Top Ten Books from my Childhood that I Would Love to Revisit

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Each week they post a prompt and it's up to us to make a list of ten books based on that prompt! If you'd like to join in you can do so here

This week's prompt for Top Ten Tuesday is childhood books we want to revisit. As you can imagine there was no way I could not do this prompt! It did help that it also counts towards me ticking something off of my Bloggiesta list as well. 

For the purposes of the list I decided to steer clear of my teenage years as the reading was very different and honestly, I'm really nostalgic for some of these books. They were my friends in the kind of way fictional characters can only be your friends when you're at an age where although you know they're fictional, you can't quite convince yourself they don't exist somewhere in the universe and that's ok. 

1. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett - kind of cheating since I plan on reading this over the next few days. Loved the story of horrible, stuck up Mary Lennox, her friendship with horrible, whiny Colin, and their discovery of the secret garden (and the film) as a child but haven't read it since I was below fifteen. Considering all the characters pretty much start out horrible, it's a beautiful book and very much about the importance of not being whiny or stuck up as far as I remember. It gives me an excuse to watch the film which I've owned for years but not watched since childhood as well! (Also as I was writing this I suddenly thought if I'm reading this I will also need to read The Painted Garden and then hello, Noel Streatfeild! Can open. Worms all over the place)

2. The Trebizon Series by Anne M. Digby - I think it was Katie I was talking to about these books the other day and I just came across them while perusing my shelves of children's books for this post. Not as great as the Chalet School books (also on this list) but still good solid boarding school books which made me want to leave home for boarding school immediately. 


3. Harry and the Wrinklies by Alan Temperley - my mum read this to my siblings and I as kids and I remember shrieking with laughter at it. A couple of Christmases ago I watched the BBC adaptation of David Walliams' Gangsta Granny (having never read the book. Terrible, I know) and it reminded me a lot of that and reminded me that I haven't read it in years. I probably will in a few years, once the boys are old enough :-) 


4. Anne of Green Gables and sequels by L.M Montgomery - Oh Anne, how I love you. Anne of Green Gables is pretty much what made being ginger in the 90s bearable. I have an undying love for all things Anne (although not quite as much as Katie I don't think) and haven't reread the whole series anywhere near as much as I should have. Plus I've never read (but now own both) Rilla of Ingleside or Rainbow Valley. There's a series reread in there somewhere!

5. Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer - I adored this book as a child but nobody else I know has ever heard of it. It's about Charlotte, who also goes to boarding school (are you sensing a theme here?) and sometimes wakes up in a totally different period of time as a totally different girl due to the magic of sleeping in the bed this girl used to sleep in. Amazing. 

6. Swiss Family Robinson by Johann Wyss - Arguably the film is more from my childhood than the book is, but it had to go on there being that it was the book which basically started mine and Rhys' whole relationship. Another post for another time. Always a danger for the amount I will shout about the stupid kid who thinks it's a great idea to tie himself to ostriches and the blond and slightly slimeyness of Fritz/Ernst/whichever one it is who's slightly slimier than the other one. Nevertheless you can't beat classic shipwreck self-sufficiency in my book!

7. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr, The Silver Sword by Ian Serailler and Pied Piper by Nevil Shute - my collection of books I loved about the second world war from a non-British (or not set in the UK) perspective. I absolutely loved and adored the first two and read them over and over, and only read Pied Piper once but it's stuck with me all this time. I have a copy that I got in a charity shop but haven't actually read it since I was eight or so. 

8. Five Children and It by Edith Nesbit - Oh so much love. I nearly put The Railway Children on here as well because that's really my childhood love (just don't talk to me about the stupid remake of the film they did with Jenny Agutter as the mother. What the hell. Bernard Cribbins as Perks all the way) but then I remembered my mum reading us this as a bedtime story (she read us a lot of stuff as bedtime stories) and how she pronounced it 'Pasamead' instead of 'Samead' and it had to go on. I might actually reread this one soon too. 



9. The Chalet School Series by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer - I did not realise until I looked at my copy of The Chalet School & Jo while writing this post that these books were written in the 1920s & 30s! I knew they were old but I didn't really cotton on to how old when I was reading them as a child. Anyway they are the foundation of my desire to visit Austria (my sister now has an Austrian boyfriend so I may be getting closer...) and I never read all of them, so that's a thing that should probably happen soon...

10. Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter - Pollyanna is pretty much the foundation of my One Little Word this year. Every time I start getting negative and forget about my word (gratitude) I try to play the 'just being glad' game. Another one my mum read as a bedtime story. Has the debatable perk of a Hayley Mills film to go alongside. Haven't reread it since I was twelve, so it's due really. 

What are some of your childhood favourites? I have an ongoing obsession with children's literature and a spare room full of books so I'm always happy to have recommendations for more to add to the collection!

Monday Spotlight 2: Anastasia, At Your Service by Lois Lowry

As a teenager, I read a lot of Lois Lowry. Nobody else I knew did. Mind you, not many of my friends at that age actually read much at all! But despite this, I've never read The Giver, which is the Lowry book which appparently is some kind of a rite of passage for loads of other people. Since I've been thinking about books I want to reread for the spotlight on childhood favourites, I'm starting to think I should expand it to include books I should have read as a child, but never got around to, such as The Giver, and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, among others.

