Winchelsea

Product Information

Winchelsea is really evocative of time, place and situation and Alex Preston has done an amazing job of transporting the reader with this story.

The Norman conquest: how some towns and cities born during the medieval urban boom failed, such as the ghost town of Trellech in the Welsh Marches, uncovered by moles in 2002 It starts off being told from Goody's perspective and I will say the first 30% is fairly gripping. You are right into the action for sure but once 'revenge' for the Father's murder has been delivered the next middle section of the book feels overly long and winding. I really struggled to get through it because there didn't feel like anything much to keep me reading but eventually it livens up again only to then experience reading whiplash when suddenly at 75% of the way through book it is suddenly being told from another characters point of view and worst of all a character we have never encountered before. Goody's experiences, thoughts, etc are gone. We have no idea what she is thinking any more and I found myself not caring This book was so slow-burner that for the first ⅓ of it I thought I might not finish it at all. But in the end I’m very happy I didn’t leave it. After recounting those first and, frankly, quite uninteresting years of Goody’s life a grand adventure of a book has started to emerge in front of me. And I have to say that it was very much to my liking and gave me a real pleasure to read it. I REALLY enjoyed this for the first three quarters; I felt like I was on my own smuggling adventure. What I found most jarring was the abrupt end of Part 1, followed by Parts 2 and 3 - the pacing up to the end of Part 1 and after was just off for me and felt like an afterthought. I truly felt like the ending of Part 1 could have been the end of the novel. Parts 2 and 3 felt a little rushed, condensed and like there could have been enough material for at least one more book if explored in greater detail.Then we switch to another narrator for the ending portion.. At least this was a character we are familiar with from fairly early on in the book but suddenly it feels like now the book is about him and no longer really about Goody at all. There is a wrapping up at the end were Goody is allowed a final say in her story but by now we don't really know who she is any more or how she feels about anything that has happened to her. Across High Street from the churchyard is the Court Hall, a two-storey medieval building now housing a museum of local life. Court Hall was built in the 14th century and has a 13th-century doorway in the east wall, brought from elsewhere.

Winchelsea is no mere rehash of a largely forgotten novel, but rather a vigorous reinvention of the entire genre. Set in 1742, it revolves around the life and misadventures of Goody Brown, a young adopted woman brought up around the marshes of Winchelsea in East Sussex, where smuggling is rife. When she turns 16, her father is murdered. It capsized his life for quite a time,” his older brother says, “but he’s doing really well now, writing hits for Olly Murs, Little Mix and Alicia Keys.” Beaming, he adds: “He’s such a smart, sensitive and generous boy.”

At the height of The Ordinary Boys’ success, Sam went into the Celebrity Big Brother house, where he met fellow contestant Chantelle, and fell in love. The pair married, divorced and, for a time, became a staple of the tabloids. The band never recovered. What holds the novel together as much as its driving plot are its incantatory atmosphere and spellbinding language. Nights are noisy with owls and fieldfares, “their lonely twits falling down through the dark”, while meaning oozes via sound and rhythm from antique vocabulary such as “fallalery” and “yelloching”. The church interior is sublime, and boasts some of the finest medieval tombs in England. Many of these are chantries to the Alard family. The earliest chantry dates to 1312, and features the effigy of Admiral Gervase Alard in armour, beneath an ornately carved canopy.

Lauren Graham: 'Why are men still surprised they like Gilmore Girls?' 24 November, 2023 The 20 best children’s books for Christmas 2023 24 November, 2023 How They Broke Britain by James O'Brien is full of anger - and not much else 23 November, 2023The building has an oddly truncated appearance. It is unclear whether the original plans for a large cruciform church were never finished, or whether the absence of a nave, tower, and transepts was the result of a devastating French raid on Winchelsea in 1380. The attempts to create an eighteenth-century atmosphere in the novel feel false and a little ‘theme-parky’. Characters, when drinking beer, only drink porter, presumably because that’s a more ‘old-fashioned’ sounding beer; they wear, doff and remove tricorns with great regularity (not the hat’s name at the time when people actually wore them), they ‘go marketing’ rather than to the market. Strange word choices are frequently used as a way of making the book seem olde-timey, a number of characters ‘festivate’ in this book, a word that seems to have been used be nobody at no-time. Most egregious is the name of the main character, Goody. The word is short for ‘Goodwife’ and was used in Puritan areas particularly as interchangeable with the word ‘Mrs’. Even the most famous Goody, Goody Two-shoes, was really called Margery.

There were elements that I loved about Winchelsea. It would probably have been a five star read if it wasn’t for the change in voice. The story is told in 3(ish) parts. The first and longest from Goody Brown’s perspective. This I found to be the most engaging. The second voice didn’t engage me as much but it was necessary for the next part of the story and to develop the character of Goody Brown further and to reveal the desperate measures that she had to go to.Reformation and Renaissance: how places like the half-drowned city of Dunwich, with its ruined monasteries, captured enquiring minds Enlightenment: how self-sufficient societies, such as St Kilda in the Outer Hebrides, were doomed by philosophical voyagers in pursuit of ‘natural man’ It has come to my attention that “presentism” has begun to be used regularly in cultural, historical analysis of writing, theater, movies, etc. While I can see some reviewers leaning into a “form” of implications of present day mores infiltrating this book, I am inclined to believe that is not a major issue.