Albany Park by Patrice Chaplin

Remember how much I enjoyed Patrice Chaplin's piece in Indiscreet Journeys? Well as luck would have it, I was cleaning out a lot of my mother's junk from her basement, trying to make room to squeeze in all of my junk when I happened upon one of my old books - Albany Park by Patrice Chaplin. I knew that story had been familiar somehow. As I flipped through the pages, I still couldn't properly remember the whole lot, so I carried the book upstairs for a re-read.

This memoir of 15-year-old Chaplin's adventures in 1950s Paris and Spain is fantastic to read. It's infused with the grimy exhaltation of penniless freedom that, as the author kept saying, really only works for the very young. Teenage Patrice makes several road trips from her not-ideal home in a London Suburb, which lead her to ragamuffin street-life in Paris and hobo-ing through parts of Spain. In Gerona, Catalonia, Patrice's finds her spiritual home and falls in love with Jose, a charming yet ambiguous figure. Is he really the carefree dilletante that he appears? I devoured this book in about a day. Luckily I also found its sequel in the basement, which promises further global adventures for Chaplin, a writing career and the re-occurance of Jose and Gerona throughout her life. It's a thicker book than the first. Goody. Two copies showed up in a search at www.abebooks.com , or you could ask amazon.com to search for this out of print book

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