I could not put this book down. The story is so grisly and yet told without any sentimentality or self-pity. The writing is excellent. I ended the book full of admiration for the writer who came off as brave and very, very smart. A real artist. A beautiful and sometimes shocking book.

A cool book that gives you a valuable insight as to how a teenage mind works and has great characters like her sister Ruby and the cool Quentin!! It's so good I'm doing my RPR on it!

About a girl of my age who is actually doing alot of things which u would say she's too young for. She's got a sister who's an drugaddict and al- most dies of it. A younger brother which she must take care of a bit, but not always doing it. It's in the London streets in the Punktime, and very kewl to read!

I definitely enjoyed this book, which was a quick read at 186 pages. It was atmospheric and I felt I had had an adventure when finished. The story stays with you. But I also felt like I'd read the Cliff Notes to the book. I felt like I was ready to move on to the "real" story. With many of the characters, I wondered who these people were and why they were doing what they were doing. Yes, the story is from a child's point of view, but having characters drift in and out, be troubled and do strange things without explanation was curious and unsatisfying. Perhaps you need to know the author's background to fully enjoy the sparsely filled-out story. I didn't know, and I was left a little dissatisfied because of this.

This book is interesting from beginning to end -- a wonderful story that is very enjoyable to read. The perspective from which it is written (through the eyes of a five-year-old) enables us to see and experience life a little differently, and that is unique. It is well written, and the characters are all richly drawn and memorable. I found it to be touching, funny, sad in parts, and very moving. I read a lot of books, and have not come across such a strikingly good one in quite a while. I didn't want it to end.

My mum and I read this book before the movie came out and it was so good! I was very sad when it ended, Bilal is such a good character, I don't blame the girl for wishing he was her father. Esther Freud is a marvelous writer and everyone should read this book!

This had the potential of being an exceptional novel but it never quite makes it. The contemporary story of Sarah is thin and cliched compared to the richness of the story of the Belgards in Germany. I found myself not caring what happened to Sarah except as her life related to her grandmother--and there wasn't much of that. That is, perhaps, the biggest problem with the contemporary scenes: the characters are all treated superficially, especially in comparison to the WWI-era chapters.The idea (at least I think this was the point--it's not too clear) that one can never truly know what really happened, in the lives of our parents, grandparents,and other relatives, before we knew them, is very interesting and certainly worthy of exploration, but it's treatment falls flat here. At the end of the book, my reaction was "Oh, well".

I was very caught up in the story of the Belgard family during the First World War, and would have liked the book to continue on about them, through the inflation, the Hitler years and World War II. I was not at all interested in Sarah and her presenet day family. If the author wanted to introduce the contemporary issue of returning property in the former East Germany to its original owners, she could have put them in the first and last chapters instead of making them half the book. There seems no other point to their existence. Unless you get into the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, there also seems no point in making the characters a Jewish family or emphasizing this. They seem to be Jewish in name only; no religious holidays are ever celebrated, no one goes to the synagogue, the parents were married at the Society of Friends. There are one or two prejudicial remarks made by others, but this book almost trivializes the problems of anti-Semitism in Germany, even before Hitler came to power. So much time is wasted talking about Sarah and her baby and her friends and relatives that serve no purpose that important questions about the other family go unanswered. Why did the governess try to turn the daughters against the mother? Didn't any of these girls ever try to think for themselves? What made the father sink into such a depression without anyone appearing to notice? I think the author couldnt decide which story she wanted to tell and wound up with half of a good story and a lot of meaningless chapters sandwiched in between.

"Summer at Gaglow" is a compelling and poignant story that veers between that final golden summer before World War I and the present. If this book has a flaw it is that the last moments of innocence in August of 1914, filled as they were with sumptuous meals and large-scale entertainments and castle-like houses, are more compelling than the crimped present where money is short and apartments small. Yet Freud almost seamlessly glides between the two time periods. The writing is full of marvelous characters such as the mother's dogs, who follow her everywhere, and the three sisters of 1914, with their strange jealousies and obsessions. I heartily recommend this book as a perfect read for a long, quiet night.