modern-day Swallows and Amazons?

[vesela]

Does anyone have any recommendations for well-written modern-day books (OK, not necessarily that new!) that are similar to Swallows and Amazons in style? I'm looking for a birthday present for my nephew - he's 7 but a good reader.

He loves Swallows and Amazons etc. - so do I. He also has a fair number of historical novels, but I can't remember which ones he already has.

I'm less keen on giving him fantasy, maybe because there's so much of it about and I'd rather seek out something different. It doesn't have to be all-adventure, but the same sort of low-key realism would be good.

Thank you!

[FiveGoMadInDorset]

Biggles?

[neversaydie]

The House in Hiding by Elinor Lyon - she wrote them in reaction to the 'perfection' of S&A so the children fall in, burn down a bothy and generally create chaos. It was originally published in the early 1950's, but the first three of the series have been republished by Fidra
The House in Hiding

[vesela]

neversaydie - I saw The House in Hiding recommended on another thread (maybe by you!). I thought it looked good (especially since we go sailing off the west coast of Scotland). It's good that they've been republished.

(Funnily, though, I don't think of the children in S&A as being perfect. Maybe that's because I was reading the beginning of Swallowdale again recently...)

I was also wondering if anything similar had come out in the last couple of decades or so. Whenever I look at the bookshelves for that age group and up it seems to be all fantasy/weird schools etc. What sort of things are there now along the lines of The Midnight Fox, that sort of thing?

[Takver]

One of my friends is a children's author, and I've had this discussion with her re. finding low key and realistic books ( - where is the modern day Milly Molly Mandy, or One End Street). Her answer was that the publishers don't want quiet realism, because they think that it doesn't sell, and she's always asked to add excitement and dramatic event to her novels (which are for relatively young children).

The other issue IMO is that they are assuming relatively low reading ability for a given age of child - so a lot of modern books aimed at a 5 - 6 yo in terms of content would be something that my dd would have read in about 15 minutes. Fortunately as she gets older that becomes less of a problem.

[JeffVadar]

Not exactly S&W, but have you seen the Michelle Paver Chronicles of Ancient Darkness. The first one is Wolf Brother. They are set in prehistoric times so there is lots of stuff about making arrows and camps etc. but with exciting stories too.

I thoroughl recommend them and have read them all myself!

[vesela]

Sorry, I forgot to check back here!

Takver, that is very interesting. (One End Street! I'd forgotten about them). Personally as a child I used to thrive on that sort of thing because a lot of it DID seem exciting to me. I mean, when you're little and you read about Milly Molly Mandy going on a picnic by herself with a friend, that's exciting, right?

JeffVadar, those look good - possibly he'd appreciate them more when he's a bit older?

In the end I chose The Minnow on the Say (Philippa Pearce) and The Midnight Fox - pretty classic but I don't think he's read them yet.

[cory]

Takver's post is very interesting and bears out what I've been thinking for a long time about modern children's books. It's either very fantasy, type Harry Potter, or it's books like Jacqueline Wilson which are realistic on the surface but which base a lot of their appeal on the fact that they do not depict the kind of life that's going to be typical for most of their readers. (if you were living a Jacqueline Wilson life you probably wouldn't be buying all that many books). What you don't seem to get is stories that start in the ordinary dull everyday life of most readers and take it from there.

Part of it I think is that children are not expected to be very patient these days. If you read the older classics, they can spend chapters building up the very ordinary background of their perfectly ordinary protagonists before anything out-of-the-ordinary actually starts happening. Rare to find an author/publisher with that much confidence in the reader these days.

And as Takver says, the low assumed reading ability means you end up with fairly adult contents before you actually get to any sort of complexity of style or composition.