Anyway, as you may have seen, I was bought an awesome load of books by my boyfriend for our anniversary, which included 3 of the 'Anastasia' books I loved as a twelve and thirteen years old, and which, I must admit, I've not seen anywhere pretty much since then.
As with the Famous Five last week, Anastasia, At Your Service didnt' disappoint me with the reread. The book was funny and engaging - I will actually admit to giggling a little while reading it.

Anastasia Krupnik (best surname ever by the way) is twelve. Her family have just moved, and she is bored, and needs a job to supplement her allowance. What she really wants to do, is be a companion to a rich old lady, so she writes up a resume, and, with help from her parents, (who never laugh at her!) puts it up in all the places she thinks rich old ladies hang out. This lead to a rich old lady, Mrs. Bellingham, hiring her as a maid (oh, the crossing of wires! Hilarity...) where she meets her grandaughter, Daphne, and makes her first friend.

The things that happen in the book - Anastasia and Daphne plotting to get their revenge on Daphne's grandmother for giving her a doll (shock, horror!) for her birthday, Anastasia's little brother, Sam, falling out a window and ending up in hospital - are all fairly routine things, which really could happen to anyone. When I was twelve, Anastasia's life could easily have been my life. I schemed with my friends like she schemes with Daphne, I talked to my family in the same way as she does hers (convinced I absolutely couldn't survive on the amount of pocket money I got, why did my parents never listen to me, etc, etc, etc), and I tried, and failed dismally, to be 'grown up'. Rereading this book made me remember so many things I'd forgotten about being twelve.

It has a simplicity that I think is lacking in a lot of teenage fiction today, but also which probably stems from the time at which it was published (1982). Nowadays, I can't see many parents letting their twelve year old out on their own until 9pm without a mobile phone, at the very least! The Anastasia books are similar, in tone and content, to The Babysitter's Club books by Ann M. Martin, which were my all-consuming passion between ages 11 - 14, and which I'm hoping to get hold of to reread. Unfortunately, '80s YA seems to be totally out at the moment, making it really hard to get hold of. I could kick myself, as at one point, I had pretty much the entire series that I'd collected from library sales and charity shops, but I passed them on to my sister who was a bit too young for them at the time, and they were all offloaded to some other friend of the family. Now I just wish I'd hung onto them - kept them in a cupboard or something. But I suppose if I start thinking like this, I'll never get rid of another book, ever, and then my house will be overrun...

To conclude, Anastasia, At Your Service is still as simple, funny, and true as I remember it being. I loved rereading it, and now I've got to get hold of the rest of the series!

Monday Spotlight: Enid Blyton

When organising my bookshelves this past weekend, I started unearthing some books I adored as a child. Obviously, this led to me being sat cross legged on the floor for a fair few hours in raptures, remembering more and more books I couldn't possibly live without as a child. Hence, a new weekly feature. Each week, I'll talk about a book or author I loved as a child, and ask for other people's favourites and opinions. Despite the fact that I read a LOT as a child, I still feel there was lots I missed out on! Basically, this just gives me a kind of validation to read children's books! I'll try to post on Monday, or as close to it as I can, every week.

So, for the first week, the queen of children's books when I was around 8: Enid Blyton. Because writing about Blyton is such a task (she's estimated to have published about 800 books over a 40 year period - that's 20 books a year!) I'm going to break it down by series. First series, The Famous Five. And my absolute favourite of all was Five Go Off in a Caravan.

The first thing that struck me, on my re-read, was how sexist the books are! Anne's (the youngest) biggest excitement about being allowed to go on a caravan holiday by themselves, is that she'll have two caravans to clean 'all by herself'. Her mother then says that of course George (another girl) must help her, and probably the boys will too, which Anne answers by saying that the boys wouldn't know how to cook or clean anyway!This made me slightly angry. My parents are Catholics, and have always been slightly 'traditional' about gender roles in the home, but as kids my brothers were taught to cook and clean up after themselves, and household chores were always evenly distributed, regardless of gender.

Aside from teaching children that women's roles are in the home, which, to be fair, they pretty much were at the time the book was written, I actually loved this as much as I remembered.
It had all the suspense I remembered, and if the characters were slightly two-dimensional, it was more reassuring than annoying. I loved the fact that the children were always eating, and running around outside, and basically doing all the things I remember doing as a kid. Also, it has a circus in it, which can really only be a plus.

Basically, the Famous Five - George (Georgina), her dog, Timmy, and cousins, Julian, Dick, and Anne, go on holiday (by themselves!) in caravans, and end up discovering the hidey hole of a couple of theives. Of course with much plotting, hiding, drama, and drinking of ginger beer along the way. I always liked The Famous Five more than the Secret Seven, as they were always doing things I wanted to do as a child. I think wish fulfillment is a huge part of children's literature, and I'm looking forward to re-reading more of my Enid Blyton favourites.

How did other people feel about Blyton as children? Any favourites?

