How Green Was My Valley

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It's hard to say much about the book without giving the story away which I don't appreciate so I won't. So I am left with an engulfing sense of melancholy which I am afraid has not been completely cured even after a few days.

Bronwen, sister-in-law: A gentle character to whom Huw goes when he is troubled or wants to learn information that the adults hold from him. Me ha sorprendido la crudeza pero a la vez la ternura que desprende esta historia, y me quedo con sus personajes, con todos pero especialmente con nuestro protagonista.And due to this, despite the myriad of characters that go in and and out of Huw’s life, it is easy to tell them apart after some time. Somewhere near the midpoint the book started to fade for me and I grew lost as family members left home, found spouses, fought their own battles. I also loved seeing how the entire village gets together when Huw’s brother and sister are married (a double wedding), from cleaning and decorating to preparing the feast, or how the family helps and supports others when one strike causes many families to be on the brink of starvation. A girl was found murdered in the woods, signifying the loss of the age of innocence that Huw associated his childhood with. Finally after almost a month when I was at around page 300 I decided to start skipping "the irrelevant stuff.

Union activities cause a rift (even within the Morgan family for while father Gwilym belives strongly in religion and prayer as the paths to pursue, Huw’s older brothers are for petitioning and agitation), and one sees how families are affected. I started out reading it silently to myself, but after a chapter or so I had to start reading it aloud to my husband. As we follow life in the Morgan family and the village as Huw grows, so do the slag heaps in the green valley, an indicator that life in the valley is never going to be the same again. Those books that I really love, I tend to love with wild abandon and, once given, that devotion is rarely retracted.Yes, an overwhelming sense of nostalgia and loss pervades all 600+ pages, but somehow it stops well short of being trite or cloying. That gives a feeling of only barely repressed menace throughout the whole book, not particularly needed when everyone is going down badly maintained pits, struggling against the mine owners or struggling at school against bullies and anti-Welsh sentiment. In the United States, Llewellyn won the National Book Award for favourite novel of 1940, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association.

I can see why this book has stood the test of time as the central story is such a classic one – the themes still feel very relevant today.The story is set around the Morgan family in a Welsh mining town and told by the narrator protagonist, the older Huw Morgan, as he took a long walk down the memory lane before he starts to leave his hometown for a new life abroad. In the evening after we had finished tea we all sat on the grass on horse cloths and sang hymns and songs, and we had prizes for the best. How Green Was My Valley is a 1939 novel by Richard Llewellyn, Narrated by Huw, the main character, of his Welsh family and the mining community in which they live. I found this book to be very atmospheric with beautiful passages of quote-worthy prose and really enjoyed the Welsh dialect.