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!)

I think the youngest sister was called Shirley.
I loved this book too, and Shadow the Sheepdog ( mentioned by an earlier poster).

Shadow the Sheepdog.
The Boy Next Door.
Mallory Towers.
The adventure series.

Fine. Not sure what point you’re making, though!
@CurlewKate

Eh? I’m not making any point - merely answering in agreement with your answer and commenting that my parents allowed me to read EB.
It wasn’t meant as a criticism of your parents not permitting them - loads of parents didn’t allow them.

I have just seen "Ballet Shoes" at the National Theatre, and it is perfect. The play has a happy ending, but I was still sobbing like a baby - just the nostalgia. There were a lot of red-eyed middle aged women in the audience. Wonderful book!

Yes it was great. I liked White Boots, too.

I tried out ice-skating recently, taking White Boots and Lalla as my inspiration, and it was a massive, humiliating disappointment. Sob.

I saw the trailer for TMFT in the cinema on Thursday.

I'll be honest, the trailer filled me with disgust.

It's wrong. It's so so wrong.

TMFT should not be made into a film imo. It needs to remain as those lovely line drawings and a child's imagination conjuring up all those lands at the top.

I'm sure that was one of the Faraway Tree books. Trolls are digging for jewels under the tree but their pick axes harm the roots and the tree starts to wilt. The tree folk enlarge some goat moth caterpillars and send them to the bottom of the slippery slip to burrow through the wood and surprise the trolls.

Can you tell I read my copies as a kid until they fell to bits?

I was a voracious reader as a child, I think I must have read all the Enid Blyton books of every description, the 'Jill' pony books, all the various Pullein Thompson books, the What Katie Did series, the Narnia series, My Friend Flicka series, another pony series set in USA with a girl who had a black stallion called the Wild One etc etc etc. I also absolutely loved Alice in Wonderland and according to my older sister when I was very young I loved the Beatrix Potter books, but I don't actually remember that. I do remember a very old picture book from when I was very young called 'Little Kanga's Pocket' which was my absolute favourite at the time and which you can still buy an original copy online for an astronomical amount!

Slightly off -topic but also on the subject of school story books, I found two lovely old ones in a charity shop today: Patsey at School and Rachel Changes Schools.
Given to Vera Brough by her Sunday school in 1957. I bought them both so they could stay together (I am sometimes sentimental).

I read it in the 80s and didn't work out what it meant. I thought it was a made up enemy.
Otoh ds who read it when he was about 6yo immediately worked it out. He was very interested in WWII and especially planes though.

Nobody’s mentioned Antonia Forest or Monica Edwards yet!

Monica Edwards, Wish For A Pony! Tamsin and Rita and a pony called Cancara.

And Malcolm Saville, Gwendoline Courtney, Violet Needham...

They all deserve different threads. No need to derail this one. I can talk about any of them in detail. 😁

There is this bit of a tree in our local woods and me and DD always think it looks a bit like the end of the slippery slip.

EB was my favourite growing up and read and reread Faraway Tree, Wishing Chair, Malory Towers ( midnight feasts and swimming in the rock pool) @and the rest so many times. I was obsessed and wished I could join ss club( I tried to have my own club but none of my friends were as willing. The ss taught me to pick a lock string and paper method. Dame Washalot, The Saucepan Man I so wanted a real tree / chair to go to
Will the film live up to our imaginations as children I doubt it

Me and my sisters always wanted to have a midnight feast, but we could never manage to save any food, or stay awake/ wake up at midnight!

Cascade!

That's it!

My all time favourite series of books, closely followed by The chronicles of Narnia.
I'm very excited to see the characters brought to life with a great cast. Yes, it may not meet up to my 5 year old imagination from back then, but I'm still excited.

I think she’s flat. I mean, there are lot of other flat characters too. (It’s pretty standard for EB. The Famous Five are all flat characters who don’t change over the 25 books or however many.) In Malory Towers I’d include characters like Irene (maths and music genius, absent minded) and Belinda (art genius, absent-minded) and Sally (loyal, ‘solid’ sidekick, after she’s reformed in the first book from her jealousy of her baby sister).

It’s more noticeable in Gwen because she’s the only unreformed antagonist. None of Blyton’s sympathy for other problem girls, even those who cheat and steal, is extended to Gwen.

Antagonists mean drama for the protagonist. EB clearly needed her for dramatic purposes, to be an anti-Darrell, to show that even MT had its limitations. But it means she is never given the chance to reform.

Loved the Famous 5! Mum would buy me a book rather than waste money on an expensive comic that only lasted me an hour. Being an only child, books were a favourite way of passing time.

I loved many many EBs. I think I started on Famous 5s, (we didn’t get TMFT until younger DSibs arrived), but also the Secret 7, 5 Find Outers, St Clare’s and Mallory Towers, and the …Of Adventure series (not all of those but a few, including the Sea and the Mountain).

I was at the library every week and the bookshop as often as I had money. (I also loved Laura Ingalls Wilder, Noel Straetfield, Chalet Girls when I found them…etc).

Love TMFT and hope they dont fuck it up. Loved Mallory Towers when I got a bit older.

I still have Binkle and Flip. Love reading about those naughty bunnies.