We read this in January/February of 2025 so I am slowly starting to catch up!

A very anxious read

I’m not sure if this book has the most peril in it, but the peril was almost too perilous at times. (Bonus points if you get the reference.)

I think that there is a lot of peril in this book, and it’s all crammed into thirty or so pages with one disaster after another.

It started with Jack getting lost in the mist, and he was worried he’d be set upon by the robbers. Then he was worried that Jack would get into trouble for following Ranni and Pilescu out that night.

We got a big Oh no oh no!  when the statue split open, and he did not want the boys to go down after Ranni and Pilescu, he was adamant that they would get caught.

Then there was the robbers at the platform where the boys had stopped for a nice sleep, though this at least had a moment of comfort for both them and the reader – That was good that they found food. It wouldn’t be a good adventure if they were hungry.

Then the escape down the river, the escape back up the river (and another nap punctuated by the arrival of the robbers), Ranni and Pilescu are caught again, and then the whole collapsing roof/flooding cave situation. He was on tenterhooks, clinging to my arm the whole time.

Things I could and couldn’t change

Maybe it was because of all the peril but the girls are really short-changed in this book.

Everything a boy could want was there – in Paul’s playroom which had an electric train sat and huge meccano set. As proven by the Secret Seven, girls can and do enjoy train sets too, so I said child instead of boy.

“It couldn’t have been, of course—because where there is smoke, there is a fire, and where there is a fire, there are men! And there are no men down in the Secret Forest!” People. Women can – and do – light fires. How do you think they do the cooking??

“Funny boy, isn’t he!” whispered Mike to Jack. “So awfully brave, and yet he cries like a girl sometimes.” Got skipped entirely

It was beyond the women’s strength to move them, of course. It was harder to change this so I just left off the of course.

The three boys move them, with the small amount of help Ranni and Pilescu can offer from inside the pit. Are we really suggesting that two or more women – women who live in a forest and presumably lug water, firewood and live in an environment with absolutely no modern conveniences – aren’t as strong as three boys?

Unfortunately there was nothing I could do about the fact that the girls are absent from about 40% of the book, apart from point out how unfair it was.

They are there until page 74 (the end of chapter 10), though the last time they are mentioned by name is on p69 and then they’re not present again until the boys “tell the girls” something on p74. They appear briefly on pages 105-108 in chapter 16 (safely at the castle and talking about the weather) and then we don’t see them again until page 131, the beginning of chapter 20, titled The End of the Adventure.

The highs and the lows

He was disappointed that Baronia is still not a real place – I think he asked that at some point in every book.

He was disappointed they were leaving the big fancy palace until I said that they couldn’t have an adventure in a place like that.

He insisted people could just climb down the other side of the mountains(s) into the Secret Forest.

He predicted the evil stone men were statues.

He, rather condescendingly told Ranni and Pilescu that the river water was deeper because of the RAIN!! (Ranni and Pilescu hardly cover themselves in glory in this book, getting captured twice and being very slow to understand heavy rain = bigger river.)