Children's books (was Inside, Outside, Near Lane, Far Lane, whatever...)

[Mary Ann Jennings]

Carol wrote:

>>>Of course, it was even better when I discovered real books like the Bobbsey Twins stories and could leave Dick, Jane, Spot, Puff, and little Sally to run and play by themselves!<<<

Mary Ann:

I never read the Dick and Jane books (I attended first grade in Montreal in 1974) but I had an awful lot of Bobbsey Twins books.  As much as I enjoyed these books it bothered me immensely that the kids never aged and that they started the same grades over and over and over again.  Nancy Drew bugged me for the same reason.  In fact, the first book series I read where the kids actually aged was The Famous Five.  Guess I was a stickler for realism (or just plain ol' anal retentive) from an early age.

As a Canadian, The Famous Five were great fun to read as the English was so bizarre to 9-year-old me.  "Oh, do let's!" and Dick calling Julian "a brick" would leave me in stitches.  I'd have to wait almost 20 years before I found out what ginger beer actually was.  While I could figure out most unknown words and phrases through the context of the sentence the term that puzzled me for a long time was "torch", as in the kids lighting a torch to explore the cave.  I couldn't figure out why on earth these kids were walking around with medieval-type burning stick-things when flashlights would be so much easier to use.  Yep, sometimes I'm a bit slow on the uptake. :D

Mary Ann, who's lived in the UK's West Country for years and speaks and understands fluent Hagrid