Category: Children’s books

book adjacent, Children's books, film, not a book

Book Adjacent: Bedknobs and Broomsticks

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Angela Lansbury would have been 100 last month, so today I’m talking about one of my favourite childhood movies – Bedknobs and Broomsticks – which had magic and witches and is thus perfect for a post-Halloween autumn afternoon.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks is loosely based on two books by Mary Norton, who also wrote the Borrowers books. In this Disney version it’s 1940 and three orphans, Charles, Carrie and Paul, are evacuated to the village of Pepperinge Eye on the Dorset coast where they are billeted with the very reluctant Eglantine Price. They try to run away to London but change their mind when they discover Miss Price is a witch. When they try to blackmail her about this, she turns Paul into a rabbit and says that she’s learning magic to try and help fight the Nazis. When her correspondence course writes to say it’s closing down, they head to London on a flying bed to track down her teacher to try and get the final spell on the course. But it turns out the teacher is Emelius Brown, who is a street magician who has no idea his spell work when it’s Miss Price using them. And that’s only got you to the halfway point. The second half has a trip to a magical island and a Nazi invasion to thwart.

As well as Angela Lansbury as Miss Price, it has David Tomlinson (aka Mr Banks in Mary Poppins) as Emelius Brown, Reginald Owen (Admiral Boom from Poppins) and for Brits of a certain age Bruce Forsyth as a spiv. Like Mary Poppins it has a mix of live action and animation sequences and music by the Sherman Brothers. As is often the case the song that got the Oscar nomination (The Age of Not Believing) is not my favourite in the but Beautiful Briny, Substitutiary Locomotion, The Old Home Guard and the Portobello Road songs are singalong bangers.

Like so many Disney films, it was adapted into a musical a few years back and I saw it on tour in Northampton. That was ok rather than brilliant, it was great to hear the songs from the movie but I didn’t love the new additions and I can see why it never went into the West End. My sister and I recorded this off the TV (one Christmas I think) and watched it in rotation with about four other videos on Saturday nights while we were eating dinner in front of the TV (our weekend treat). Even now if I happened across it on TV on a weekend afternoon I’m pretty sure I would stop and watch it to the end.

Have a great Sunday.

Children's books, children's books, series

Children’s series: Taylor and Rose mysteries

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Happy Friday everyone, and it’s another mystery series today, but this one aimed at middle grade readers. And I do love a good middle grade book. And sometimes a bad one if you look at some of the terrible lesser known Girl’s Own books I’ve read over the years!

So the Taylor and Rose series is the follow on to Katherine Woodfine’s Sinclair Mysteries and features the same main characters, Sophie and Lillian, who are running a detective agency but also doing work on the side for the secret service agency. It’s in the years running up to (but not reaching) the First World War and the overarching plot that runs across the series is around a shadowy organisation who are trying to disrupt the world order and even maybe start a way by sowing discord between nations. Thus means there is plenty of scope for international travel as you can see from the titles of the books.

I really enjoyed the original series and this is a great continuation, that widens the world out and feels like it’s for slightly older readers in the same way that the main characters are slightly older. These are adventure capers more than mysteries and probably do need to read these in order to get the most out of them because of the over arching storyline with the secret society. I read the first two a couple of years ago and the last two over the last month or so and it worked really well.

You should be able to get these really easily in bookshops with children’s sections – and the first one (or even the set!) would make a great Christmas book for the 10-12 year old in your life.

Have a great weekend!

Book of the Week, Children's books

Book of the Week: The Wombles at Work

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Happy Tuesday everyone and I hope that those of you who had a bank holiday yesterday had an excellent day. This week’s pick is a nostalgic trip down memory lane for me, because I read several of the Wombles books when I was at primary school, so when I saw this in the same edition as the school library had at a book sale a few months ago, I snapped it up.

This is the third book in the series of children’s books about the Wombles, furry animals who live in burrows and clean up the mess that humans leave behind them. In The Wombles at Work, they are living in Hyde Park after being forced to move from Wimbledon Common. The overarching framing device for the book is that the Wombles are competing to come up with the best ways to fight pollution. Within that, the different strands of the plot sees the different Wombles trying to solve the various problems that they come across. So for example Tomsk saves a swan from choking to death on a net, a music festival takes place in the park and leaves lots of rubbish behind it, Madame Cholet is struggling with restrictions on how long she can have her stove on every day because the cooking can be smelt above ground and there are mysterious notes being left for the burrow.

