Without Warning and Only Sometimes: 'Extraordinary. Moving and heartwarming' The Sunday Times

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One of my recent Summer Reads, Kit de Waal's memoir, is a fascinating, intelligent, charming and affecting read.

How could they do this? How could they semi-starve their children while hoarding treats and possessions for their own use? But it rings all too true. This memoir is an astonishingly good evocation of the dream and reality of migration to postwar Birmingham, a city that must have seemed flush with cash to anyone moving from elsewhere. It gave its migrant working class a promise of riches while delivering a life of hard work and exhaustion. For the O’Loughlin children, becoming a Jehovah’s Witness family involves interminable hours spent at weekly meetings, inconveniently timed to clash with Top of the Pops, at which Mandy and her siblings nearly die with boredom and fail to have their various forms of hunger sated. Like their parents, they long for escape, but unlike them seek flight to better places that actually exist, through music and books and the teeming life of Moseley outside their unhappy, falling-down home. Another review, referred to Kit De Waal as a “born storyteller” & I go along with that, she could make the most mundane topic interesting. Her experiences through these years are wonderfully captured with a poignancy and a sense of achievement. The vast majority of the memoir is about the author’s childhood and their relationship with their parents, but though the stories changed they were all very similar, and other moments like the author’s later life were examined superficially, brushed off mentions of death in exchange for a nester ending.Vivid and compelling and so moving… Kit’s depiction of her parents’ dynamic is both painful and comforting to read’ Marian Keyes Just published with Tinder Press, Without Warning & Only Sometimes is an engaging and beautiful journey that gives an insight into the remarkable path taken by a curious little girl to become a reader and the writer we all are familiar with today.

They just wanted to get out, and who can blame them? De Waal got out, and doesn’t judge: she understands because she watched and listened so closely. “When the other one is out,” she writes of her parents, “they tell us stories about their life before us. They both want us as their audience, for the depository of their dreams, for their excuses, justifications, explanations.”

WITHOUT WARNING AND ONLY SOMETIMES is a story of an extraordinary childhood and how a girl who grew up in house where the Bible was the only book on offer went on to discover a love of reading that inspires her to this day. I enjoyed this memoir but don’t think I can give it a higher score because it felt repetitive and, at times, shallow. Not shallow as in the author is a shallow person, but shallow as in I wish certain stories and emotions were explored more.

PDF / EPUB File Name: Without_Warning_and_Only_Sometimes_-_Kit_de_Waal.pdf, Without_Warning_and_Only_Sometimes_-_Kit_de_Waal.epub Joseph of Arimathea’, he says, like he’s giving his name to the dole office. ‘Yeah, yeah. Had to step in & help with the burial of Christ. It was a day like today, actually. Chilly.’ Without Warning and Only Sometimes is a beautiful memoir about growing up with too much and not enough. Kit de Waal navigates the intricacies of growing up Irish, Caribbean and British in 1960s Birmingham in a family home that struggles to contain 4 siblings, a perpetually working mother, a withdrawn and imposing father, and their collective memories, hopes and failed aspirations. From the award-winning author of MY NAME IS LEON comes a childhood memoir set to become a classic: stinging, warm-hearted, and true. An interesting insight into a childhood, which occasionally resonated with me but also detailed the challenges of growing up in a discordant marriage, with the added dual heritage dynamic.Exploring the extraordinary years of her youth with a mother insisting she and her siblings attend regular Jehovah Witness assemblies and a flamboyant father with dreams of returning to his native St Kitts, Kit (Mandy Theresa O' Loughlin) made plans to escape from a young age.