The Castle of Adventure

Enid Blyton's The Castle of Adventure is a holiday mystery for 9 year olds about a ruined castle that nobody will go near.

What happens

Four children and a parrot arrive at Spring Cottage for the holidays. Thatched roof, little leaded windows, tucked away in the trees halfway up a hill.

Right on top of that hill is a castle. Two towers, thick walls, slit windows and some wide ones that look a bit wrong. Nobody lives there. Nobody even seems to know who owns it.

Dinah asks her mother whether something horrid happened there once. Her mother thinks so, but doesn't know what. She does know the road up has gone in a landslide, and that part of the castle is supposed to be ready to slide down the hill. So the children are not to go up.

You can guess roughly how long that instruction lasts.

Then lights start flashing in one of the towers.

The four of them are very good company. Lucy-Ann is the shy one, red-haired and freckled and easily worried. Dinah is twelve and takes nonsense from nobody, yet she squeals at a spider. Her brother Philip is wonderful with animals and an absolute pest about it, sticking earwigs under her pillow and beetles in her shoes. Jack thinks about birds more than he thinks about anything else.

Then there's Kiki, who is worth the price of admission on her own. She's a parrot who screeches like an express train going into a tunnel. She tells the headmaster not to sniff and orders Jack's form-master to wipe his feet. She got herself banned from school for it.

There's a quiet sadness running underneath all the fun. Jack and Lucy-Ann have no mother or father, and before this they lived with a cross old uncle. Nobody in the book makes a drama of it. It just surfaces in small moments, like Lucy-Ann thinking for the hundredth time how lucky Dinah is to have a mother of her own, and feeling grateful to be allowed to share her. Most readers will take that as a warm thread rather than a sad one. If that's a tender spot in your house, it's better to know it's there.

This isn't the first book about these four. They spend part of the opening chapter remembering an earlier holiday on the Island of Gloom and a shaft going down into the heart of the earth. Your reader loses nothing by starting here. It just means the four turn up already certain that adventures come looking for them.

What to read next

The same four and the same parrot turn up again in The Valley of Adventure, this time on a night flight in a friend's aeroplane, with two odd pilots and a valley they had no intention of landing in.