Book Review - The Perfect Summer, England 1911, Just Before the Storm by Juliet Nicolson

Synopsis:  The Perfect Summer chronicles a glorious English summer a century ago when the world was on the cusp of irrevocable change. Through the tight lens of four months, Juliet Nicolson’s rich storytelling gifts rivet us with the sights, colors, and feelings of a bygone era. That summer of 1911 a new king was crowned and the aristocracy was at play, bounding from one house party to the next. But perfection was not for all. Cracks in the social fabric were showing. The country was brought to a standstill by industrial strikes. Temperatures rose steadily to more than 100 degrees; by August deaths from heatstroke were too many for newspapers to report. Drawing on material from intimate and rarely seen sources and narrated through the eyes of a series of exceptional individuals — among them a debutante, a choirboy, a politician, a trade unionist, a butler, and the Queen — The Perfect Summer is a vividly rendered glimpse of the twilight of the Edwardian era.

First Line:  "The season from May to September 1911 was one of the high sunlit meadows of English history."

Random Quote:  "At a party at Billy Grenfell's rooms at Trinity College, Oxford, fifty rabbits were lowered out of the window in baskets, released, and then chased by a hundred humans and a bulldog, pursued in turn by several horrified dons who collected up the dead rabbits for burial."

Review:  I liked this, but I didn't love it.  The author had access to lots of different sources in telling the story of the end of the Edwardian era and chunks of the book are riveting, but lots of it rambles around in a random kind of way that detracts from the overall arc.

King Edward VII - Image via Wikipedia

It's probably difficult for Americans to really understand what WWI meant to a generation of Englishmen.  The casualty figures are staggering - 880,000 from the UK plus another 200,000 from other countries in the British Empire - essentially an entire generation was lost to the trenches.

There are moments in this book where the author deftly captures the tenor of the times, but too often the clarity is muddied and the sense of what was lost is, well, lost.

Reading Challenges:  Truth is Stranger than Fiction Challenge, 100+ Reading Challenge