I read the first part of Mollie Kaye's autobiography a few years ago, and although I enjoyed it, I didn't engage with her very well, and was left feeling as if I rather disliked her. The first book Sun in the Morning which I registered on bookcrossing and released - only takes us up to when Mollie is 10 years old and goes off to boarding school. This book I am keeping as I liked it so much more.

In this installment - we begin in 1927 - Mollie is 19 and she, her sister and parents travel back to India, a place Mollie has spent her years at school dreaming of. I throroughly enjoyed this book, and felt much warmer toward Mollie Kaye - although she is very much a product of her upbringing and generation, and in several places defends the Raj to the hilt - as by the time she was writing these books when she was quite elderly - she knew full well what many people's view of the Raj now was. Mollie shows us Delhi, Kashmir, and Tonk, in her irrespresible company we visit Simla and the houseboats of the Nageem Bagh Navy. Her memory is just extraordinary - her ability to conjure up landscapes in quite fine detail from decades earlier, and her memory for events, parties and theatre productions from the 1920's when she was writing in the 1990's. She admits in the book that her fantastic memory is something she has taken for granted and had only recently realised that not everyone is blessed with the ability to recall distant events so exactly. Just like all young girls in what ever age they live, Mollie must find her way among the more beautiful and more confident girls, she has one or two social disasters, and falls in love a few times, but her biggest love affair of all is the one she had with India itself, and it is this almost obsessional love for the country and it's people that makes this so readable. ( )