1/5 Beware. This is not the TV show
  by Linda L. Nielsen
I should have read the reviews more carefully. I thought I was getting the book that the PBS series of the same name was taken from but this was not the case. This book has no plot. It is simply a rather long detailed description of life in a part of England during the time the PBS series is set in. Some of the people mentioned in the book are the same as in the TV show but that is all. If you have seen and enjoyed the BBC PBS series as I have you would be disappointed in this book as I was.

5/5 A Perceptive and Empathetic Account of English Rural Life by a Precursor and Kindred Spirit of Miss Read
  by min-bee (Nyack, NY)
This book provides an easily readable, well-written account of English rural life in the late 1800s, before this culture was forever changed by industrialization. The author was a young girl whose simple adventures are described, and she does have an eye for the details of country life that provides a charming portrait of that life. Oxford University Press was the original publisher of this trilogy, and the quality of the book justified the publisher's faith. The author observes that although people didn't have as many material goods as today, and although they worked very hard, they seemed happier than their descendents. For example, she describes the system of assistance in the community among its different classes and members when there was no welfare state.
Perhaps because I discovered this book through an article in "Victoria" magazine in the 1990s--before the BBC made a television series out of it--I did not miss the absence of a storyline or plot. This is a beautiful book when it is taken on its own terms. If you enjoy Miss Read's novels of English village life, you will probably appreciate this book's loving depiction of country life at an earlier time. I think the inspiration of Miss Read and Flora Thompson is the same.

3/5 Late-19th c. rural England
  by LH422 (Washington, USA)
Written in the 1940s, this semi-fictional account of hte Oxfordshire villages Lark Rise and Candleford looks back at the 1880s, a time of transition in the ENglish countryside. Work, social relationships, home life, schooling- all of these things changed in the last years of the 19th c. THompson examines these changes through the story of Laura, a girl who comes of age in the 1880s and 90s. But truly, in this work Laura's story takes a back seat to description. Thompson is clearly using this book to capture a lost world, and the book includes whole chapters describing the countryside and the traditions of its people. The writing is almost anthropological. While the description is interesting, and it is a very easy read, I found myself longing for more plot, more discussion of what happened to Laura. I also found that the book seemed to romanticize what must have been, by all accounts, grinding poverty. That said, the descriptions THompson offers are engaging and vibrant, and the book is a quick, and dare I say, relaxing, read.