Novels about resourceful people making things happen

[fivetriangulartrees]

I love stories where someone creates or achieves something through being resourceful - and the book tells you how they do it in replicable detail, so you believe it's truly possible. I'd love to find more to read like that. Can anyone recommend something that fits the bill?

The only examples I can think of right now are:

The Swish of the Curtain - children put on a show and have to sort out all the little creative and admin details to make it happen.

The Martian - astronaut figures out how to survive on Mars until he's rescued.

Similar, but not quite what I mean, is the Freeman Wills Crofts novels, where Inspector French plods through every bit of mundane information, like alterations to train timetables, to solve a case.

Devon Venture by Catherine Bell. Two sisters rent a farm and make it work. Aged 17 and 19! I first read it as a child and it's really a teen book but I still love it. Published in the 60s so also charmingly full of shillings and sending wires.

The Jill series of pony books by Ruby Ferguson fit the brief as well, teenage girls setting up riding stables and running pony treks and getting mad equestrian-related jobs. I also like her endless attempts to look sophisticated by putting on lipstick and combing her hair only to be scuppered by adults offering her hot cocoa or sending her to bed at 6.30 🤣

True story but South, Shackleton. Entire account of the journey is about making things happen, being resourceful in minute detail, rationing, building shelters in incredibly adverse conditions, survival against all odds. Reread it every year, love it. Also reread The Martian :)

These are all great. To my shame, I still haven't finished my previous book, so I haven't started any of these yet, but I have a good wishlist going.

Thank you so much for this recommendation. I've just finished Miss Benson's Beetle this evening and I LOVED it.

Edited to apologise for not realising how old the thread was.

Among ancient children's books, Gwendolen Courtney's Sally's Family is good - an orphaned family separated by war are reunited in 1945 and have to learn to live together and cope with (moderate, middle-class) poverty and housekeeping and so on. Very satisfactory comfort read.

Obviously Cold Comfort Farm. Some Georgette Heyer, though they are more about manipulating people to solve their problems than about practical hands-on work. - The Toll Gate, The Foundling, Venetia

Maybe some of the Chalet School series? Very satisfying detail about the minutiae of living together in a boarding school in the Alps.

Maybe not the right message, but the recent Ripley series on Netflix also shows the work necessary to get away with identity theft and murder :)

Are the Little House books something you might like? I remember so vividly the maple syrup making chapter, I read it to my daughter and I got her maple sugar as a little present at christmas because of it.
Little House in the Big Woods, On the Banks of Plum Creek, Little House on the Prairie are the first three books, details building a house!

@WeirdPookah I love the descriptions in the LHOTP books about making things, everything from cheese graters (old saucepan punched with nail holes!) to building a house. I do remember Pa nearly dropping the house on Ma though, and a neighbour passing out from underground gas when they were digging a well - it was such a precarious existence.

Have you read Farmer Boy, about Laura's husband growing up in New York State? The descriptions of the food are absolutely mouth-watering....

@SydneyCarton no I haven't read that, sounds like I would enjoy it! Thank you.

Miss Pettigrew lives for a day. A whole life change! So satisfying.

The Secret Garden. The book really focuses on the work involved inaking the garden come back to life. The children call it magic, but the reader can see it's hard labour.

Fly by Night, K M Peyton has the (working class) central character finding a temperamental pony, and getting him to gymkhana level.

For any person who read the Pennington series, the girl is Ruth, pre-Pennington

Placemarking

Have you read the Cazalets? The first one is set at the outbreak of WW2 in a huge rambling house, with a frightfully naice family pitching in as life gets harder (but also more meaningful).

Barbara Pym is generally good for resourceful spinsters working in the parish and what not.

YA also a rich vein for this sort of thing:

Swiss Family Robinson - a family learning to survive on a desert island. It's for children, but not too childish.

How I Live Now - teens coping and living after a cataclysmic war.

The Secret Garden - young girl coaxes a forgotten garden back to life.

Surely the obvious example is Defoe's Robinson Crusoe! Or how about Patrick Fermor's A Time of Gifts? It's a travel book covering Fermor's backpacking adventure across Europe in the 1930s. He often finds himself alone and has to sleep in a barn or a gypsy campsite. Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London is kind of similar.

Books about survival and so on can be very inspiring, I agree. I find the same with memoirs about adventure or war. I've always loved Robert Graves' Goodbye to all That, and also Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. I've always meant to try Richard Burton's stuff as well (I mean the 19th-century explorer, not the actor). Oh, and Brian Blessed wrote a really interesting account of his attempt to climb Everest.

Dorothy whipple’s high wages

LOVE cold comfort farm.

if you love LHOTP, I BEG you to read prairie fires, a history of the real life Laura, Almanzo. It’s literally the best history book I’ve ever read.

The Whalebone Theatre
Station 11
The Cazalet chronicles