... disarming.

I fell in love with Jackie Winspear almost at once, right there on Page 24 of her engaging, amusing and moving memoir of growing up in the post-World War II English countryside. And then there’s the hopeful — and hopefully prescient — title of the book: This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing. It was hard to resist.

... affecting, personal.

Winspear draws distinctive portraits of postwar England, altogether different from the U.S., where she has since settled, and her unsettling struggles within the rigid British class system.

Winspear uses her talent as a consummate teller of tales to share family stories, some of which she later discovered were greatly exaggerated or untrue, in this lovely memoir. Though she was born in 1955, she provides a visceral portrait of London during WWII and the hardships and cultural changes that shaped England in the decades that followed.