Group Read, May 2021: Hideous Kinky

Our group read for May is Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud. Please join the read and post any comments here.

I have a terrible track record with actually getting to the group reads, but I've wanted to read this for a while, so I will try! I read and enjoyed one of the author's non-list books, The Sea House, a few years ago.

I am planning on reading Hideous Kinky this month but I probably won't be starting it a week or so.

I rated this Very Good when I read it in 2010

https://arukiyomi.com/?p=2419

I have finished my read of Hideous Kinky. I found it an easy read with beautiful and informative descriptions of Morocco but as the narrator was such a young child, I was left wanting more insight into the motivation of many characters, in particular, the mother.

I'm finally going to start this tonight - it's still May, right? ;-)

My copy has a terrible movie tie-in cover with an enormous picture of Kate Winslet's face.

I managed to pick mine up from the library just before we went back into lockdown - again. Mine has a cool psychedelic lookng cover.

I just finished this and enjoyed it more than I thought I would.

I loved that this was told from the youngest daughter's perspective. I think it's very hard to write from a young child's POV and Freud does it amazingly well. I think this is partly because she doesn't use a lot of dialogue and it's easier to buy a five year old thinking this was internally than actually speaking this way.

This book would have been intolerable to me if it was told from the mother's point of view. I found her selfish and a neglectful mother. But not being forced into her perspective made me able to enjoy this book.

I've left a review with further thoughts on my thread.

I finished this morning and overall it was an enjoyable read. Uniklike >8 japaul22: I never believed it was told by a five-year old but somewhere along the way, I decided not to care.

There were lots of interesting characters and beautiful scenes from Morocco, but the central theme is obviously the mother's decision to travel and later engage with the Sufi religion despite having two young children to look after, but the neglect was never as profound as the blurp on the cover suggested.

>9 Henrik_Madsen: I agree it didn't sound as though a 5 year old was talking or how she would have thought in her own head. But the things she noticed and the things she didn't notice seemed childlike to me.

I thought the mother's neglect was pretty profound. Maybe because I'm not that far away from mothering a 7 and 5 year old? My kids are currently 11 and 8. For me, the medical neglect alone was pretty horrific. And then leaving her 7 year old behind, basically with a stranger?

As I said above, I would not have been able to read this book if it had been told from the mother's perspective.

>10 japaul22: I read the review on your thread afterwards and I think we pretty much agree on the point-of-view thing. Like you say it is written with the perspective but not the language of a five-year old.

And I agree the mother's neglect in those two situations were profound. I just expected much worse, like letting the children go alone to visit the Luigi Mancini chararacter, who seemed really shady to me, or pretty much letting the narrator become a child living on the street instead of just making friends with them.

>11 Henrik_Madsen: I can see that. She certainly loved the girls. And I would guess she viewed the experience as a positive formative experience for them, very different from her British upbringing that she must have been rebelling against in some way.