Mini Book Review – The Midwich Cuckoos

Recently I have been reading The Midwich Cuckoos; and it was an interesting read! Written by John Wyndham, and published by Penguin Books; The Midwich Cuckoos is a science fiction novel, which tells the story of how lots of women in a small English village, gave birth to a group of children, with frightening abilities! Having had some knowledge before hand of the story and plot, thanks to reading a stripped down synopsis online, and watching the recent, terrific TV series of the same name; it was interesting to read the original novel, to see how it all played out. At first though it was a shock, as I wasn’t expecting the old fashioned/traditional form of language, that the book was written in, which did take some time to get used to. The story is actually quite small, as quite a lot of what happens is described in third person, after the events have taken place, with a lot of the description getting near lost in the large amount of theory used to pad out the chapters. Most of what goes on, has already happened by the time the chapter reaches that story, and it relies not on the main character being there at the event, but first hand eye witnesses who did. I thought the story would feature a large amount of violence, and create a lot of blood-thirsty imagery, but no! Those events, as stated above, are just talked about afterwards, which was rather strange, given how those events are usually shown in live action adaptations. On the whole though it was an interesting read, with the only down part for me being, some of the rather large chapters in the second half; but other than that, a decently fascinating read!