Great Northern Review?
Hey,
I"m way behind on reviews of the stuff I've been reading lately so let's try to fix that up.
To start with, I finished off the audiobook of Great Northern? by Arthur Ransome. This is the last in his Swallows and Amazons series of books about plucky British children having adventures in various English countryside locations. I've now read/listened to all the books in the series except for Peter Duck and Missy Lee because those books are stories the children made up about wild adventures they'd like to have (so sort of an in-series fan fiction?). I was more interested in their "real" adventures over their imaginary ones.
So in this book, the Walkers, the Blacketts, and the Callums are in the North Sea along with Uncle Jim who's borrowed the boat they're sailing around in (and providing a modicum of adult supervision). Near the end of the trip, they put into a small cove on an island in order to scrub and paint the hull before returning the boat to its owner. While the older kids work on that, the younger ones go exploring on the island and Dick makes an interesting discovery, a nesting pair of Great Northerns (loons) which aren't supposed to be found in that part of the world.
That information falls into the hands of a Mr. Jemmeling who collects birds and their eggs and is most interested in acquiring such a rare set of specimens for his collection. Horrified, Dick and the rest of the kids put a desperate plan into play to allow Dick to get photographic proof of the birds and to throw Mr. Jemmerling off the scent. Scottish highlanders also make an appearance.
The book gets a bit of flack because Mr. Jemmerling has a gun and firearms are pretty unusual in these books. But the gun is for hunting birds and no one is ever threatened by a weapon so I'm not sure how it ranks as a bigger problem than casual English racism that crops up in the books. Overall, I thought the book was pretty good, but there were far too many adults involved. These books work best for me, when it's mostly the children deciding what they want to do and then going to do it. Too many adults (or "natives") tends to disrupt the kids' natural inquisitiveness.
On balance, I really enjoy the Swallows and Amazon series. As I mentioned earlier, casual English racism is probably the biggest stumbling block for recommending the series to young readers. It's not a constant thing, but every so often it really flares up (notably in Secret Waters where smearing yourself with black mud to camouflage people). It's really too bad because in a lot of other respects, the books are well ahead of their times. There's almost always an even split between boys and girls and the girls have at least as much agency as the boys. The interactions between various groups of kids (especially when they first meet) is handled quite well as is the internal life of various characters when they are focused on in the story.
I really enjoyed the series and had a lot of fun with it. It's a product of it's times but it's also probably one of the best products of it's time and worth looking into if you want some classic YA.
later
Tom