Book #27: Missee Lee by Arthur Ransome
Number of pages: 349
The tenth Swallows and Amazons book had a premise that felt a little far-fetched.
In the first few chapters, the Swallows and Captain Flint end of stranded, after their ship the Wild Cat, which featured in previous books, burns. The following chapter switches to the Amazons, who are (as I understood it) boarded by Chinese pirates and kidnapped, making one attempt to escape, only to be recaptured.
Soon after the Pirates capture the Swallows and Captain Flint, and all seven of them are apparently taken to China, being told they are being taken to Miss Lee, who is apparently their leader. When they finally meet Miss Lee, she apparently wants them as friends, although she also wants to tutor them. However, she won't let them leave the island where she lives.
It was a bit of a strange idea for a plot, and certainly different from some of the previous novels that were set in and around the British mainland, but most of it was enjoyable, as the storyline led towards the "Dragon Festival", which I guessed was a real tradition (part of Chinese New Year, perhaps?); Miss Lee was an interesting character, although I didn't completely understand her motives. It was also good to have all the original characters back after their absence in "The Big Six".
However, I had one big problem with this book...
It was incredibly racist. In fact, I couldn't decide what was more racist and Huckleberry Finn, with its 200 plus uses of "n****r".
I wasn't too surprised at the racism because this book was originally published in 1941, when people were a lot less politically correct, and it manifests itself in the awful way in which all the Chinese characters are stereotyped, not least in the way they appear in the illustrations, but the fact that they were portrayed as speaking English very, very badly (most of it was the usual racist joke that is made about Asians, which involved them constantly referring to Roger as "Loger"). Literally, everything the Chinese characters said was full of this sort of stuff that would never be acceptable in a book nowadays.
So, overall I thought this book was okay; it did have an exciting climax, and it was easy to follow, but the constant racism throughout the whole story was very shocking and so this has to be one of my least favourite titles in the Swallows and Amazons series.
Next book: Brick Lane (Monica Ali)