When I bough this I wasn’t sure if this was one of the ones that I had already read or not, but in reading it, I realised that I hadn’t and that was also a delightful treat. I went off and had a look at the book summaries and I have definitely read the previous book where the Wombles had to move form Hyde Park, and fifth book the Wombles around the World where some of the burrow are sent around the world to find out more about other countries and other Wombles. I think I’ve read the book where they move back to Wimbledon common, but I’m not 100% sure. And I have the audiobook of the first one too because it’s read by Bernard Cribbins, which I listened to years ago and now want to listen to again! It’s easy to think that the problem of pollution and people wanting to care for the environment is a new thing, but when you go back and read the Wombles books – written in about eight years from the late 1960s through the 1970s, you realise that things really haven’t changed a lot. All of which means I think it would still be a great story to read as a middle grader today, even if the references to the Old Queen are more likely to be read as references to Elizabeth II rather than Victoria!

These were out of print for years and years which may explain that – my school library was the only place I ever remember seeing these and I’ve never come across them anywhere else before, and I suspect they may still be hard to find in the shops but they are at least on Kindle now.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, Children's books, children's books, Forgotten books

Book of the Week: Juliet Overseas

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It’s Tuesday again and that means it’s review day. And today I’m back in Girl’s Own territory with a boarding school story that I picked up after one of my friends gave a talk about the author at Book Con before last. Yes it’s taken me more than two years to get to it, but that year was a particularly large haul. I braced myself and checked the photos from that one and the last one – I’ve got one left to read from the each. I should work on that…

Anyway: Juliet Overseas. The Overseas of the title is England – for Juliet is from New Zealand. She’s been sent over to go to her mother’s former school, which was actually founded by her grandfather and three of his friends, but when she arrives she discovers that things in her house have gone downhill – they’ve got a reputation for being the slack house and a severe shortage of seniors to try and pull things back together. And so of course Juliet throws herself into restoring the house to former glory with the help of hockey, cakes and some no nonsense behaviour.

This is such a good example of a boarding school story. I tend towards series because I like to see characters progress though the school (and I guess because all the early one so read were from series) but this does such a good job of setting up the school and the rules but without info dumping on you. The talk about Clare Mallory at Bristol was called “Salvation through Hockey” and although I wasn’t a hockey lover at school (more of a cricket and tennis girl) the match sequences in this are really good and show the power of a sport to bring people together.

I appreciate that this is a bit of a niche recommendation, but sometimes I do that and I’m not even sorry about it! Anyway this is going to be on the harder end of things to get hold of – specialist vendors only really or a book conference…

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, Children's books, Forgotten books

Book of the Week: The Top of the Climb

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I was wondering what to write about this week and then I realised that I was the only person to have read and rated this on Goodreads and so obviously the choice became clear! And so this week we have another in my intermittent series of career books for girls from the mid-twentieth century.

As you can tell from the cover, this is the story of a plucky young wannabe air hostess through her training and into the early stages of her career. In this case it’s Caroline, who comes down from the north of England for her interview at London airport and doesn’t speak much of any foreign language, but clearly has the right accent and the right stuff for the job. This runs you through the skills that an air hostess needed at the time, and then a bit of the day to day of the job once you qualify.

The rest of Betty Beaty’s books appear to be Mills and Boon category romances – between air hostesses and pilots, but there’s not actually a lot of romance in this – for all that the traditional love interest is easily spotted early on. There’s a dollop of glamour with trips to New York- but also the usual dash of teething troubles and peril. I’ve said before that my expectations for air travel were made unrealistic by the fact that I read Shirley Flight, Air Hostess as a child – and this would have done the same, although maybe not quite to the same extent.

Of course the main issue with a lot of this era of books is that problematic content can pop up anywhere – and anything with travel tends to have at least a few issues. The Shirley Flight books are particularly bad when it comes to the portrayal of anyone non-British, and although it has a moment or two, The Top of the Climb is better than they are on that front. And also, spoiler, there’s no plane crashes in this. Shirley crashes in practically every other book, but Caroline makes it to the end sans wrecked plane – despite a few scares. All in all an interesting and mostly fun way to spend a couple of hours.

I bought this at Bristol Book Con this year, and I can’t see any other copies anywhere, so if you want to read this you may have to make me an offer. But I don’t suppose you will – and indeed I’m not really suggesting you should.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, Children's books, children's books, Forgotten books

Book of the Week: Vicki Finds the Answer

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Another week, another BotW pick that is a little bit niche. But on the bright side, it’s another of my acquisitions from Book Con, so at least I’m bringing the tbr-pile down a little. And hoo boy, the plot to this one is crazy.

This is the second in the Vicki Barr, Flight Stewardess series, and it should be noted I haven’t read the first. Vicki is newly graduated from the stewardess school and is now being sent out on her first flights with Federal airlines. She’s living in a flat with five other stewardesses and has a bit of romance going on with a handsome co-pilot. SHe’s working on a short hop line and on one of her flights she encounters a young woman called Joan who is clearly in some sort of trouble and ends up helping save a timber business. Yes, you read that right a timber business. I now have a rudimentary understanding of how the timber business worked in late 1940s America, as well as the methods of fire-watching and fire fighting that were in place for forested areas. You weren’t expecting that were you? Me neither.

