Thanks for the great review, John - and also good to hear your memories of your mom's driving - though the outcome was certainly a lot more dramatic than mine!Lucky Star wrote:
Anyway I was peckish so ploughed straight on into part four of Rob Houghton's ongoing Blyton cookbook series. Rob recently said he had several more episodes of this to go which is great news as these are a very entertaining series of articles indeed. Farmyard stories dominated this entry and as always I am broadly in agreement with Rob's analyses. I too rated The Children of Cherry Tree Farm rather low due to it reading more like an extended nature lesson than an exciting Enid Blyton story! I personally found Tammylan a boring character, possibly because my interest in plants and wildlife is a bit lower than seems common among Blytonians. I much preferred Twigg from The Six Cousins books as he was a part of an actual narrative rather than a sort of lecturer. As always the generous sprinkling of Rob's own personal experiences added considerable spice to the dish and I was interested in his farm memories and had to smile at the driving story. A similar thing happened to us when we were returning from holiday one time and my Mum was driving. She had not long since passed her test so was still rather nervous and a tyre blew out causing us to skid wildly across the road. Fortunately we ended up on a wide grass verge shaken but unhurt.
I think, when we are talking about Tammylan and his character, I probably agree with you, in The Children of Cherry Tree Farm and The Children of Willow Farm, but in More Adventures on Willow Farm he does become (slightly) more a part of the narration and is a more interesting addition to the book. As a child, I was never into nature as many children were, and this is probably why I read the third book in one sitting, as it was much less about nature and animals and more about people! More Adventures on Willow Farm is like a completely different book, compared to the first two.