Book Description:
A hilarious parody of D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy’s earthy, melodramatic novels, the deliriously entertaining Cold Comfort Farm is "very probably the funniest book ever written" (The Sunday Times).

From the back cover:
When the sukebind was in bud the orphaned Flora Poste, expensively, athletically and lengthily educated, descended on her relatives at Cold Comfort Farm. There were plenty of them - Judith, alone in her grief; Amos, called by God; Seth, smouldering with sex; Elfine, who needed a little polish; Urk; Rennet; Harkaway; Caraway etc.; and, of course, Great Aunt Ada Doom who saw something nasty in the woodshed. And Flora felt it incumbent upon her to bring order into chaos.

This fantastic novel is on my top ten list of fiction and is one of my annual reads. I've recently purchased the newly repacked volume from Penguin so I'm passing this along to HoserLauren at our meetup on May 28, 2006.

I received this today from the very kind Antheras.
This is another BBC Top 100 book (#88 I believe). The cover is kind of freaky though, don't you think?

I love the bookplate you have on the inside! It's so cute!

Thanks for passing this along! :)

Flora Poste is educated and reformed, but when her parents pass away she's at a loss for what she should do. Heaven forbid she learn how to work, instead she tries to stay with extended family, writing to four different family members asking if she can stay with them. She gets a response back from Cold Comfort Farm and the Starkadder family and decides to go stay with them. While she expects mystery and intrigue, things are a whole lot different than she expects. Cold Comfort Farm is indeed cold. The environment is quite dreary, with her cousin Judith being quite a downer, Judith's husband wanting only to preach to the Brethren rather than tend to the farm, 17 year old Elfine who wants to run in the fields and write poetry all day, Seth who only cares about movies, and a whole slew of other cousins. Then there is Aunt Ada Doom who keeps herself in the upstairs bedroom, threatening to go crazy if any of her children or grandchildren leave the farm. Flora has an overly cheerful demeanor and sets out to change her cousin's lives. She wants to make Cold Comfort Farm less cold and help her cousins reach their full potential.

The author has a mocking tone towards Flora at times, making fun of her naivety and cheerfulness. At the beginning, I found Flora kind of annoying but eventually got used to her and the way the author was trying to portray her. Other people have described this book as funny, which I didn't really find. Parts of it were amusing, but it wasn't laugh-out-loud funny.

Overall, I thought the book was alright. I didn't love it, I didn't hate it. This book is #88 on the BBC List and I think there are far better books on that list than this one.

I'm saving this one to RABCK!

Sent off to k00kaburra as a thank you for loaning me another book to read :)

Thank you, thank you, thank you :) Both the book and the 'write bookmark' totally made my day! It may seem silly, but I just love the colors of this version of the book's cover. Makes the main characters look like zombies. Very neat.

Can't wait to read this one, thanks for sending it my way, HoserLauren! If you ever want to 'borrow' something else out of my TBR heap, just ask!

Cheers!