Cheap Cold Comfort Farm (Book) (Stella Gibbons) Price

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Customer Reviews of Cold Comfort Farm

A Book Rich In Characters
Alive Flora Poste's father is wealthy, but upon his death (not uncommon in English novels) Flora finds in reality he was"disconcertingly" poor. She sets out to find relatives to "live on" rather than find an occupation. Flora turns down offers from the expected/obvious relatives, to go live with the Starkadders, (a strange lot) at Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex. Once there we meet the most colorful and strange characters with names such as Caraway and his son Harkaway, and a grandfather named Agony Beetle. There are crop diseases with names such as King's Evil, Queen's Bane and Prince's Heritage.

No matter how many times I've read this book, it stills brings laughter and enjoyment. Ms. Gibbons is an author that brought you the sounds and smells of Cold Comfort Farm through the pages of book. I felt almost transported in time and place as I became engrossed in this book. I recommend it highly!

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My favourite book: Funny, clever and brilliant.
I can't tell you how many times I've read Cold Comfort Farm but everytime I do I can't help but laugh out loud and enjoy it just as much as the first time I read it.

It is the story of expensively educated Flora Poste, whose parents die when she is only 20. Rather than make a living for herself by working she decides to foist herself onto her relatives at Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex. The Starkadders are a decidedly odd bunch consisting of; Aunt Ada Doom who saw "something nasty in the woodshed" when she was two and is assumed to be mad, Judith, alone with her grief, Amos, called by God to preach of hellfire and damnation, Seth smoldering with sex and obsessed with the 'talkies', Elfine who runs wild in the woods and the fields, and other crazy characters. Flora feels it is her duty to bring order into this chaos and to tidy the lives of these uncivilised relatives as she is an excessively tidy person and dislikes a mess.

Stella Gibbon's novel is charming, incredibly funny and parodies the earthy, melodramatic novels (Thomas Hardy and D.H Lawrence et al) of the period extremely well. It is a must read and shall remain my favourite book for many years to come.
If you want to see one of the tv adaptations of the novel I would recommend the version starring Kate Beskinsale as the best.

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A book to pass the time
I first saw the movie, then decided to read the book. Well, I was confused by the timeline. This book was first published in 1932, yet one of the characters makes reference to Clark Gable and Gary Cooper being hot "20 years ago." Another reference is made of a man, Flora's date for a dance, who served in a war "in '46." I can't imagine Flora being escorted by a man over 90 years old (as he would have had to be if he served in 1846) yet it is clearly not yet 1946 in this book. Perhaps the author had a rather simplistic view of the future, where nothing has changed since 1932? So this has disturbed me ever since I read this book.

Granted this is a work of fiction but when Flora is talking to her friend Mrs. Smiling at the beginning and she deduces from her cousin's name "Judith" that the husband will be Amos and the sons Reuben and Seth...well, I had no idea how she pegged that (because they ARE all named those things). I assume it's a Biblical reference, but how many people are going to know that?

With almost all the characters Flora meets in Sussex, she is omniscient about them. She tells us all about how they think and what they will say and wear just by meeting them for the first time, and of course she is always right. I suppose we are meant to feel that Flora is an excellent judge of character but it seems to me that she was TOO right all the time. Like the author is hammering home Flora's sense of character judgment. They are almost all one-dimensional and Flora is easily able to sum up each character and make a simple decision which results in the improvement of each person. Too easy.

Otherwise, if you can mentally transport yourself to a decaying English farm in the '30s, where owners of small planes can simply land them in convenient fields, enjoy yourself.