The Adventurous Girl’s Handbook

Stephen Brennan's The Adventurous Girl's Handbook is a practical how-to book for 11 year olds, collected from much older manuals and packed with things to actually go and do.

What happens

It isn't a book you read from the front. It's one you open at whatever takes your fancy this afternoon.

The crafts half covers modelling a head in clay, hand stitches, drawing, watercolours, beadwork on a loom and pressing flowers. There's a proper run of knots with pictures, from the overhand and the figure of eight up to the bowline, the sheepshank and the clove hitch, and a note on why a rope needs whipping at the ends.

The sports half is bolder. How to learn to swim, how to breathe and balance in the water, how to rescue somebody, how to get out of a grip if they grab you. There's rappelling down a cliff face on a doubled rope. There's paddling a canoe, with the useful detail that the paddle should reach from the ground to the tip of your nose.

Now, one large caveat. Almost all of this is reprinted from books written a very long time ago, and it shows. The first-aid section teaches an old method of artificial respiration that is nothing like what a first-aider is taught today, so nobody should be learning rescue breathing from these pages. There are dated turns of phrase about girls and boys and about Native Americans. And the skills at the riskier end, rappelling in particular, are not things a child should try alone, which the book does say but rather quietly.

Would a child spot which pages are still good advice and which aren't? Probably not. Read alongside a grown-up, none of it spoils the book. Read alone, some of it could mislead.

What it does have is a lovely seriousness. Nobody is being encouraged or congratulated. It simply assumes you can learn to tie a proper knot and get on with it, which for the right child is far more flattering than being told she's amazing.

What to read next

If your reader likes the sound of that but would rather have it in today's voice, The Daring Book for Girls is in the library. Same spirit, same practical bent, starting with a list of essential gear that begins with a penknife and a bandana.