Wednesday the 25th of September–time again for Shelf Control. Shelf Control is a weekly feature hosted by Lisa at Bookshelf Fantasies, and celebrates the books waiting to be read on your TBR piles/mountains. To participate, simply pick a book from your TBR pile and write a post about it. Link back to Lisa’s page, and do also leave your links in the comments below as I’d love to check out your picks.
This time my pick is a book from one of my favourite authors, whose books I’ve loved (and which I occasionally write about on this blog) since I was a child–The Caravan Family by Enid Blyton. This is the first in what is called the ‘Family series’ , which has six books. These feature three children Mike, Belinda, and Ann who go on various adventures–in a Caravan, staying at the seaside or on a farm, aboard a houseboat, and even on cruises. In this one, as the name suggests, it is adventures aboard a caravan. The three children’s father buys not one but two caravans for them to live and travel in. The book was first published as a serial in Playways Magazine between March 1945 and February 1946.
As I said, Enid Blyton (1897–1968) is and has been one of my favourite writers since I was a child. A prolific writer, she published over 700 books (wikipedia lists 762 during her lifetime) and while she essentially wrote children’s fiction, she wrote across a range of genres–mystery, adventure, and detective series like the Five Findouters, the Famous Five, the Adventurous Four, the Secret Seven, the Secret Series, the Adventure Series, the Barney Mysteries; school series, like St Clares, Malory Towers, the Naughtiest Girl; fantasy and magic like the Faraway Tree and Wishing Chair books besides standalones featuring pixies, brownies, goblins, and other fairy and magic folk; farm stories like the Six Cousins, and Willow Farm; circus stories like Galliano’s Circus, and the stories featuring Pip and Susy-ann; nature books like the Animal Book among many many others including short stories, re-tellings, poems, and puzzles.
The family series is not one I really read as a I child, at least not one that is as familiar to me as some of her others, so I’m really looking forward to picking this one and the others in the series up, once I wrap up the final book in my Malory Towers revisits (My post on book 5 of Malory Towers is here).
Have you read this book or any of the others in the series? How do you find these? Which are your favourite Blyton books? Looking forward to your thoughts!
The book is available in public domain via fadedpage.com. Info on the book is from goodreads (here) and the Enid Blyton society (here).
Literary Potpourri 
I spent my childhood reading every Blyton I could get my hands on, and adding to my already large collection. It never mattered if the book was in tatters, as long as it was written by Enid Blyton. Have read and re-read so many that I’ve lost count, but I don’t think that I’ve come across The Caravan Family before.
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Me neither- It’s part of the Saucy Jane, Buttercup Family etc books but I haven’t really read those.
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