Short, funny and sweet, by an author that I did not know of until this book kind of fell into my lap. It's a middle-aged person's recollection of her childhood and adolescence, growing up with weird parents (aren't everybody's) and a bunch of sisters, experiencing and thinking a lot about sex, drugs, family, relationships and some about the Circle Line in London, as this is, after all, a book that is part of the big London subway project that Penguin issued a bunch of books on in 2013.

All in all: sweet, heartfelt, made with sensibility and a lot of humor. One of the better in the bunch, so far. ( )

Heads and Straights is a fantastic novella detailing Lucy Wadham’s family life growing up in Chelsea with her sisters in the 1970s. It’s semi-autobiographical (the names of her sisters are different), but I’m not sure about the content. It’s almost as though the family story is so outlandish that you couldn’t make it up! Anyway, it really doesn’t matter as the story is fascinating.

The sisters are into everything, such as punk and being as non-Chelsea like as they possibly can (drugs, protests, Mockney accents). Each of the sisters could have their own full length novel about their antics. What is just as fascinating is the story of the girls’ grandmother, who shuns wealth and marriage but reluctantly enters into it when she is given a riding school of her own. Desperate for a divorce, she commits adultery and ends up with a daughter who is her exact opposite – definitely a ‘Straight’, while the girls and their grandmother are all ‘Heads’.

The story moves at a cracking pace, discussing mental health, drug use, time in colonial Africa and the general problems of growing up, especially when your father loses his business. There are some sad moments, but overall the story is upbeat, witty and enthralling. I hadn’t heard of Lucy Wadham prior to this book, but if she writes more about her family I will line up to be the first to buy it.

http://samstillreading.wordpress.com ( )

This is another of the books in the Penguin Underground Lines series, written in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the London Underground. In keeping with many of the books in this collection, the author does not discuss the Circle Line at all, but she has written an interesting and readable book about her experiences growing up in a posh family in Chelsea in the 1970s, at a time when the neighborhood changed to a bastion of the upper middle class to one divided into Heads, the young people like Lucy and her older sisters who smoked marijuana and took heroin, attended hard rock and punk music concerts and partook in promiscuous sex, and Straights, the mostly older residents who maintained a staid 1950s lifestyle. Waldham describes her sisters and parents, but she mainly writes about her maternal grandmother, a free spirit who was influenced by her neighbor Virginia Woolf and, in turn, had both negative and positive impacts on her granddaughters. This book was just the right length to hold my attention, although I would have liked it more if she had included something about the Underground in it. ( )

Although this volume represents the Circle Line in the recent Penguin series commemorating the London Underground it scarcely rates a mention. In fact, I can't recall any specific reference to "the Circle Line" throughout . At one stage near the end of the book we learn that Lucy regularly travelled from Gloucester Road to King's Cross, and there are regular references to Sloane Square, but that is about as far as it goes. That omission, however, does not detract from the attraction of the book which tells of Lucy Wadham's experience growing up during the late 1970s in an affluent background in Chelsea, just around the corner from the Kings Road.

While the family was affluent, it was not without its problems, and one of the rime focuses of the book is the reckless and relentless experimenting with drugs of her elder sisters, culminating in Florence (always known as "Fly) becoming addicted to heroin. We are introduced to Eileen, Lucy's maternal grandmother, who had an amazing story which included knowing Virginia Woolf, running a commercial stable, living in Kenya, marrying three times and then taking a Bosnian toy-boy for the last thirty years of her life.

One does feel for Wadham's parents, having their house overrun by their Bohemian daughters' friends and submerged under the scent of their copious drug abuse, though they seem not to have been too bothered, and the overall picture is one of a chaotic but supportive group.

I found it enchanting. ( )

I'm not quite sure what this has to do with the Circle Line. It seems to be about a lifestyle alien to that led by most of the human race. ( )