Some of the recollections highlighted how wild and dangerous childhood can be, especially without the supervision of adults.

Gifted by Vintage and the Reading Agency* Amy and Lan is both an amusing and tragic presentation of rural life in the mid-late 2000s. Its two principal characters, Amy and Lan, provide a strong narrative voice for the plot. The story of Frith and the families that reside is told through the childish eyes of its two leads; trying to comprehend and navigate the complex dramas of the adults on the farm. The references to popular music helped to set the era and mood, it is easy to identify with particular songs evoking memories. I loved Amy and Lan... I've long been a Sadie Jones fan but this may be her best yet . Poignant , compelling and brilliant ' Mary Lawson, author of A Town Called Solace It is through their eyes that we learn about life on the commune. Not just the daily tasks but the personal tensions. Amy and Lan occupy a privileged zone: those younger than them are the “little kids”, their elders “the grown-ups”. They observe both, often literally from a perch high on the barn roof. They are not naïve and do notice things. They do not look through a glass darkly but make astute and shared assessments of their parents and other adults. How did the Simple Life get so complicated? A child's-eye view of family and rural life in the compelling new novel from Sadie Jones.

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No one conjures the magic of place like Sadie Jones ... A beautiful, haunting novel about the limits of love and the loss of innocence' Clare Clark Initially I found it quite difficult to follow and without any direction, one chapter being written as ‘Lan’ , the next as ‘Amy’, which made it a bit more difficult to follow which parents/family belonged to which child, but it’s worth persevering with. The chapters alternate between Lan’s voice and Amy’s. It takes a bit of getting used to. Working out who belongs to each child and who the others were took me a long time. They are definitely childish voices, with childish interests. We get clues to what are the issues with the adults through their childish observations, which they patently do not understand. Lan says that Amy never thinks that her mum ’might just go off one day’, which is a hint at what his mum has already done and so might do again. He catches his mum and Amy’s Dad kissing and ‘it wasn’t a love kiss because they aren’t married’. He dismisses it because he does not understand. A gently episodic and humorous tale whose sharp-eyed, effervescent child narrators entertain... Beguilingly readable' Daily Mail The adults are far too busy to keep an eye on Amy and Lan, and Amy and Lan would never tell them about climbing on the high barn roof, or what happened with the axe that time, any more than their parents would tell them the things they get up to - adult things, like betrayal - that threaten to bring the whole fragile idyll tumbling down...

It was not credible that the supposedly feisty Harriet would allow her husband and best friend to conduct an affair for five years without taking any action. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? The main characters were stereo typed with a token Asian woman and young man with mental health issues. Visitors from the city were uniformly ignorant, condescending and shallow.I did not engage with any of the people described in the book and found it hard to picture them except in very general terms. Adam, in my opinion,was the only one who was not one dimensional.

I am not sure that Amy and Lan have distinctive voices, but perhaps they just wouldn’t. Nor is there an obvious development in their world view until they move to secondary school – but again maybe there wouldn’t be. It is not to be read as a comment on the viability of communal living – there being at least as much good as bad in Frith. Good and bad in all things and everyone.