again.
The author’s love for the area pours thorough and in a lovely poetic manner that is just right, because though I am a hater of really descriptive books, this one works. I felt transported to another world, both historically and geographically.
Now, I did watch the new PBS series of this book first, and I have to say, reading the book didn’t make me mad. The show did well, they made Mrs. Hall into a dimensional character (though maybe she becomes more of one in later books) instead of the near non-entity she is in the book, added more to Helen’s plot, making the romance not as ‘easy,’ though Siegfried does not look at all on the series as described in the book, he’s spot on, and Tristan…I don’t know whether the casting director was a genius or the actor is, but he could not be anymore the exact Tristan in the book as he’s portrayed on screen. Kudos for that casting. I could see the PBS actors in my head as I read the book and enjoyed it that way, they fit. I can’t always say that about every character in movies, but I think I actually enjoyed the book more because of it. Both book and recent 2021 PBS series recommended. Can’t wait for season 2 though I might not read the other Herriot books, they are quite the tomes and I have so many other books on my TBR! But if I owned one and had time, I’d read it.
Caveat: Minor language, what you’d probably expect as typical of 40s/50s sort of ‘gentlemanly’ UK cussing. Bl**dy, H*ll, D*mn, and that sort, not too heavy. I do think some of the heavy accented dialog might have had worse words in the mix there, but well, I have to say, I had a bit of a hard time always knowing what they were saying in their heavy accent, that I often just ‘got the gist’ and didn’t let myself think to hard about it. But the accented language was not so heavy in the book that it got annoying, Herriot was good at a lot of doing ‘just the right’ amount of all sorts of things in this book that can be annoying in others.
Also, lots of anatomical references to the reproductive system/mating of animals all with correct anatomical names as you ought to expect from a memoir of a vet. In the PBS series, I was thinking, my goodness, does he always have an entire arm inside a cow nearly every visit? Well, the book about makes the same sort of impression. I sometimes wondered why he ever bothered to put a shirt on since he was going to take it right back off again most likely. I find it very funny that the old cover that shows up on goodreads of this book is a man rolling up his sleeve…for those that need a cover to be completely representative, not sure you could be more representative than that one! 🙂
- Goodreads rating – 4.33
- REVIEW – Melissa