What was your favourite Noel Streatfeild book?

[Deminism]

Have been reading some to DD and we’re loving them. I realise however she wrote loads and I had only read a few as a kid. Ballet shoes, White Boots and Thursday’s Child.

Of the others which did you love the most?

The Gemma stories
White Boots, which was about skating

Hello all, Sorrel here!

I own a copy of all NS's children's books/stories and a quite a few of her adult books and I whilst I love so many of them, Ballet Shoes will always be my favourite. It's actually my favourite book non stop! My Twitter avatar is the 'we vow' picture.

The Painted Garden comes a close second, followed by White Boots, Tennis Shoes, Curtain Up and the Gemma books. I've read them all so many times.

The Whicharts is definitely worth a read and whilst it's very similar to BS, it's much darker in tone and outcomes!

The Emma Watson filmn version of BS is dreadful and deviates so much from the book. The 1970s BBC version is lovely though (I have a copy somewhere!).

I have a pdf copy of a NS short story about what happened next to the Fossil girls. Send me a PM if want a copy.

Bideyinn

I'm feeling a bit teary too. Time for a re-read! I have them all on my bookshelf and on my kindle.

I'm having a spectacularly shit time at work at the moment and NS is a great idea to cheer me up.

I never quite got over her inability to spell field.
I only discovered this in the last month when I was ordering Saplings.

Has anyone been here? www.sevenstories.org.uk/

They hold some of the original manuscripts and the Ruth Jervis illustrations .

I had it in my head that Streatfeild indicated she must have been of German and/or Jewish stock. But wikipedia tells me she was English and her dad a bishop.

I liked Curtain Up, White Boots and The Circus us Coming best, but I have such a soft spot for the academic couple who tutored the Fossil girls in Ballet Shoes.

@SoftSheen

I've read all Noel Streatfeild's children's novels with my daughter, some several times over. We loved most of them, but best of all, The Bell Family, which is such a warm and happy story and deserves to be better known.

It is lovely, but I get frustrated that Angus’s desire to dance which seems to be such a bit thing at the end of that book is a fad he had grown out of in New Town.

Did you know that there are a couple of short stories featuring the Bell family? They were published in annuals and at least one was reissued in one of the virago Streatfeild compilations.

@Doubleraspberry

I also loved the Gemma books but they felt really different. Maybe because they were so 'modern' compared to the others?

They did, didn't they? They felt fairly modern to me (well, when I read them in the late 80s/ early 90s).

My favourites were definitely Ballet Shoes and White Boots. I never liked the Painted Garden as much, and hated Apple Bough (but we read it as a school text when I was about 14 and I found it tedious beyond belief).

Feild is how we used to spell field.

@Doubleraspberry curtain up - thank you!

@SorrelForbes I have been to Seven Stories, it's nice, but as I recall aimed at quite little kids (3-7) plus a little nostalgia bit for the parents. If you go in the school hols there are kids everywhere and if you go in term time there are school parties everywhere!

Apple Bough and A Vicarage Family, but I worked my way through all of them as a child and have such happy memories of them.

Some of her more obscure books are a little bizarre - The Children of the Top Floor which starts with a TV personality talking of his longing to be a father, and the next morning he finds four separate people have abandoned babies on his door step….

I do love Curtain Up and Wintles Wonders/Dancing Shoes, but The Painted Garden and White Boots (and Ballet Shoes) were childhood favourites. I have a few Streatfeild audiobooks, but the pronunciation of Lalla really annoys me so I’ve only listened to White Boots once. Ballet Shoes for Anna upset me so much as a child, but I read it as an adult and appreciated it a lot more. She wrote some grim adult novels, and some lighter ones as Susan Scarlett.

Seven Stories is also an archive though, so if you were researching something you can make an appointment and look through an author's archive - so original manuscripts. letters, ephemera etc.

I would say Ballet Shoes and The Growing Summer are my faves.

I also remember really enjoying the Gemma books (in the days before 'teen fiction', they were quite unusual with the photographic covers. Felt quite grown-up) but I can't recall the plots or anything about them now!

I did love The Painted Garden! Probably my favourite. I do think she wrote very well on jealousy and sibling dynamics.

My main memory of the Gemma books was Robin 'swirling' his music, and having no idea at all what that might be. My mother suggested it might be skiffle.

I'm just re-reading the "Anne of Green Gables" series. I am going to have to make a list of Streatfield novels to come back to when I'm finished with Anne.

Curtain up definitely. I loved that book and lived in it in my head for much of my ‘tween’ years. I might have to re read it.
I loved the circus is coming too.
Ballet shoes comes in third place.

I love White Boots and The Growing Summer and the Gemma books. Actually I love all of them! I read them in the 70s so I have the original Puffin paperbacks. Of the adult novels I've only read Saplings.

NS seems to have had an interesting life so I'm very surprised that there is only one biography, written in 1984 and now out of print. Someone needs to do another! I would read it like a shot.

Ballet Shoes, with Apple Bough a close second

As a slight derail, has anyone read any Pamela Brown? I loved her books, and they're really enlightening as to the early days of television. (however there is a female black character who probably wouldn't pass muster today, although she is kindly drawn).

@ChristinaRussell - The Swish of the Curtain! I only have the Windmill Family and Maddy Alone otherwise, but I loved the Swish of the Curtain

I loved several of them, and it recently occurred to me that there were some I had never read. So I've just finished reading Theatre Shoes (interesting as set during the war and in the Ballet Shoes school with some of the same characters), and have Tennis Shoes to read next. Then maybe I'll get Circus Shoes. Ballet Shoes is one of my key comfort reads. I've read some of them to my children. Maybe at around 7 or 8? But as I'm happy to read them now, then why not for older children too?

@ChristinaRussell if you'd like to read the biography of NS, I'd be happy to lend you mine