The Island of Adventure (The Adventure Series)

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Minor issues present such as mild cracking, inscriptions, inserts, light foxing, tanning and thumb marking. Despite this inevitable feeling of a different era, it has a few universal truths that are often missing from more contemporary and I might say violent works. As a bird enthusiast Jack is desperate to visit the Isle of Gloom, where he thinks he’s seen the extinct Great Auk, so the boys practice sailing Bill’s boat, and then secretly borrow Jo-Jo’s to sail to the island.

Philip and Dinah's father is dead too, but while their mother is alive and well, she's away pretty much all the time, working to earn a living and send money back to Craggy-Tops. But as quick as she is to explode, she's also quick to cool—so while her quarrels with her annoying brother are often loud and physical, they're over very quickly and there seems to be no evidence of her bearing grudges or sulking. Temperamental as she is, she often finds herself the target of her brother's teasing, but otherwise she is quite level-headed, intelligent and grown-up for her age. After settling in at Craggy-Tops the children explore the beach and the caves along the coast, in the process managing to get on the wrong side of Jo-Jo. However if you actually read the book properly through to the end you will see that it is all a very clever act!Refreshingly, however, Blyton acknowledges just how nightmarish this all is, and there’s a definite edge of brittle trauma to many of the characters. Although the publication dates span a decade, Blyton reportedly wrote each of the novels in less than a week.

What I read, and what I adored, were her eight Adventure novels, starting with this, The Island of Adventure. Boards with rubbing, creasing, edge and corner wear, marks, wear top and bottom of spine, discolouration. For me what’s wrong with the “Adventure” series being filmed in the 1980’s and 1990’s is this: like FOATI it should have been filmed by CFF way back in the 1950’s. In the stories Kiki serves usually either as comic relief or as a saviour from tight situations, as her voice is sometimes mistaken for a real person. He was only seen doing real work a couple of times in the entire series- he was shown playing pool and golf, and on one occasion, he was seen fishing, though he lied that he was in the office.The great thing about her is that, as hot-headed as she is, you don't get any feeling of malice or general nastiness.

Our donations to The Rainbow Centre have helped provide an education and a safe haven to hundreds of children who live in appalling conditions. So while it maybe ends up less mindlessly racist than it at first appears, it’s still pretty racist, in effect if not in intent. But amongst the islands, they stumble upon a sinister plot; Bill disappears, and the children are left alone to find out where he is, what is going on and how they will escape. But Philip, Dinah, Lucy-Ann and Jack are not prepared for the dangerous adventure that awaits them in the abandoned copper mines and secret tunnels beneath the sea. I honestly didn’t know what I’d find, re-reading this novel for the first time in at least 15, if not 20 or more years.

Philip’s pets don’t play a particularly large role in this first book but he has a little brown mouse living in his jersey through the book, who makes several appearances. But he is constantly refered to as ‘the black man’, drawing attention to his skin colour multiple times a paragraph for no clear reason.