Summerbook #1 and 2: A couple of children's books

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 Doing well so far!  I'm deep into a more serious book, but in the meantime I enjoyed TWO children's books from the UK that probably qualify as minor classics and which I quite enjoyed.


Knock Three Times! by Marion St. John Webb: this 1917 fantasy tale reminded me of E. Nesbit in its
Edwardian tone with humorous asides, but it was weirder.  Nine-year-old twins Molly and Jack receive birthday presents from an aunt, and while Jack gets the paint box he'd hoped for, Molly gets a very disappointing pincushion shaped like a grey pumpkin.  But!  That night, Molly sees the pumpkin grow and roll away out of the house.  She and Jack follow it through a tree portal into the Possible World -- a pleasantly bucolic and magical land, where the inhabitants are horrified to hear that the Grey Pumpkin is back.  That Pumpkin contains an evil wizard who once menaced the kingdom, and who was imprisoned in a regular pumpkin (it turned grey from his wicked soul) and disposed of as a harmless pincushion in the Impossible World.  Now it's back and will sneak up to you quietly and bonk into you, and then something awful and unpredictable will happen; perhaps your nose will fall off, or you'll suddenly be blinded.  There is just one thing that can defeat the Grey Pumpkin -- the Black Leaf, a pumpkin vine that grows every year for a couple of weeks and then disappears.  The entire country must turn out to search everywhere, and Molly and Jack want to help, of course.  After all, strangers are often lucky!  It's quite an adventure, and bounces around the countryside in a pleasant and unusual way.



The Otterbury Incident, by C. Day-Lewis: yes, this is Daniel Day-Lewis' father, and he wrote a couple of children's books, along with lots of other stuff.  Set in the fictional Otterbury town a few years after WWII, the story follows a bunch of schoolboys who spend all their free time playing at 'the Incident,' an uncleared bomb site that makes a great place for pretend battles.  When a school window is accidentally broken and Nick has to pay five pounds (a fortune!!) by Tuesday, the boys band together to earn the money, which is promptly stolen.  Their detective work leads them into some hair-raising adventures!  This was a fun story and a good read.  

What first grabbed me about this story was the illustrations by Edward Ardizzone, who I tend to collect.  He was very prolific and I have all sorts of odd volumes that happen to contain his pictures, but of course I also have the picture books he wrote himself, such as the Little Tim books.



And now it's on to more Summerbooks!  I've disqualified one of the others on the list for being too determinedly whimsical.  But I'm enjoying spending so much time reading again!  I'd gotten out of the habit as well as being in a distracted slump.

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