4. Terry Pratchett (2003), The Wee Free Men
Very enjoyable. I think overall I slightly preferred Wintersmith, mainly because its story-arc felt better crafted - some the scenes in the Queen's domain dragged a little for me. But I like Tiffany all the more now, and I warmed to the Nac Mac Feegles over the course of this book in a way I hadn't with WintersmithI'm also now in a better position
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This may not be what you are thinking of.
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Just goes to show how my memory has mashed things up, then, thinking it was in a children's book. In my defence, though, I read this book at least fifteen years ago, possibly more, and I suppose I can see how I'd have got confused over time, because she is looking back to her adolescence.
Anyway, that's definitely what I was remembering, and I'm thrilled to have been able to track it down and read it again. A great passage, and I can very much see how it would have appealed to me as a female reader in her early teens, irredeemably given to the same sorts of fantasies myself. Could the real-life appearance which I thought happened later in the book be something to do her coming to think of Bond as a kind of incarnation of the Hero, perhaps?
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I know I've read Wee Free Men but I can't remember the tobacco pouch - I'm sure I must have thought of Thunderball at the time.
And searchable Fleming texts online, my word! Who's brilliant now?
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Google!
As for Wee Free Men, Tiffany's grandmother smoked Jolly Sailor tobacco, and a sou'westered sailor on the front of the packet became the way Tiffany learnt about the sea, even though she'd never actually seen it in her life. It's rather an important theme, because a) she later realises that the Chalk was once a sea-bed, so that the sea is actually buried deep in her cultural heritage, and b) she ends up in a dream-world based on the tobacco packet, in which the Sailor pursues a huge whale that is an incarnation of the Queen on her behalf.
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