Book info

• Title The Tent, the Bucket and Me
• Author Emma Kennedy
• Year 2009
• Genre Memoir

For the 70s child, summer holidays didn't mean the joy of CentreParcs or the sophistication of a Tuscan villa. They meant being crammed into a car with Grandma and heading to the coast. With just a tent for a home and a bucket for the necessities, we would set off on new adventures each year stoically resolving to enjoy ourselves. For Emma Kennedy, and her mum and dad, disaster always came along for the ride no matter where they went. Whether it was being swept away by a force ten gale on the Welsh coast or suffering copious amounts of food poisoning on a brave trip to the south of France, family holidays always left them battered and bruised. But they never gave up. Emma's memoir, The Tent, The Bucket and Me, is a painfully funny reminder of just what it was like to spend your summer holidays cold, damp but with sand between your toes.

Thoughts

I loved this so much. Poor Emma! I listened to the author reading the audiobook, and she does so with such warm and humour, with great accents and a natural ability to be funny even in the worst of circumstances. I genuinely do not understand how this family could have kept attempting to go on holiday. Once is a bad trip, twice a coincidence perhaps but once you get to the fifth or sixth time, you’re really just asking for trouble.

But they did and we benefit from the entertaining, if sometimes disturbing and actually kinda scary, moments where a family just want to make the most of their free time before they grow out of it.

Rating: 5 / 5