This weekend was hot, far too hot to do anything at all. This is unusual in September in the UK, but there you have it. I needed something easy to read that was going to require zero effort, so I reverted back to my childhood and picked up one of my Enid Blyton books. The Island of Adventure is the first in the Adventure series and one I haven’t read for aeons! I remembered the characters' names, Philip, Dinah, Jack and Lucy-Ann, but that’s all I remembered. I didn’t recall how they met or how their adventures started, so it was like going in as a first-time reader.
The Island of Adventure is fast-paced, exciting and, as the title suggests, adventurous. I love Enid Blyton’s writing, her sense of wit and all her old-fashioned ideals. You know the ones, where women should stay at home and do the housekeeping, the kids should probably be at boarding school and the Dad earns the money. Well, as long as you see past all this - the book was first published in 1946, so just keep that in your head - it’s a brilliant escapism for a few hours. Oh and it’s also full of bad men who lock kids in a cave when they get caught and don’t care if they get lost and starve to death in mines! What isn’t to love! I forgot how I used to read quickly to find out what was going to happen next, and this hasn’t changed. I often skimmed to the end of the page to see if the baddies were going to get away!
From what I can gather from my Bookstagram friends on the other side of the pond, Enid Blyton, although known worldwide, never quite made it across the Atlantic, and I have no idea why, but honestly, I would urge you to introduce yourselves and your children to this amazing author. I promise you won’t regret it.