I feel fairly safe in telling you this, because I don’t think any of you are going to be buying this one. So I also don’t mind spoiling the plot a bit further and telling you that Vicki also rescues her younger sister from drowning in an icy pond, takes a crew of hunters up on a flight to a shooting trip – and one of them shoots a window out on the plane on the way – and that the denouement of the timber plot involves landing the plan on a track in the middle of the fire and then a life or death fight. All this in under 200 pages. You’re welcome.

The good news is that unlike her British equivalent, Shirley Flight, Vicki’s plane doesn’t crash. Shirley is in a worrying number of crashes over the course of her series, but in this one at least Vicki makes it safely down to earth at the end of all of her flights. It’s slightly random that a teenage air hostess is the one to work out how Joan’s father’s business partner is trying to put him out of business, and also that the guy who is organising the hunting trip is also a timber baron, but coincidences like that are the stuff of Girl’s Own adventure stories. And I love them for it.

There are fifteen other books in the Vicki Barr series and I’d happily read more if I can lay my hands on them at a sensible price because this is my sort of crazy. And unlike some of the other books of the ear, I didn’t spot any racism. Which is a low bar to be cleared, but there it is and the same can’t be said about some of the Shirley Flight Books. Helen Wells is also responsible for the majority of the books in the somewhat better know Cherry Ames series about a peripatetic nurse, some of which I’ve read as well and which are generally easier to get hold of.

My copy came from one of the sales at Book Con (the dealer one I think) and as it’s an American series, they’re not the easiest to lay your hands on if you want them. I can see a couple on the sales sites, but although the actual books are cheap there’s often a hefty whack of postage attached to them because they need to be shipped from somewhere else. But as I don’t think you’re going to be buying them anyway, it doesn’t matter – I just hope you’ve found this as entertaining as I did when I was reading the book!

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, Children's books

Book of the Week: Roller Skates

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Yes, the list last week was huge, with lots of good stuff on it – but I have other plans for some of them. Yes, yes, yes, this is cheating because I finished this on Monday. No, I’m not really bothered that I’m breaking my own rules again because I’m jet lagged and I’ve caught something with a cough from the plane (no it’s not Covid, I did a test). So here we are with a rule breaking BotW pick, you’re welcome.

Roller Skates is a Newberry award winning children’s book, first published in 1936. Set somewhere in the 1890s, it tells the story of a year in the life of a little girl called Lucinda, who moves to New York to stay with two ladies while her parents are away in Europe. Lucinda has a greater degree of freedom while living in New York than she is used to at home, and as a result explores the city on her roller skates and makes a variety of friends along the way. Lucinda clearly comes from a fairly well-to-do background, but many of her friends do not, and she learns a lot about the way of the world from her adventures.

My love of children’s books from the first half of the twentieth century is sufficiently well known at this point – and this was one of my acquisitions from Book Con this year. And as is often the case in books of this age, there’s more death in Lucinda’s life than might be expected in a modern children’s book, but given my grandma’s stories about her childhood, nothing that wasn’t realistic. I haven’t read a lot of children’s books set in late nineteenth century urban America and that made this interesting even beyond the lovely writing. It’s hard to tell whether I would have loved it as a child the way that I did Lottie and Lisa – which was written about ten years later and which I used to borrow from the primary school library on the regular and obviously is the basis for one of my favourite Disney movies – but as an adult with an interest in the genre is an interesting one.

I’m not expecting many (any?!) of you to want to read this, but if you do, you’re going to have to pick it up second hand I’m afraid, but there are a few copies on Abebooks.

Happy Reading.

Book of the Week, books, Children's books, Forgotten books

Book of the Week: Film Stars at Riverlea

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It’s only right that the week after Book Conference, my book of the Week pick is a bonkers Girls Own boarding school story. So buckle up, this has got a lot of plot to get though…

I was going to say that I don’t know where to start on the plot, but I do: the start, because this opens on a twin arriving at Riverlea having run away from the boarding school she was attending after the parents decided they would be better apart from each other. And it only gets wilder from there. It’s got (not in order and not exhaustive) film stars, vindictive PE teachers, hidden talents, missing treasure, salvation through cricket, missing heirs, near drowning and a shipwreck. And those last are not at the same time. And it’s only just over 200 pages long.

Now I normally like my school stories a little saner – if by saner we mean the realistic (in comparison) boarding school in the Alps where you might get lost up a mountain that Elinor M Brent Dyer offers. But sometimes you just need something crazy. This was a great way to spend an evening and I thank my friend for letting me read it first.

