When I Was Young quickly becomes gripping. It is hard to put the book down as you just want to know what is going to happen next. It is not immediately obvious and you wonder what secrets this family has. The characters draw you in with their mysteriousness and you wonder what it would be like to live in a post-world war world. With all of the scars and memories; the trauma and loss. Secrets can be toxic and so can lies. Nowhere it this most clear than in 1950s postwar France.

Eleanor is only 16 when she goes to the Loire Valley on a French Exchange. But her maturity and intelligence is beyond her years. Her arrival in France is only welcome by some of the family she is to stay with, and initially she cannot help feeling that it is her fault. At home her mother works the farm as her father sustained serious mental and physical injuries whilst he was a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp. Throughout the story Eleanor becomes even stronger, she becomes a women.

Eleanor falls in love in France, but love is always complicated. I do not want to give away too much of what happens- always hard in a book review- but the book is wonderful at capturing emotion and the fact that home can be anywhere, and when you find it, that’s it.

This is a wonderful book that you will want to read all the way through to the end without stopping. Highly enjoyable.

Published by Arrow and out on the 27th March 2013. Also available as an eBook.

On the backcover:

‘When I was young the war started. When I was young my father was a soldier. When I was young I moved to the country. When I was young I went to France and fell in love’

1950

Eleanor is sixteen when she goes to the Loire Valley on a French Exchange. But the beauty of her surroundings are at odds with the family who live there. It is a family torn apart by the memories of the German occupation, and buckling under the burden of the dark secrets they keep.

Etienne, the dark and brooding owner is friendly, but his wife Mathilde’s malicious behaviour overshadows Eleanor’s days.

As the secrets reveal themselves one by one, Eleanor begins to understand the terrible legacy of war, and when death comes to the vineyard, she learns the redemptive power of love.

When I Was Young