Lucky Star wrote:You can say that about virtually every Blyton book. I mean is it really feasible that a bunch of kids can outwit spies, criminals, kidnappers, smugglers etc? Or that they have more success than the police at crime solving? Or that they can trek all over the country amd even abroad and survive better than many adults? Blytons magic trick is to draw in the reader and involve them in such a way that these often amazing situations seem perfectly possible, indeed we feel certain that the kids will triumph in the end.
This is an old post from 2007 by John. I was delighted to find a thread on one of my favorite EB books.
Of course it's pretty unlikely that children could outsmart adult criminals, but there were a few decades in the last century between the 1930's and the 1960's when hundreds of such adventurous children's books were written (not only by EB, but also by Norman Dale, Malcolm Saville, US author Stephen Meader, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, "Kalle Blomquist" aka "Bill Bergson" by Swedish author Astrid Lindgren and dozens of similar books by several German children's books authors) and dozens of movies for kids were created by the CFF at the same time like "Treasure at the Mill", "Five on a Treasure Island", "The Carringford School Mystery", "Five Clues to Fortune" etc.
Those children's books were about sunken ships, buried treasure, underground passages, castles or about thives like the one in Norman Dale's book "The Best Adventure" (1945, The Bodley Head).
Unfortunately these adventurous children's books were replaced by lesser interesting topics in children's literature from the 1970's on like parents getting divorced, class bullies, death of a relative etc.
The few exceptions that I found later on were usually children's books set in WW II like "Goodnight, Mr. Tom" by Michelle Magorian and "The Kingdom by the Sea" by Robert Westall.
Any other opinions?