In many ways this is the ultimate children’s adventure:<\/p>\n
Pirates, natives, exploration, tension, scary scenes, humiliation, exhilaration, excitement, battle, peace-making, new enemies, new friends and above all…<\/p>\n
Independence.<\/p>\n
Freedom from the normal world.<\/p>\n
In Swallows and Amazons the protagonists inhabit two worlds.<\/p>\n
In the first they are family members bound by the usual restrictions that brothers and sisters – on holiday in the Lake District with their mother and not-yet-toddler sister – have.<\/p>\n
And then they discover Swallow, a small sailing dingy<\/span> ocean-going schooner in which they sail on to Wild Cat Island and set up base.<\/p>\n With their island\u00a0base established, the adventures come thick and fast.<\/p>\n Excellently told,\u00a0though\u00a0some might say this book could be a little clumsy and that the use of sailing slang might be a barrier.<\/p>\n Some might try Swallows and Amazons and say that the terminology would be an obstacle\u00a0to young readers.<\/p>\n I would argue otherwise, for surely even the widely-read (and much inferior) Harry Potter has introduced children to a world of muggles, quidditch, etc…<\/p>\n Which makes me wonder what the many Harry Potter readers would think of Swallows and Amazons?<\/p>\n Given the age of the book – published before the 1939-45 war – it has aged very kindly.<\/p>\n Arthur Ransome’s conversational style doesn’t feel like a clunky old black and white movie that some books of this time have.<\/p>\n The writing is a little ‘old’ in one or two places but these few patches don’t spoil the overall delivery.<\/p>\n Nor do they interfere with the pace.<\/p>\n And I’d forgotten what a major influence this book had been on my childhood; because of this book I saved my summer holiday pay and bought a dingy and in later life learned to sail.<\/p>\n Swallows and Amazons, much better than Harry Potter.<\/p>\n 4\/5<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In many ways this is the ultimate children’s adventure: Pirates, natives, exploration, tension, scary scenes, humiliation, exhilaration, excitement, battle, peace-making, new enemies, new friends and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}