4 ½ stars, rounded up.

An intriguing combination of memoir and reflection on memory. Growing up English in Egypt in the late 1930's and early 1940's (she returned to live in England in 1945), Lively's memories offer something out of the ordinary (in my reading, anyway) thanks to their historical and social aspects, but I'm sure she could make even an ordinary suburban childhood interesting. The questions of how clearly we remember things from our childhoods, why we remember certain things, how those memories get jumbled and mixed, how later knowledge and events may affect memories, and so on are intertwined with her stories, which are placed in context with modest amounts of historical background. The book offers an engaging invitation to readers to sift through the fragments of their own childhood memories and ponder how pieces fit together, how “factual” various memories might be, and how their adult selves see places, people, and events differently (or not) from the way they remember perceiving those things in childhood. An enjoyable, thought provoking little book. ( )

Oleander, Jacaranda. A childhood perceived is not so innocent as it sounds. Penelope Lively writes that she conceived the title from her experience as a child in car rides, observing the blossoming shrubs, alternatingly planted along the road: Oleander, Jacaranda, Oleander, Jacaranda, Oleander, Jacaranda. Flowers you don't see much in England.

Although Penelope Lively may have many beautiful memories of Cairo and Egypt, the memoir consists of a mix of impressions, through the lens of the mature author. These memoirs are based on actual memories, and memories induced through photos, and a visit to Cairo. These three views are all mingled, and present the memoir with a great deal of nostalgia. All familiar sights find a place, although some are introduced very late, so that "Groppi" isn't mentioned until page 80, or so.

Naturally, the home, with the garden and a small pond are all lively in the author's memory, although she wonders how memory plays games, as the size of the pond is incorrectly remembered, probably because to a small child the pond appeared bigger. This distortion works through at various levels. Moreover, the reality of the present day is different from that forty years ago. Then, the children could swim in the harbour of Alexandria, as the water was clean.

Oleander, Jacaranda. A childhood perceived is a wonderful memoir for readers who get a fuzzy feeling of nostalgia about British imperial past. The memoir breathes the air of nostalgia, and celebrates the expat / colonial lifestyle, with its white superiority over the local population. ( )

This is an enjoyable book about the author's first twelve years of life growing up in Egypt in the mid 1930's to about the end of WW2. The writing is superb with delicious descriptions and some humour thrown in. It is also a retrospective on childhood in general. ( )

This is an autobiographical memoir of Penelope Lively's childhood which was mostly spent in Cairo - she "returned" to Britain, a country she barely knew, when she was 12 at the end of the second world war. It's not the exotic setting that makes it fascinating as much as the implications of its subtitle "A Childhood Perceived". Lively has almost as much to say about the nature of our memories of our childhoods as she does about the life her family lived in Egypt. Really enjoyable!