Life Among the Savages

November 30, 2015
Originally published as short stories in women’s magazines in the 1940s, these funny, semi-autobiographical anecdotes from Jackson describe life with three young children in rural Vermont and were first assembled into a novel in 1952. Reader Lockford handles domesticity in just the right tones: you’re hearing the inflections of the mildly sarcastic, self-deprecating, endlessly exasperated but always loving wife and mother. And Lockford’s children’s voices are age appropriate and believable. Laurie, Jannie, and Sally are alternately demanding, helpful, helpless, annoying, happy, disobedient, and perfectly wonderful in sickness and in health, in school, at home, in the department store, in the restaurant, or engaged in the complex lives of multiple imaginative friends. But this audio edition is best listened to one tale at
a time, because literary life with children, like real life with children, can sometimes be repetitive and tiresome.