The best book for young readers about surviving danger and seeing your dream come true

Peter is on his way home from school and discovers a crooked laneway. Soon he looks through the bay window of a junk shop and is ‘drawn’ towards one item inside: a little ship. There is a strange conversation between Peter and the owner of the shop who says, "All the money in the world wouldn’t have bought this ship once [...]. It would cost all the money you have in the world and a bit over!" The man in the shop sells it to Peter.

Along the beach on the way home the ship turns into a real ship with sails. The book is not only about the many adventures with his brothers and sisters involving time travel to many lands but has an overarching plot that one day Peter will have to return the ship where he bought it. Only then will he discover about the ship and what has happened. The closing chapter is as stirring as all the other episodes when Peter has grown into a young man, returning the ship along the crooked laneway to the very same shop and the same owner.

In being faithful to the ‘first’ books I ever read The Ship That Flew and The Adventures of Henry Penn. Henry Penn is a Penguin and daydreamer. He wants to be a poet. Some of the story involves his creative life writing/reciting from his ‘secret’ little book the “Lays of Ancient Penland.” The close of the story recounts an episode after the Kipper War when there is a celebration concert and Henry performs his first poem!

The town’s people (Penguins) dominate the story. The Kipper War (is a funny episode) against the Pirates to recover the stolen hoard of fish belonging to the Penguins. Important in all of the books chosen are the illustrations, for instance, the illustration of Henry in school at the back of the class ‘caught’ by the teacher staring out the high windows.

Lang’s story telling is compelling opening up for the reader the timeless characters of Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel & Gretel, Jack the Giant Killer, Jonathan Swift’s “A Voyage to Lilliput” from Gulliver’s Travels, Aladdin, Sleeping Beauty, Rumpelstilzkin, Why the Sea is Salt, Goldilocks, Blue Beard, Snow White and many others. 

My sister and brother (older than I) used to read aloud from, not only The Blue Fairy Book but the Red Book and the Green Book. These stories were the first I’d heard, and were so real I believed the characters would be present in my life. Grimm’s Tales ‘told’ by Lang becomes an exciting guidebook for a young person growing up. This aspect was ‘proven’ to me by the co-existence of these characters as archetypes in terms of life events and situations. My conviction is that the storyline, characters, and the progression of events in fiction fully engage and fully reward the experience of reading.

I began to read this book in childhood because it was in our house (sent as a present from an Aunt living in America) and it intrigued me by the title and the illustrations of buffalos, coyotes, bears, the landscape, rivers, canyons, and the covered wagons in a circle with people and their belongings, bedding down by campfires under the starry skies […] The episodes easily captured my attention. Parkman is documenting the first settlers crossing the Mid-West Plains towards the Rockies. This is really ‘a page turner’ and classic of travelogue adventure, even though I had never heard the genre term ‘travelogue’ on first reading. It also reads like a fantasy and provides the reader who has never been to the United States with a longing to go there. Books are parallel to life and in this case for me, I did reach the Origen Trail, walked some of the tracks left by the covered wagons from the era when Parkman made his journeys, saw buffalos, travelled in a covered wagon at the State Fair, and otherwise worked in Idaho and the Pacific North West.   

I read Stevenson’s A Childhood Garden of Verses and then Kidnapped the novel which I enjoyed far more than Treasure Island. In Kidnapped the hero David Balfour is beset by challenges that ‘doubles’ his adventures. Kidnapped is more intensely engaging because instead of imagining yourself part of a group, you ‘become’ David Balfour alone beyond mere suspense into elements of horror and which he survives. It was my first experience with a Gothic novel. This is the sort of book where you forget everything and are transported within David Balfour’s journeys by land and sea.

What I still remember is the compelling nature of the narrative: how his Uncle plans to destroy him, how he loses his inheritance, how he is captured and thrown into the hold of a ship, how he lives as an innocent fugitive, and as a warrior fighting for his life. Stevenson’s method is the passionate prose that is present in the opening chapter when Balfour arrives at his Uncle’s house and is deceived by the hospitality and the welcome which proves to be false and full of danger. Stevenson’s vigorous style is intoxicating, each sentence enlivens the action; the pace of the book, the events, and happenings to the hero are so real in the mirage created by the language and storytelling. The mirage comes to life.