Rene' Q. (CoolitaReen) reviewed Rebuilding Coventry - a Tale of Two Cities on + 31 more book reviews
From inside book jacket:
"In her first work of fiction since The Adrian Mole Diaries, a runaway international bestseller, Sue Townsend offers a hilarious and scathing tale for the eighties. Her heroine is the wonderfully resourceful Coventry Dakin, who looks out the window of her modest suburban home one afternoon while cleaning the chimney and sees her odious neighbor Gerald Fox strangling his long-suffering wife. Covered with soot, she races across the street, grabs a handy Action Man doll, and beans Gerald, who promptly drops dead. Coventry flees in a panic: "Yesterday I had a husband and two teenage children. Today I am alone, I'm on the run and I'm in London, without my handbag."
A wanted woman ("Killer Housewife Could Strike Again"), Coventry has nowhere to turn but to "other badly dressed dirty women." She soon knows in her bones what it feels like to be hungry, cold, wet, and utterly unwanted in a city of wealth and comfort. ("You're rubbish!" a garbageman spits at her). Eventually her surreal adventures in survival take her to Cardboard City near Waterloo Station. Under the tutelage of her boxmate, "officially insane" Dodo, she learns to beg in style and spends a wild evening with the upper crust at the home of Dodo's high-hat brother, where they force their way in "like successful Jehova's Witnesses" and inadvertently find the solution to Coventry's dilemma - but not before we see the true face of homelessness through her astonished eyes.
"In her first work of fiction since The Adrian Mole Diaries, a runaway international bestseller, Sue Townsend offers a hilarious and scathing tale for the eighties. Her heroine is the wonderfully resourceful Coventry Dakin, who looks out the window of her modest suburban home one afternoon while cleaning the chimney and sees her odious neighbor Gerald Fox strangling his long-suffering wife. Covered with soot, she races across the street, grabs a handy Action Man doll, and beans Gerald, who promptly drops dead. Coventry flees in a panic: "Yesterday I had a husband and two teenage children. Today I am alone, I'm on the run and I'm in London, without my handbag."
A wanted woman ("Killer Housewife Could Strike Again"), Coventry has nowhere to turn but to "other badly dressed dirty women." She soon knows in her bones what it feels like to be hungry, cold, wet, and utterly unwanted in a city of wealth and comfort. ("You're rubbish!" a garbageman spits at her). Eventually her surreal adventures in survival take her to Cardboard City near Waterloo Station. Under the tutelage of her boxmate, "officially insane" Dodo, she learns to beg in style and spends a wild evening with the upper crust at the home of Dodo's high-hat brother, where they force their way in "like successful Jehova's Witnesses" and inadvertently find the solution to Coventry's dilemma - but not before we see the true face of homelessness through her astonished eyes.
