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!)

You are correct, she is now Dame Snap.

Surprised that the Angry Pixie is still allowed to be Angry 😁

Grew up reading EB books (and having them read to us).
The Find Outers, the Barney mysteries and of course Famous Five.
Never really took to the Secret Seven.
Most were the original (as written) books but I had a few updated ones (late 70's) where the pictures were more contemporary and money was now decimal, these did not seem right so I sought older copies of the same books to keep that "past times" feeling.

I loved Malory Towers. My fave scene was where Mary Lou goes out in the rain to post a parcel for one of the other girls, think she was called Daphne or Deirdre or something. And the parcel actually contains stolen goods that Daphne has pickpocketed from other girls! And then Mary Lou is blown over the cliff in the rain! So Daphne heroically fetches her galoshes and sou wester and heads out to rescue her. Stirring stuff, and moral judgement galore! And somehow made more exotic and mysterious by the fact that I didn’t have the faintest idea what galoshes or sou westers could possibly be 😂

That’s right. Tammylan the ‘wild man’, who lives in a cave in winter and a willow house in summer. How could I have forgotten?

The Famous Five, obviously, but also The Five Find Outers and Dog.

And, also obviously, Mallory Towers.

I read Enid Blyton's Book of the Year avidly several times too.

And Mavis who is vain about her singing voice and breaks bounds to sing at a local talent competition, and gets caught in a storm and gets so ill she loses her voice and can only croak!

She probably had a point i loved them as a kid but downloaded the magic faraway tree on my kindle for nostalgia they were not as brilliant a,I remember them ,having said that im looking at them from an adults perspective, my mum read them to me and my sister when I was about four.

I've just finished reading the Faraway Tree books to my 7 year old, she loved them.
I was hugely into the school stories!

I loved the Famous Five, but they really gave me a weird view of the world and childhood, and adulthood and friendships. And I always thought how amazing it would be to sleep out on the moors all night waiting for an evil villain to turn up.

ETA - they are very badly written...but they were a gateway into all sorts of other books for me.

Yes, and that episode where Jo and possibly some of the others get stuck in a land and get sent to her school doesn’t work at all in the rewritten versions because instead of all the slaps she keeps dishing out in the original, she now just gives everyone sharp scoldings.

Secret Seven.
Famous Five.
Mr Pinkwhistle.
Mr Gallianos Circus.
The Wishing Chair.
Mr Twiddle (who I’ve just realised is basically Mr Tumble!)
The Naughtiest Girl In The School
Amelia Jane
The Three Holliwogs

Oh yes The River of Adventure, The Castle of Adventure.., thank you, I had forgotten those

I remember hating Mr Meddle and much preferring Mr Pinkwhistle!

I loved Malory Towers, St Clare’s, Mr Pink Whistle, Amelia Jane, and the Five Find Outers.

but oh, reading them as an adult is a revelation indeed.

xenophobia is not the word!

3 slapping for Silky
from the old Saucepan Man

Enid Blyton and the BBC Chronicles of Narnia series basically formed me! 😂I loved The Famous Five (for some reason I was always most enthralled by the descriptions of their gargantuan picnics!), The Magic Faraway Tree and The Twins at Saint Clares. Absolute magic.

Not to mention the fact that in EB world, having the flu meant you were immediately sent off for a year in the country with some obliging red-cheeked uncle and aunt to eat home made scones and jam with yellow (clearly unpasteurised) cream! I was most put out as a child living in a Northern town in the 1980s to discover that being ill no longer seemed to come with a free countryside holiday.

Used to be fascinated by the food world of Blyton’s books, too. Brer Rabbit was always eating kippers for breakfast (I could not imagine how these could be nice to eat); and things like relish on hot buttered toast. Obviously there are the weird midnight feasts in the school stories with the sardines and tinned peaches and cocoa and so on, but all of her books were filled with weird 1940s foods that I found terribly exotic (wtf was pound cake or seed cake, for example?)

Same as you. I read so much EB and loved the Magic Faraway Tree. I liked the short stories and boarding school stories, wishing chair, secret 7, famous 5 etc

Okay, so I did love Enid Blyton and devour all her books, but even at the time I found the Saucepan Man really fucking irritating. And sodding Moon Face. I am hiding all knowledge of the Magic Faraway Tree from my four year old son because frankly I don't think I can put up with having to read it to him.

I have a much younger sibling and when he was the '... of Adventure' age I didn't get why the books needed to be updated, but now I totally see that the horrific stereotypical portrayal of the black character in The Island of Adventure had to go. Jojo was portrayed both as a comical, foolish, servile character and (when revealed to be the villain) an evil, cunning black man. The updated version retains all the thrilling plot elements and is in no way diminished by having a nondescript villain called Joe and no mention of 'the black man's eyes rolled back crazily in his head' etc.

Yes and it gave me extremely unrealistic expectations when I was made head girl of a comprehensive secondary school in a deprived area of London. To my great shock I was not universally revered.

I read and re-read Malory Towers and St. Clares. Slightly preferred St Clares as the characters were more interesting and very slightly more three-dimensional.

Also The Naughtiest Girl, imagine all that drama in assemblies with people sharing their problems and complaints.

The Magic Faraway Tree and the Wishing Chair, so magical.

I got very into The Secret Seven and the Five Find Outers and Dog.

Objectively she's such a poor writer and her characters are pure cardboard but there is some indefinable quality that makes her books so magical.

I loved the Faraway Tree too and looking forward to the film, I hope they do it justice.

I enjoyed St Clares and Malory Towers (liked the TV adaptation until season 7 when it got a bit silly and went too far from the books)

I also loved the books set on farms, Willow Farm and Cherry Tree farm. I wanted to be a farmer for a bit because of them but of course they presented quite a simplistic and romantic picture of it all, I know the reality is much different, especially nowadays!!

Never liked Famous Five or Secret Seven though.

I think it took me years to realise that The Valley of Adventure (where the four kids and Kiki get on the wrong plane, and end up in a valley in Austria with bomb damage, a cave behind a waterfall, and bad guys trying to find treasure) makes a lot more sense when you realise it was written in 1947, and that even though it only vaguely references a war, the idea of low-level former Nazis trying to find valuable artworks hidden in caves in a valley now cut off by a pass being bombed would have made a lot more sense to contemporary child readers.

The only book of hers I can think of set actually during the war is The Adventurous Four, and even that doesn’t mention Germany, just ‘the enemy’, and that enemy planes and submarines have ‘the sign of the crooked cross’ on them.

Kiki was hilarious, what a legend.

Me! Still have them (although in Kindle format these days) and still love them. I can see that they are problematic in places reading them with modern adult eyes but since most were written in the 1940s I can excuse it. My main issue is how irritating certain characters are to me now, Darrell is pious, Peter a jumped up Jobsworth and Julian a patronising misogynist.

Anyway I had, read and loved:
Secret Seven
Famous Five
Malory Towers
Naughtiest Girl in the School
The Children of Cherry Tree Farm
Magic Faraway Tree
The Island of Adventure

God this thread brings back memories!
I used to live with my grandad as a child and he bought me loads of books

I fondly remember the wishing chair,the faraway tree,willow tree (?) farm and the cherry wood (?) farm

The naughtiest girl books where good too but I found them a bit 'young'

I never read the famous five or noddy (but my brothers loved them)

I also remember the Katy did books and the little princess (not Ms Blyton) as a huge part of my childhood

So many memories-i may give the film a watch