Customer Reviews: Read 49 more reviews...
 YOU COULD FALL ASLEEP WHILE ANDREW COLLINS SEARCHES BACK THROUGH HIS CHILDHOOD LOOKING FOR SOMETHING WORTH REMEMBERING.... May 23, 2008
11 out of 15 found this review helpful
Where did it all go right....? Good question andrew collins, but unfortunately - no-one cares.
Andrew`s family once appeared on `telly addicts` and he spends pages telling us what they all wore, which jumper noel edmunds wore, what the questions were - and even the answers and how they arrived at them. Then we get to read page after page of andrew`s family tree - who did what for a living, whether they had an allotment or not, if they could drive a car...
On pancake day, andrew, along with all his school friends, went on a visit to the local fire station....then we read about him playing with his action man...
(it really is a job and half keeping up with all the excitement in this book...)
Andrew thinks too many `whingers` have written books about their terrible childhood - like dave pelzer ( a child called it ) and he wants to tell us about `a normal childhood.`
Andrew, i`m not sure you know what `normal` is, because no normal person could even hope to get away with writing such boring and utter drivel.It`s like watching a complete stranger going through all the family albums and giving you the complete run down on every single person that has ever been even remotely related to them.
I mean, imagine yourself being riveted while he rambles on..
-:
"Pap collins never learned to drive, a moped was as far as he got. My other grandparents both drove, he well into his seventies. Nan passed her driving test first time well into her fifties, but then was too anxious to use the car.."
So you`ve been searching all these years for something that went wrong andrew...? I think this book could be it.
 I can't review this one objectively... May 13, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
,,,because I was born in the same town just 3 years later. Thus I devoured it and passed it on to my brother who found it even more evocative.
I suppose if you were born in the mid to late 60s or if you are a Northamptonian, you'll love it. If you're not, you may find it less appealing but it's warm without being sentimental and it's still a lovely account of middle England in an age that's now lost.
If you want a humorous book by another person from the same town, set later in time and with the usual London-centric view of the town, try Robert Llewellyn's 'The Man on Platform 5' (a sort of 'trading places meets queer eye' in softback)
 A Normal Book for Normal People April 28, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
I grew up in the Seventies not a million miles from Northampton and this book rang a lot of bells for me in many ways. The weirdest thing was recalling that we too used to call stuff we rated, 'skill' something I had totally forgotten until I read this book!
The book is a lot like life, some dull bits, some funny bits, fairly variable overall. I found it entertaining rather than compulsive and amusing rather than hilarious, but good enought to merit me bothering to find the next one to read (Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now).
And he's right. It's about time someone wrote more books about growing up normal...
A generally most enjoyable read April 24, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
All in all, this is a most satisfying read, especially for anyone who was born between the mid fifties and the late sixties. In case you weren't born between these years and you're wondering, by and large it really was exactly as Andrew Collins describes "growing up normal". Nothing too outrageous happened, we lived a largely hand-to-mouth existence, nowhere near as austere as our parents' generation, but very thrifty all the same. Little pleasures mattered a lot and Collins captures this superbly. His narrative is easy to read and the passages about his grandparents are particularly sensitive and poignant. I do, however, agree with my fellow reviewer who finds the use of footnotes slightly irritating. One has to interrupt the flow of one's reading to read the footnotes. Collins could simply have given us the information concerned in the regular text.
It is somewhat disappointing to see that Collins appears, by his thirties, to have turned into the kind of "new man" that simply doesn't fit with the healthy, (dietarily and culturally) upbringing he had. Very disappointing.
His claims of being involved in the "punk scene" are also somewhat wide of the mark, as he is taking about the years of 1980-81 and buying records by groups like The Undertones and The Boomtown Rats, who were, as any true punk knows, impostors.
Great to see Collins namecheck the "Molesworth" books though.
Generally a good effort, although it is now becoming a little tiresome to read lists compiled by middle-class thirty-somethings of all their teenage girlfriends. Nick Hornby, you stand accused....
 An enjoyable nostalgia trip April 10, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
You had to be there, and if this is your era you'll probably enjoy much of this affectionate and witty account of being an absolutely normal schoolboy through the 1970s. Collins uses his journalistic skills to highlight and make relevant what it's like to grow up outside London in a town or city where nothing much happens (which is of course what it was like for most of us).
The bit that was missing for me was the whole teenybopper bit, but I am a girl - boys' concerns were slightly different!
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