How Green Was My Valley

Clearly, I was confused. I had it in my mind that How Green Was My Valley was a memoir, something along the lines of James Herriot. It's not; it's the fictional coming-of-age of Huw Morgan, youngest son of a mining family in the lush Welsh valleys...which are slowly being defaced and devoured by heaps of black slag.

Unfortunately, I didn't like this book as much as I expected I would. The first reason is that I had trouble with the cadence. Richard Llewellyn has written the words - narrative and dialogue alike - in an honest and unmistakeable Welsh way. This adds to the authenticity of his work, certainly, but to an American reader, it's a bit jarring to read a sentence such as "It is nothing to fly at hundreds of miles an hour, for indeed I think there is something to laugh about when a fuss is made of such nonsense." Add to that the Welsh names and, well, I often felt like I was looking at words, rather than reading them. (I'm still not sure if the main character, Huw, would pronounce his name Hugh or Who or in some other way entirely. These things bother me.)

Beyond the prose itself, the story often felt a bit, dare I say, boring? I had a hard time caring about a boxing match for 10 pages, or a football match for a similar number, and too often I was left with the feeling that the event did nothing to move the story along. The lack of larger, external events compounded this for me. I must have been nearly halfway finished before the first reference to Queen Victoria clued me in to the approximate time that the story was set. In the end, I reckoned Llewellyn was writing in another time and for another audience, one that didn't necessarily include me.