We read this from the 30th of August to the 19th of September so my memories of conversations are a bit hazier than usual – just one reason why I shouldn’t let myself get so behind on these posts!

Anyway, this one of my lesser favourites from the series and although I’ve always read it along with the others various parts are less familiar to me.

The usual refrains

He knows his Enid Blyton by now, and he knows the Adventure Series well enough to correctly identify that:

• Aunt Allie won’t let them go off alone – because they WILL have an adventure.
• Jack is up to something regarding Kiki
• Kiki would end up on the ship after being seen on the dock
• Kiki would not welcome another pet
• That a sniff of treasure means they’ll end up treasure hunting
• An old piece of parchment is absolutely going to be a treasure map
• That Bill coming definitely means treasure hunting

As always he found Kiki hilarious, especially her fights with Micky. He remarked how useful she is, too, because she always scares off the bad guys.

And again, he asked why they always had to say the book title at some point (when Lucy-Ann says she bought the ship, the Ship of Adventure).

Questions

There are always questions, some insightful, others less so.

• A cruise? How can they have an adventure on a ship??
• A CINEMA on a SHIP??
• At being reminded of Huffin and Puffin How are they? Do you think they’re OK?
• He’s not going to have a MONKEY as a pet, is he?
• [My Eppy] OWNS islands?
• What’s deck tennis? I had to look this up as I wasn’t entirely sure.
• What’s hotfoot?

This was one book where I didn’t have to look up an awful lot of things, or get into great lengthy explanations about anything. Not that I can remember anyway.

My own edits

I’m always a fan of preserving as much of the original texts as possible, while still recognising that sometimes small changes can and should be made for children reading them today.

I feel like I made a lot of changes to this book which I wasn’t expecting.

First up, I dispensed with the steward/stewardess. We don’t (thankfully) call Enid Blyton an authoress or poetess anymore, so I think we can do without stewardess. Apart from one maybe or or two occasions where I had to distinguish between the two stewards by adding “the other” or “the Scottish”, this was a case of simply dropping the ess.

Like with other books I don’t use natives. There are obviously situations where this is used – such as Native American, but the natives smacks of colonialism and sounds very derogatory. I generally replace it with local people or locals. Likewise I don’t see the need to repeatedly describe the local people as brown, dirty or smelly. I also made Andros a bit less obsequious by reducing how often he said sir.

I slightly toned down the way the children treat Lucian, as they are unduly mean to him at times. I also focussed on them being surprised at him crying because he’s 14, not because he’s a boy in particular.

A surprising number of times I ended up saying everyone or children instead of just girls, and similar.

• When Jack demands the girls stand back and watch as he and Philip remove the parchment from the ship I had him say everyone stand back and then they (as in everyone) worked together.
• Jack said he would take out the stitches in his shorts instead of assuming Lucy-Ann would do it.
• Although Philip went with Mrs Mannering he did not sort all her travel details as she’s a competent grown woman who runs her own business and he’s a 14/15 year old boy.
• The girls were capable of going down the spiral stairs without needing the boys to help them.
• Bill warned everyone to be careful, and told Mr Eppy not to touch the children, and the girls were just tied instead of tied less tightly than the boys.
• Perhaps more subtly Dinah was tougher, more like the boys [than Lucy-Ann] instead of like a boy.
• There wasn’t much I could do about Bill having Tim take the girls off the island, but I didn’t have him say I don’t want them exposed to danger here one moment longer than necessary. Instead he suggested all the children go, as he didn’t want them in any more danger, but in the end only the girls went as Lucy-Ann had had enough, and Dinah went with her.

The majority of this was literally changing a word or two here or there to reframe the emphasis or who a statement was aimed at. It did not change the story in any way, and it couldn’t rewrite the gender roles of the time, it just – I hope – reduced the message of boys being braver and girls being weaker.

The voice acting

As always I try to give everyone distinct voices and accents where I can. The Scottish steward was obviously not a challenge, but there were issues elsewhere.

Lucian’s Oh I says were very useful to get me into his frightfully posh sort of accent. The Mannering/Trents could probably be described as pretty posh, but it’s too hard to put that on for long periods given how often the main characters speak! They, instead, are just relatively well-spoken.

It turns out I have no idea how to do a Greek accent. The closest I could get was a bad Spanish so I just didn’t try. Thankfully there are only about three Greek characters to talk and they only have a few lines.

I also can’t really do donkey noises so relied on Alexa for those.

Other things

I’m saving the best until last here, so bear with me as I go through the miscellaneous things that didn’t fit anywhere else.

He loved the idea of camping by a river and looking for otters, and was really quite upset at the thought of Kiki not getting to go on the cruise with them.

He declared that he would be very sea-sick on the ship when they encountered rough seas. So would I, actually.

He seems to understand the stuff about them not telling lies, but he’s right that the children sort of do tell lies. Jack knows that Lucy-Ann bought the ship in a bottle from a fishing cottage on Amulis. Just because he doesn’t know exactly which cottage, doesn’t mean he doesn’t know where it came from.

The book started a brief obsession with ships in bottles. We ended up watching videos later about how they work and for quite a while he talked about really wanting one of his own – you know, the way kids decide that some random thing is the one thing they want more than anything and is suddenly their life-long wish. He forgot about it by Christmas, though! To be fair, I’d rather like one…

He was tremendously relieved when the donkey brought them food, as he absolutely agrees that an adventure without food is not good at all.

And last, but definitely not least… I read the “proposal” scene – can you even call how about it a proposal?

And with a big sigh, he said:

That’s SO romantic!

I think that’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.

And ran off to tell his dad all about it.

Clearly, we are failing in the romance department in this house!