Shelf Control #273: The Growing Summer by Noel Streatfield

Wednesday, the 27th of March 2024, and time for Shelf Control once again! Shelf Control is a weekly feature created by Lisa at Bookshelf Fantasies, and celebrates the books waiting to be read on your TBR piles/mountains. Since early January 2023, Shelf Control has moved base here to Literary Potpourri. To participate, all you do is pick a book from your TBR pile, and write a post about it–what it’s about, when/where you got it, why you want to read it and such. If you participate, don’t forget to share your links in the comments. I’ll check out your picks of course, and also add you to the list of participants in this post.

Today’s post features an author who appeared not many weeks ago on Shelf Control but another of her books found it’s way on to mount TBR amidst my birthday books. Sussex-born Mary Noel Streatfield is best known for what have come to be called the ‘shoes books’, for having successfully published Ballet Shoes in 1936, her American publishers re-titled several subsequent books working in ‘Shoes’ to appeal to buyers (honestly, such tactics never make sense to me).

The book I’m featuring though, is not one of these. Instead, it is another children’s novel from 1966, The Growing Summer also published as The Magic Summer (and not Summer Shoes :D). In this one, the four Gareth children. Alex, Penny, Naomi and Robin are packed off to the home of their Great Aunt Dymphna in Ireland when their father falls ill abroad and their mother must go to him. But while this starts off typically, their stay with Great Aunt Dymphna is far from the usual–she lives in a ramshackle house of which they are to have a whole wing; ‘flits about like a bat’, ‘quotes swathes of poetry’ and expects the four to fend for themselves. There are tears and mishaps, but living with Dymphna, they learn something new each day, the whole visit becoming a great adventure.

While this book has the customary children’s book strategy/structure to conveniently send away parents so that the children can be unsupervised, I do like the idea of the children having to look after themselves in an every-day scenario (as opposed to being lost on an island or battling/escaping ‘villains’ as is the case in say, Enid Blyton’s mysteries). The setting in Ireland is also appealing (an makes me wonder if I can fit it in with Irish reading month next year). My copy is a Puffin ed (206 pp) with illustrations by Edward Ardizzone.

Have you read this one? Would you like to?

In case you’re joining in with Shelf Control this week, do leave your links in the comments so I can add you to the participants list in this post.

The cover image is from Goodreads