Best Famous Five Sequels...and the worst

[Moonraker]

Mehul, I'm wondering if perhaps your list is in order from 1 as your least liked and 21 as your most liked?

Swatithought.

As for an anti-American possibility, Edgar Stick was English - that doesn't make Enid anti-English!

[Lucky Star]

Enid's American characters are something of a mixed bag. The Hennings are utterly obnoxious but Berta in Plenty of Fun is a lovely child. Zerelda Brass from the Malory Towers series starts out as an empty headed idiot but as far as I recall she ends up being a really nice person once her delusions of acting are shattered.

I wonder if her impression of Americans was coloured by the war years when many English people were a bit stunned by the behaviour of US forces whom they described as "overpaid, oversexed and over here"?

[Chrissie777]

...the behaviour of US forces whom they described as "overpaid, oversexed and over here"?

This quote always made me chuckle in WW II documentaries .

[Courtenay]

I seem to recall it's even voiced by Fowler the plasticine rooster in Chicken Run...

[Ming]

I found Enid's depiction of the French far more interesting than that of her Americans! All the Mamzelles, and Claudine, were very bright, fun and jolly characters and somewhat unscrupulous! - with the exception of Mamzelle Rougier (?) of course. She was a nasty piece of work.

I think Enid's Americans and P. G. Wodehouse's Americans are quite similar - loud, usually rich, and slightly foolish.

[Daisy]

You'll soon be able to judge for yourself when you start your University course in the USA Ming! I guess, like every nationality, you will find a complete mixture of characteristics and temperaments.

[walter raleigh]

I found Enid's depiction of the French far more interesting than that of her Americans! All the Mamzelles, and Claudine, were very bright, fun and jolly characters and somewhat unscrupulous! - with the exception of Mamzelle Rougier (?) of course. She was a nasty piece of work.

I think Enid's Americans and P. G. Wodehouse's Americans are quite similar - loud, usually rich, and slightly foolish.

That's a good point about Wodehouse's depiction of American's Ming. As both he and Blyton were contemparies I guess that was the common perception of "Yanks" at that time, possibly fuelled in part (as Lucky Star suggests) by wartime experiences.

I feel Wodehouse and Blyton have a lot in common and most Blyton fans would enjoy Wodehouse's books too. Like Enid, Wodehouse has a deceptively simple prose style that is often imitated but rarely equalled. His books are extremely funny and also have that same quintessential English quality to them. And both he and Blyton created fictional worlds that epitomised a bygone age that probably never really existed in the first place.

[Chrissie777]

Wodehouse has a deceptively simple prose style that is often imitated but rarely equalled.

I think Patricia Highsmith equalled it. She has a way of creating lots of atmosphere with very few sentences.

[Spitfire]

Junior is a pest but Berta was portrayed as a nice, likeable kid in a tricky situation, so I think it balances out.

EB needs to exaggerate the awfulness of Junior and his Dad to create a proper enemy, because the unusual thing about the Finniston Farm story is that it lacks a proper villain.

Mr Hemming is quite within his rights to offer to buy old stuff from the farm, and he enters into a contract to excavate the castle site. Nothing he does is actually illegal, so the author has to make him/Junior seem rude and uncultured in order to justify the actions of the Five. I am not sure why she needed to make him American, but maybe she had a thing about the postwar relative decline of Britain and Pax Americana ?

I've said it before: there no real justification for any of this given the amount of loot from around the world that lies in British museums and stately homes...

Not sure about the war/post-war events influencing Enid's decision to make Mr. Hemming an American. She would have needed the character to be very rich and to not be British, so American seems the natural choice.

I totally agree with your first and last paragraphs though!

Enid's depictions of Americans are mostly positive, I think. Lucky Star has mentioned Bertha and Zerelda Brass - and there's Sadie Greene from the St. Clares series who, if I remember rightly, is on balance a pleasant, likeable character. But one of Enid's best creations (only in my view of course!) must be Kit Armstrong in The Boy Next Door. Kit is American. He's also immensely likeable - a resourceful, principled and courageous character, a fun playmate, a boy with irrepressible high spirits and good humour, whilst also being a child overwhelmed by powerful adults, and who is hunted, afraid and parentless.

I read The Queen Elizabeth Family for the first time recently, a very simple story about a family who travel to New York and stay there for a short while, and was struck at the simple, generalised way in which Enid contrasts British and Americans. I suppose that contrast is one of the best ways to introduce children to different cultures and countries, and, of course, Enid was trying to show New York to her young readers. Anyway, her representation of Americans is overwhelmingly positive. She describes them as 'wonderful people' who take the English family into their hearts and homes. They are incredibly generous and shower the visiting family with gifts and invitations. 'Mummy' is proud of her three children, and 'secretly thought that they had much better manners than the American children who spoke loudly and were often rude to grown-ups.' Daddy worries about how to repay all the generosity - ' "The Americans are rich, and English people are poor - I haven't enough money to repay all this kindness." But the Americans didn't want any return. They liked Daddy and his family, and they wanted to show it.' The meals are enormous, and no thought is given to wasted food - "The Americans waste far more than we eat - but it's America, and that's the way they live. I daresay if we had as much food as they had, we would be the same."

