Book review: Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood by Angelica Garnett
Rating: 2 out of 5
I bought this whilst at Charleston Farmhouse the setting for some of this book. I wanted it to be much more exploratory of emotions and descriptively rich to match the decorative features of Charleston. There were parts that lived up to this. But other parts were little more than “What I did on my holiday” style writing. With little depth or passion.
I’m sure the writing of it was very cathartic. But it didn’t add a lot to my understanding of the life that was had at Charleston. About how you grow up split between London and Sussex. About how it feels to discover that your father isn’t the man you thought he was. Or what it is like to discover that your husband was rejected as a bed-fellow for your Mother, but not by your birth Father. I wanted to feel empathy, to gain an understanding into what must have been an extraordinary childhood/adulthood.
Originally posted to my Goodreads account