Reviews of 'How Real Is My Valley?'

"In his short and anguished book 'How Real Is My Valley?' John Evans postulates that the decline of religion and politics and their institutional basis within Valley society has left behind a vacuum' which is being filled by satellite television, fast-food outlets and videos...

Evans offers a nightmare vision.. 'A fast-food instant freeze-frame loss of memory; a grim and workless future; a violent microwaving of life into a mediascape without end or beginning. Colourful even apocalyptic prose.

But after a melancholy wander round our once-thriving valleys, Evans' book seems to reflect today's life more realistically than the euphoria of the tourist brochures." - Dan O'Neill, South Wales Echo, July '94.

"Something has to come last in an extended review of this kind, and the fact that it is John Evans's How Real Is My Valley? does not mean that this illustrated booklet should come low in the scale of anyone's priorities. It is far and away the most significant of all these publications ...

John Evans summarises the state of the Valleys in terse, unsentimental prose which presents a picture of a once-thriving region reduced to irrelevance and hopelessness. Now that the jobs have flown along with religious and political faith, what is there to do but turn one's back on the world and goggle at the telly?

The consequences of the loss of community are painfully underscored by one of the most committed writers in Wales today." - Herbert Williams, New Welsh Review, No. 29, Summer '95.

"I have just been reading a slim volume by John Evans, a young Valleys writer who calls himself a post-modernist. Don't let the angst-ridden term put you off - this boy can write and his tract, "How Real Is My Valley?" is worth a spot on anyone's book shelf...John Evans writes in a note of suppressed passion which is the authentic voice of the present day." - Herbert Williams, South Wales Argus, Autumn 1994.