How charming the world can be when it gives you books like this, books which sprawl out in front of you like yourself on a too-hot day and demand the world to stop until you have finished them. I have taken too long to get to this series so you should not. Monica Dickens is a joy and this was a lovely, eccentric, vivid thing.

It begins with a displaced family due to circumstances (a phrase, I feel, which characterises some of the best of children’s literature). Their mother is in hospital due to the circumstances and their father is sailing the world for reasons it’s not best to get into. It’s just one of those things. The children end up living with their nearest relatives for a while before providence presents them with a dilapidated house in the country. The relatives are cool with them going off to live in this house in themselves. It’s just one of those things. But it works. It really does. We all just have to be cool with it.

We know Dickens can write horses (I think often of her description of the herd coming in at Follyfoot) but here she proves that she can write people as well. She is soft and loving and sunlight all the way through this. People fight, they argue, they make up, they love each other, they’re a family who will fight for each other until the end of time. Especially against a system which doesn’t actively understand or sympathise with people like them. It’s just about people, this, really, and how you can love them in all their different ways.

Books like this require you to be cool with a lot and kind of accept that this is all part of the process and I’ve found some of them to really not work for me with that (The Children Who Lived in a Barn springs immediately to mind) but this one just did. I think it’s because the agencies of the children differ here (And also that they’re not surrounded by a village of up the revolution types). They’re accepted as capable individuals who just happen to be young people. Even when the system comes calling for them, you know that they will fight it and that they will win because that’s how they roll. You know that when one of them wants a pony desperately, she will get because that’s how they roll. The confidence here makes it work. The belief in the characters makes it sing.

A book for sunlit afternoons, for realising the world and all its potential before you.

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(24th April 2026 edit: hello! it is your author here, letting you know that this website has been redesigned and has a new layout and theme and that. It’s the sort of thing that happens when I’m between contracts so I decided to go for it 😊. I hope that everything is still findable and manageable and you enjoy the new look. It’s a pleasure having you here!)