Flatlands

Product Information

Together they nurse the goose back to health, but war is encroaching and Philip decides he must do something and ends up going to Dunkirk.

The novel asks the great questions of life, and it affirms the healing power of nature and art–and love.

Their backgrounds, perspectives on war and life in general and struggles are distinctly different yet, their friendship is beautiful and serves as a source of comfort for both of them. Both the characters in this book--the young girl separated by war from her family and the young man who tries to hold to his pacifist believes--are thoroughly believable and their external and internal struggles make a fine parallel set of stories that come together. Eighty-seven-year-old retired librarian Freda, now a resident of a senior living facility, spends her days taking walks in her neighborhood, reminiscing about the years gone by, and documenting her memories. We start this novel with "a patchwork of events" in the memories of an elderly Londoner, remembering her time being taken off to the distant Wash and fens as an evacuee. When not working he spends his time amid nature, with his painting and providing a sanctuary to the birds who take shelter with him during the winters.

The setting was gorgeous and haunting, the characters were decently complicated, but I felt like the story dragged on for quite a while and then ended suddenly on a rather hopeless note. When she finds an injured goose and takes it to the lighthouse where Philip lives, an unlikely friendship develops.Freda is a 12 year old girl who becomes one of the many children evacuated for their safety from London to this lonely place where she is faced with the harsh realities of country life. For survivors, memories of the wartime years have become “a patchwork of events etched across our hearts”, thinks Freda. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

Her friendship with Philip who shares his love for books and nature with Freda is the only happy memory Freda has of her time as an evacuee. Are we like the ripple when we throw a stone into still water–a quick disturbance that flashes into nothingness? I’m doubtful, too, about the philosophical conclusions he’s able to reach while in the midst of chaos and crisis at Dunkirk. There, deprived of any warmth, she meets a young man - Philip Rhayader -a conscientious objector who has left Oxford and his prospective vocation in the church following a nervous breakdown.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Philip is an artist and a conscientious objector, living in a remote lighthouse on the shores of the Wash. A bond is formed between these two, as a conscientious objector he is considered somewhat of an outsider, someone who doesn’t really fit in with his family, or with a country at war, and she is definitively an outsider, a child far from home.