I can’t even tell you where to get this – it’s long out of print and I’ve never seen it before – but I’m also not expecting many of you to want to read it because it’s niche. So niche. But also hilarious.

Happy Reading!

books, Children's books, series

Children’s series: Wells and Wong

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The second book in Robin Stevens’ new series is out this week, so I’m taking the opportunity to talk about her Wells and Wong middle grade mystery series this Friday.

So Hazel Wong and Daisy Wells meet at Deepdean School for Girls in the 1930s. In the first book, Murder Most Unladylike, they’re desperate for adventure and form their own secret detective agency in the hope of excitement, but it’s all pretty boring until one of their teachers is found dead in the gym and they start to investigate. And then across the next nine books they keep stumbling across bodies and intrigue in a variety of settings inspired by the best Golden Age mysteries. It’s doing Agatha Christie crossed with Enid Blyton.

I read these as they came out – and various of them were reviewed here at the time. I think my favourites are First Class Murder (Daisy and Hazel do Murder on the Orient Express), A Spoonful of Murder (Hazel on getting home advantage over Daisy in Hong Kong) and Death in the Spotlight (Daisy and Hazel do an Inspector Alleyn theatre mystery) but the books are a lot of fun and I think if I’d read them at the right age (if you know what I mean) it would have been a delightful gateway to Agatha Christie and Peter Wimsey. As it was, I went straight to Miss Marple when I was about eleven and loved it right up until the point I scared myself! I’ve bought these as gifts for the middle graders in my life – and loaned them out to the middle graders in my work colleague’s lives (although I’m still not sure how I ended up with Jolly Foul Play in ebook *and* paperback!

By the end of the series, Daisy and Hazel are almost grownups and it gets a little bit melodramatic in the Death on the Nile Homage, but I forgave it because I had enjoyed the series so much – and it was also setting up the Ministry of Unladylike Activity series, which you can also see in the picture above, where the new main character is Hazel’s little sister May.

I’ve read both of the new series too – which are World War Two-set spy adventures. I liked the first one better than the second but I think the premise of the new series is fundamentally a little harder for an adult to get on board with than the first series is. But if you are looking for a Christmas book for an older primary age child this Christmas (and they’ve already read Wells and Wong) they would be a safe bet. And they have cameos from Daisy and Hazel too.

You should be able to get these basically anywhere with a children’s section because they’ve been hugely successful – and the ebooks go on offer from time to time too.

Have a great weekend!

American imports, Children's books, Young Adult

Book of the Week: Cherry Ames – Boarding School Nurse

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Back in the Girls Own niche this week, with one of my purchases from Book Conference and my first foray into the Cherry Ames series.

In case you didn’t guess from the title, Cherry is a nurse and each book in the series sees her taking on a different type of nursing job. The jacket of this one says it’s book six in the series, but it’s clear from reading it that it’s actually book 17, although the author situation is complicated (two different authors, across three periods and 25 years) so maybe we’ll let it off. I picked this up from the bargain box because I like boarding school books and I thought it might be a good way in to Cherry Ames, considering I never got into Sue Barton – who was her British nursing novel equivalent.

So our plot here is that Cherry has taken on a job as the resident nurse at a girls boarding school in Illinois. On her way to the school, she meets one of the other pupils, a new scholarship girl called Lisette who has a book she doesn’t want anyone to see the title of and a strange obsession with flowers and the school’s garden. Soon Cherry is trying to keep peace among the girls and ends up investigating a mystery with the strangely aloof Lisette. I don’t think any of you are going to read this, and the good reads summary gives it away any way so: Lisette is actually the headteacher’s niece, the school is in the former family mansion and Lisette has a diary written by their common relative which suggests that there is a valuable secret hidden somewhere in the school. The secret turns out to be the formula for a perfume, which Cherry, her new beau the local doctor and Lisette try to make to try and save the school which is struggling financially.

That’s a lot of bonkers isn’t it? And that’s before you mix in all the nursing that Cherry does, which includes but is not limited to: a broken arm, a preemie birth, a car crash and a student who makes herself ill to get out of doing exams. All in under 200 pages. It’s fast paced and kinda hilarious – it’s like Nancy Drew crossed with a nursing manual. And as a connoisseur of school stories, I can confirm that Cherry would not have lasted long at the Chalet School because she’s far too close to the students and not maintaining A Proper Distance! I had a hoot reading it, and it was worth every penny I paid for it. Which wasn’t many, because: bargain box, but you know what I mean.

If you want to try out any Cherry Ames, you’ll need to find a specialist book seller or try Abebooks.

Happy reading!