Of course, the story ends with the children remembering all the wonderful things about home (England), and longing to get back there!

Back on topic... I can't list all 21 in order of preference, as I haven't read them all in recent years - but my favourite sequels have always been Adventuring Again, Run Away Together, Smuggler's Top, Get Into Trouble and Fall Into Adventure. Since joining in with readathons on these forums, I also rate Hike highly, with Caravan not far behind.

The only Famous Five book I really don't like is the last one in the series. All the others are good books, just not as good as the ones in my list.

Swatithinkanyway.

[Courtenay]

Americans (in general) really do eat, or at least serve, huge amounts of food to this day. I guess the contrast must have been all the greater in the postwar era when Enid was writing The Queen Elizabeth Family, when Britain was still on rationing while America was far more prosperous. But certainly one of the main things that struck me when I visited the US a few years ago was the incredible size of the food portions, wherever I bought a meal. Early on, I ordered a "small" roast beef sub at a sandwich bar, expecting it to be a six-inch baguette like at Subway. It was a footlong - and packed to bursting with piled-up slices of meat!! What their "large" size must have been like, I shudder to think.

[Chrissie777]

You are absolutely right!
On my first trip to the US in 1988 there were those many all you can eat restaurants and everybody was piling up food and getting second portions as if they were about to encounter WW III and starvation .
When I immigrated to the US 12 years ago, I noticed that, too. The portions are so large that many guests ask the waitress for a so-called doggie bag.
No wonder 60% of all Americans are overweight...
All social activities over here like meeting friends or relatives/in-laws are always combined with going out for dinner. You cannot just meet for 3 hours, have a nice conversation and go home without eating at a restaurant (even in the worst part of the recession I noticed that chain restaurants like the Olive Garden were booked out at 5 p.m. on a Monday night).
It's hard to maintain your weight over here unless you live like a hermit, even as a European.

[Courtenay]

I'm known for normally being able to eat large amounts of food (despite my small size and weight - no, I don't know where the food all goes), but I simply could not stomach the portion sizes in America. They went way beyond even what my Polish relatives (all good eaters) would consider reasonable. Another memorable incident was ordering a "chopped steak" (read: oversized burger patty), which came with an absolute mountain of mashed potatoes and butter-and-cream-enriched mushrooms... I fitted it all in somehow, but then someone invited me out for dinner later, and it was all I could do to eat a bowl of soup, out of politeness rather than desire!

By the way, Sarah, I appreciated your description of Kit Armstrong - I'll soon be reading The Boy Next Door for the first time, not knowing much about it, and he sounds like a very intriguing and appealing character to get to know. No spoilers, please!

[Chrissie777]

By the way, Sarah, I appreciated your description of Kit Armstrong - I'll soon be reading The Boy Next Door for the first time, not knowing much about it, and he sounds like a very intriguing and appealing character to get to know. No spoilers, please!

What a co-incidence! My husband is just sitting at his computer creating a cover for "The Boy Next Door" which I bought in Alton on the day before the EB get together at the Spade Oak & Old Thatch in May. He's a bit frustrated, because there is only the front cover of the later reprint (with the boy in the Indian clothes outfit which I actually like much better than the original old cover from 1944), but that has no backside of the dust wrapper. So I convinced him to just combine it with the backside from the original cover. That's good enough for me. He's such a perfectionist .

I plan to read it later when I'll be finished with the Secret Seven series. Just like you I've never read it before. The story sounds great!

[Ming]

Not sure about the war/post-war events influencing Enid's decision to make Mr. Hemming an American. She would have needed the character to be very rich and to not be British, so American seems the natural choice.

I'm not sure why that would be the natural choice, though? Wouldn't other nationalities, such as Canadians, or maybe the French, be just as rich as Americans? I'm thinking of the many times in Agatha Christie novels where children are sent to relatives in Canada to start over, which makes me think that there would be a huge number of British expats in Canada too.

Finniston Farm was first published in 1960, and it was the in 40s that the Great Depression ended. I am aware that WWII played a huge part in recovering USA from the Depression but this was just 20 years after the Depression. I might be wrong (and I probably am) but it does seem like during that time there wouldn't be very many extremely wealthy Americans about.

Thoughts?

[Chrissie777]

Finniston Farm was first published in 1960, and it was the in 40s that the Great Depression ended. I am aware that WWII played a huge part in recovering USA from the Depression but this was just 20 years after the Depression. I might be wrong (and I probably am) but it does seem like during that time there wouldn't be very many extremely wealthy Americans about.
Thoughts?

Well, I got the opposite impression when I was reading books on Americans in the early 60's. Taking 4 or 6 weeks off in the summer for a long European vacation was something that many Americans did (today they cannot get off more than 2 1/2 weeks for a trip the most), especially in the 50's and 60's. There are several novels and movies out there.
Americans were certainly wealthier than Germans, British or French people after WW II. It took a while for Europe to recover from the war whereas WW II improved the US economy.