Milly-Molly-Mandy’s Autumn

Milly-Molly-Mandy's Autumn by Joyce Lankester Brisley is a cosy collection of village stories for 5 year olds, full of bonfire smoke, harvest and one very surprising plant.

What happens

Milly-Molly-Mandy lives in the nice white cottage with the thatched roof. She shares it with Father and Mother and Grandpa and Grandma and Uncle and Aunty (and they nearly always get named in exactly that order!).

Each story starts "Once upon a time" and is finished before the light goes out. So you can read one at bedtime and stop there.

In the first, Mr Rudge the Blacksmith gives her a mystery seedling for her little garden. It spreads right over her radishes. Is it a marrow? Mother thinks so, Grandpa says no, and the guessing is half the fun.

Then there's a dinner cooked on Father's bonfire with little-friend-Susan and Billy Blunt. Potatoes baked in the ashes, a smoky stew and a sausage that catches fire. Only the day before, none of them liked stew (funny how that changes).

She's a bridesmaid when Mr Rudge gets married. Billy Blunt's bulging pockets save the day when the village tries to fire the anvil. On bonfire night the guy has a surprise of its own. And when a gale tears the thatch off above her bedroom, she helps Father and Uncle patch it up.

It reads aloud beautifully. The sentences roll on, and the same people come round again and again, so a young listener soon knows the whole village. The narrator chats to you in brackets too, and even asks "how many's that?" when the radishes get counted out.

Nothing much happens, and that's the charm of it. The biggest worry in the wedding story is whether the bang will ever go off.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

These are very old stories, and it shows. The children cook on a bonfire with no grown-up watching, and the wedding ends with gunpowder in the anvil. Father calls their bonfire meal "gipsy cooking", an old word for Gypsy and Traveller people that many families now find hurtful.

There's also a church harvest service where Mother talks about thanking God. If any of that needs a chat, reading together makes it easy. If your reader loves slow stories about real small things, like jam-making and a muddy nose, they'll probably settle right in.

What to read next

If bonfire night was a hit, Milly-Molly-Mandy's Winter carries on into the dark evenings, with carol-singing in the forge and a secret present stitched together from scraps.