Last time I ran out of time to finish the review let alone scan any of the illustrations or the map, but hopefully I can put that right this time.

Last time I got a far as the Five having the miserable Roland tagging along after them. It’s at this point that I realise the boy’s name is actually Raymond. I really should have checked before I wrote part one.

Anne’s brainwave

While it’s nice to see Anne having a non-food-preparing moment to shine it’s sort of a shame that she is still relegated to reading people’s feelings to solve part of the mystery. She identifies that there really is someone weird going on with Raymond and his mother.

He’s not missing her – he’s afraid of her. His mother hasn’t been pleased to see them around the dig and that’s because [Spoiler!!] she’s not his mother, she’s an impostor! The real mother is bound and gagged, and her assistant has taken her place so she can loot the dig site in Whispering Wood instead of giving the artefacts to a museum.

I couldn’t help but wonder why she then passed Raymond on to the Kirrins – known for their adventures as they are – and asked him to report back to her if anyone in the village started asking questions. Yes she threatened to hurt his mother if he didn’t do as he was told, and yes he didn’t dare tell them what was really going on but what a risk to take! She’d have been far better tying Raymond up with his mother until they were finished.

Back to the future

As the flashback is only about half the book it’s all resolved pretty quickly. They make one night-time visit to the camp, rescue Raymond’s real mother and then, rather recklessly they change the lights on the cliff so that the baddies’ boat crashes into the rocks and sinks.

Back in the present day it’s clear that Raymond (the man storming out of Kirrin Cottage earlier) is after the treasure that sank with the boat. George has given him the map to find it. It’s still there as young George deliberately misled the police about where the boat went down, to prevent sightseers and treasure hunters swarming the area. I don’t feel that’s something George would do – she’s not a liar and she would recognise the importance of the historical artefacts.

The New Five then get to (briefly) have their adventure as they go up against Raymond to prevent him from stealing the treasure.

My thoughts

This isn’t a bad book. but I think it could have been better. As I said already the two stories are fairly thin as neither is a full book.

George’s ability to recount an adventure in such detail is unrealistic especially when it comes to conversations she wasn’t even present for, and those pages could have been better spent fleshing out the present-day action.

George is not particularly recognisable as a grown-up version of the girl we knew, even if she does still insist on being called George.

If this wasn’t a Famous Five book I’d probably have rated it higher than three stars. There were some nice touches, such as the parallel between the New and Old Famous Five arriving at Kirrin, the New ones ribbing George for the jolly good language (though there was very little of it!), the reference to the Sanders’ Dairy and so on. We briefly get to see Kirrin Island, the secret passage from the study and the passage from the quarry to the island (both of which are never seen or used again in the original books).

It’s also illustrated which seems unusual these days. Shame it’s not Soper-esq but it’s better than nothing.

So yes, not bad, but not great. I read it in an afternoon and at least wasn’t prompted to put it down repeatedly to write great long complaints so that’s something, and I’m intrigued enough by the ending to read the next one!