Out of curiosity, does anybody know what poltical correctness has changed Dick's name to in the reprinted editions? As they've changed all the children's names in The Magic Faraway Tree, I assume they've done the same with this...

Review: Apple Bough & When the Siren Wailed

Apple Bough  was my absolute favourite book for a while, when I was around 8. I used to borrow it from my school library over and over again, until they made me let somebody else have a turn. It is the most comforting, reassuring book I can think of, and rereading it didn't disappoint me.

Apple Bough is a big, old house, with an overgrown garden. The kind of house that's a bit dilapidated, a bit the worse for wear, kind of like the threadbare teddy you've had forever, whose ear is falling off because you cuddled him too much. It is home to the Forum children: Myra, Sebastian, Wolfgang, and Ethel, and their parents. When Sebastian is eight, he gets noticed as a child prodigy violinist, and all of the children have to go on tour with him. Apple Bough is sold, and the children become 'world citizens'.

Basically, the book is about children who want a home. The obstacle to this is that all of the younger children are extraordinarily talented: Sebastian a violinist, Wolfgang an actor and wannabe writer of pop songs, and Ethel a dancer. What Streatfeild does so well here, as in so much of her work, is to present the plight of the child who believes herself to be completely untalented and worthless.

There's a huge wish fulfilment quality in Streatfeild's work, and the endings are almost always happy. Of the novels that I've read so far, the ones that I adore the most are the ones with the most fantastically impossible happy endings; the kind of endings you always want in reality, and only ever get in books. This is still one of my absolute favourite books, ever.

Rating: *****

When the Siren Wailed

I thought that I hadn't read this book, but when I got about half way through, I realised that I had. And there's a reason why I didn't remember it. It's the first Noel Streatfeild book I've read that was only OK. It's set in the Second World War, and if I'm honest, the central characters, Laura, Andy and Tim Clarke, reminded me a lot of the children from Disney's Bedknobs and Broomsticks. I do want to just point out that I totally love Bedknobs and Broomsticks, but the children in it, as they do here, feel a bit like caricatures. There was no central character to immediately fall in love with, and for me that was a huge loss to the story.

This book had none of the comfort and charm of Apple Bough, and, reading it directly after the other, that bothered me. For me, the major charm of Streatfeild's work is the satisfaction of children who have big dreams, managing to find a way to make them come true, and that was missing here. I've read a lot of literature, both now and as a kid, about the war, and while it's always been a subject that's interested me, and I do feel it's particularly important for kids to learn about the things that happened then, 8 year old me wishes that Noel Streatfeild, for me the queen of safe, comforting, uplifting and inspiring books which make children feel they can do anything, hadn't ventured into this kind of subject.

Rating: ***



Wonderful Wednesdays: Favourite Childhood Book

Little Women by Louisa Alcott



I was having a slight problem with this topic, as I have several books that I absolutely loved as a child, but after much careful thought, I decided that I'd have to go with Little Women, by Louisa M Alcott. I doubt there are many people who don't know about Little Women, but at the same time, I don't think there are too many who feel quite the way I do about it.

For me it's not only my favourite childhood book, but one of my favourite books of all time. I call it my antidepressant, as every time I'm feeling particularly down or uninspired I'll start reading the series and not stop until I'm cheered up, and so far, through biannual readings for the last fifteen years, it hasn't let me down once.

The reason I've picked it as my favourite childhood book though, is that it's the first time that I remember reading a book from cover to cover in one sitting. It was summer, as I was sat on our back doorstep, and it took me two hours to read the whole thing. When I got up I couldn't feel my legs anymore. Being brought up in a Christian household, I think that my sisters and I had a lot in common with Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March, and as a young child I used to use the book as a model for my own life. I think to some extent, I still do. I know that it's all very quaint, reading about girls who basically just want to be good, and who are very domestic and content to stay home with their parents until a nice young man comes to marry them, but, after years of struggling against it, I've come to accept that maybe that's a big part of who I am as well. As a child, I used to see the girls from the book as very individual and independent, as they are all very much their own people and have their own aspirations beyond wanting homes and families, and although my feminist tendencies have, on occassion, made me keep quiet about my love of this book, I've decided it's time for this to change.

Following reading it, I always have a hugely industrious fit and start embroidering tablecloths or making curtains and suchlike. The most recent reading spurred an obsession with self-sufficiency, which led to me buying a bunch of half price vegetable seeds to grow in the summer. To sum up, reading it, for me, creates only good things and always has done. It makes me happy, motivated, and energised, and so I've decided that in return for this favour, I'll stop being ashamed that it is my favourite!

I'm going to put in a short blurb about it, in case there's anyone who doesn't know the basic storyline, which I have, as usual, failed to even slightly outline in my ramblings!
This is what Goodreads have to say about it, and that's basically all there is to it:

Little Women is the heartwarming story of the March family that has thrilled generations of readers. It is the story of four sisters--Jo, Meg, Amy and Beth-- and of the courage, humor and ingenuity they display to survive poverty and the absence of their father during the Civil War.

Wonderful Wednesdays is a new meme hosted by Sam @ Tiny Library