Who grew up reading Enid Blyton books?

[OldFred]

Just seen that The Magic Faraway Tree movie is to be released in the UK on 27 March 2026 🙂

I will hold judgement until I've seen it on it compares to the books but as a child, I devoured EB books.
I loved them all but TMFT holds a special place in my heart so fingers crossed!

I know EB books rightly so have had their fair share of criticism but (immigrant) childhood me just took them at face value, and as an adult and parent, my enduring love for them remains.
The Mini Old Freds have inherited all my copies and love them too.

What are your favourite EB books?
(Hoping to come across some I've not heard of!)

The Magic Faraway Tree https://share.google/9k1Ssa6iszdZUv586

Oh I loved them and am enjoying reading them to DD. Noddy was a favourite, Magic Faraway Tree for sure, Famous Five and Secret Seven! I remember my parents taking me and my brother to Barcelona for Easter and the only thing I did the whole trip was read my new Secret Seven anthology.

Ohhh I loved the EB books, had lots of them, my favourites were the Amelia Jane stories

Beth, Joe & Fran.

I can understand why they’d stick an e on the end of Jo & update Fanny’s name but what’s wrong with Bessie?

Me, but never far away tree. So Famous Five, Secret Seven, Mallory Towers. Was St Clare’s also Enid Blyton?

Me - I was sad that my own DD didn’t really ever take to them. I guess the world they depict (which was already defunct but still charmingly old fashioned in the 1980s) is just too unfamiliar now. We always had loads of EB around at home when I was a kid, including the copies that my mum had had in the 50s and 60s. Pretty much everyone read them, though parents did sort of tut and say that they weren’t the greatest writing for children (they still got them for us, though!)

I started on the Brer Rabbit and Amelia Jane books as a four and five year old, then the Wishing Chair and the Faraway Tree around 6, then the mystery books like the Secret Seven, Five Find Outers and the Famous Five at around 7-8; and lastly the Adventure series and all the school stories when I was about 9-10.

Have really enjoyed the recent CBBC Malory Towers series, which despite not being completely faithful to the books, has been charmingly updated and is really watchable with some fantastic young actors! My DD loves it too even though she could never get into the books!

I loved The Faraway Tree!!! & also the magic wishing chair.

Yes! My list is the same as yours. Loved them all.

The magic faraway tree (and the other books in the series) were probably my favourite reads for longer than I should probably admit 😊 and I had heard that a film version was being made.

Unfortunately I am not holding out much hope that it will be very good, as film adaptations of books rarely are any good and the changes that they will no doubt make to the story/characters to modernise them will probably take it too far away from the original for me, but I will see it at some point and have the tiniest glimmer of hope that I wont be too disappointed! 🤞

Yes @PodMom that's the one with the twins in it.

@EmpressaurusKitty My sister and I were just saying we still prefer the original names

I’m sure they will have updated Dame Slap and all the odd slightly dodgy characters!

I adored the Famous Five. Many decades ago one of my best birthday presents ever was Five Go To Smugglers Top - a new FF read!

Dds loved The Magic Faraway Tree.

Loved the magic faraway books and the wishing chair books. Read them to my kids

My entire childhood was a love of Enid Blyton books. I would get a new one every week when I went shopping and would have read it by that evening.

My absolute favourites, Magic Faraway Tree and Naughtiest Girl, then Mallory Towers as I got older.

@catontheironingboard yes I am sure they will. I don't want to get into the debate of whether they should or shouldn't update them, but I do understand that they have to be relateable to younger/newer audiences.

I wasn’t allowed to read Enid Blyton books - my mum forbade it because she didn’t think they were well written.

I will never, ever see the film, despite the fact that the Faraway Tree books weren’t my favourites. I think I read virtually everything EB wrote down to her retelling of Greek myths and Pilgrim’s Progress. I think my favourites were the school stories, the ‘Secret’ series (Peggy, Mike, Nora and Jack) and the ‘Adventure’ series (Jack, LucyAnn, Dinah, Philip and Kiki the parrot). My first literary crush was on Bill Smugs.

Oh, and Six Cousins at Mistletoe farm and its sequel.

Me, I loved them! Famous five for me and secret seven.

I loved Famous Five and the Naughtiest Girl books, feel the need to read the latter again now!

They’re spectacularly badly-written, but their repetitiveness, limited vocabulary, stock emotions and dire ideas about gender and race in no way detract from their appeal!

Yes l was a late 60s child, loved magic faraway tree and the wishing chair, secret seven and famous five.
I

Me, loved them, liked the ones already mentioned and Shadow the Sheepdog and the circus ones too.

Loved them when I was a kid but tried them with my own kids and it was a disaster. They were bored and mystified while I was aghast at how badly written they were, how annoying and mean minded all the kids were, always telling each other "serves you right", and how outright weird a lot of the other characters were, Sir Slapalot & co, an assortment of dungeon masters and perverts, most of them wouldn't have looked out of place in The Shining.

Naughtiest girl! I loved those too.

Thinking back, my absolute favourite were the Cherry Tree Farm ones. I used to fantasise about also having to go and live on a farm in the country (and maybe even live in an outdoor shelter made from a willow tree with a bed made of moss…) They were surprisingly informative about animals and birds, but the premise of small children hanging out alone in the outdoors with a mysterious elderly unhoused gent who just wants to charm bunnies with a reed flute, and teach the kids all about Nature, probably doesn’t quite make it into the modern safeguarding era 😆