The Key To Flambards by Linda Newbery, reviewed by Pippa Goodhart

       

     As a teenager a long time ago I fell in love with big scruffy handsome house Flambards, young Christina sent there to a household of men when her parents died, the two very different boy cousins, Will and Mark, and sweet Dick the stable boy back in the years before and including the First World War. Those of us who read, and still read, ‘Flambards’, ‘The Edge of the Cloud’, ‘Flambards in Summer’ and ‘Flambards Divided’ live Christina’s love of horses and riding, and her love in turn for those three young men. I was most in love with Dick who smelled of hay when he comforted Christina after her pony was sent away! 

            And now we are lucky enough to be offered more Flambards grit and romance to enjoy. Set in 2018, ‘The Key To Flambards’ is the story of Christina’s great great granddaughter Grace, visiting Flambards for a summer after her own life was changed by parental divorce and a devastating accident in which she lost a leg. Much happens in those summer weeks, so that Grace will look back and think, ‘.. the Me of Then was a person she no longer quite recognized. That Grace was a child, more than a year younger. She had never been To Flambards, never met Marcus or Jamie or Roger, Sally or Adrian or Skye; had never ridden a pony, watched otters or bats or listened to owls. She had never fallen in love with a place and its ghosts; had never seen a an drive himself to the brink of suicide, pulled back to live again. She felt quite dizzy with the swirl of experience.’

            In this Flambards story Linda Newbery brilliantly follows in the writerly style established in the first books by Kathy Peyton. As you can see from the cover, this is a handsome book, and its printed on thick creamy paper. It gives a family tree at the start. And there is an Afterword by Kathy Peyton herself. The story in between the two covers lives effected by two world wars and war in Afghansitan, we experience love of different kinds, bravery and lives reinvented, all amongst a cast with some clear echoes of those earlier Flambards characters from whom many of them descend. 

            An absolute treat, especially for those familiar with those earlier books and who want more. Something to ask for for Christmas, perhaps?!

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No Going Back by Alex Gutteridge, reviewed by Pippa Goodhart

   

 Alex Gutteridge is brilliant at writing stories that feel light and easy to read, and yet carry a depth of wise consideration of life and love and loss and families and friends that keeps you thinking about the story long after the reading of it has finished. 

It took me a long time to become a real reader as a child.  I struggled with learning to read, so didn't see it as something to do by choice for fun for a long time.  My breakthrough book was 'Flambards' by K M Peyton, and I mention that because it was the same qualities of light first romance in a novel, together with moral dilemmas for characters I cared about, that I recognise in Alex Gutteridge's 'No Going Back' and her earlier 'Last Chance Angel'.  I think this will be a book that entices reluctant young (mostly female) readers of about twelve to fourteen into reading a story that will move them to laugh, cry and think. 

Described as 'contemporary paranormal', this is the story of fourteen year old Laura who has had to leave the London home she and her mum have shared since the accidental death of her father ten years before.  Now they must move to Derbyshire to live with ailing grumpy Gran.  But they aren't the only ones to move into Gran's house.  Suddenly the ghost of Dad is there too, well meaning but annoying in just the way that all dads are to their teenage offspring!  There are secrets from the past to be revealed, family misunderstandings to be sorted, and a kitten and boy to be flirted with and finally won. 

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Minna's Quest by K. M Peyton, reviewed by Pippa Goodhart

I began reading this book in some trepidation. Kathleen Peyton is a hero of mine. When I was eleven, and rather lost and lonely in a very big school where everybody seemed to know what they were doing except me, I was embarrassed when my Mum volunteered to run the school book stall (remember them? Whatever happened to that brilliant initiative?). On the advice of the other mother manning the stall, my mother bought me 'Flambards', even though I'd said that I really didn't want any book.

But of course I loved 'Flambards', and I still do. How could I not love a book that combined a romantic gritty historical tale of being orphaned and discovering horses, and falling in love, all in an accessible, but seemingly grown-up, read? I read that book, and read it again, and read all the others in the Flmabards series. And then I looked for other books by other people, and I became a 'proper' reader.

I read lots more K M Peyton books as a young adult, and later as a bookseller,and as a mother recommending them to my own daughters. KM Peyton has written an amazing book a year since she was fifteen; sixty in all! But I hadn't read any of this latest series, set in Roman Britain ... until now.

'Minna's Quest' has been a delight to read. It has all the hallmark K M Peyton attributes, chiefly a wonderfully romantic adventurous tale, set in an historical past that is lightly brought to life, and set in a vividly portrayed landscape. I know for sure that my adolescent self would have loved this book just as much as I loved 'Flambards'.

This story opens with a newly born foal abandoned on a beach on the Essex Marshes, and somehow eleven-year-old Minna must save the foal before the incoming tide drowns it.

Minna herself is the classic Peyton 'firebrand' of a girl; able and brave. There's handsome Theodosius Valerian Aquila, leader and fighter with a soft spot for socially inferior Minna. Of course they will come together as the trilogy progresses!

But there's bloody life-or-death action involving pirates as well as the tingles of romance and adoration of horses in this story. There is suspense and excitment of the kind that made me read the book in one sitting.

And there is interest too in the depiction of the dying days of Roman Britain with its mix of races and religions finding echoes in Britain today.

I nearly always find photgraphic covers showing real people hard to relate to stories because I want to create my own images of the people, or 'become' them myself, and that is somehow easier with an artistic representation. This cover shows a young woman who is decidedly older than eleven or twelve, presumably because the same model poses for the later books in which Minna becomes older. But I did so love the Victor Ambrus illustrations of those K M Peyton books I still have from my own childhood. So perhaps I'm just being sentimental?!

But I highly recommend this book. Thank you yet again, Kathleen Peyton!

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