27th August 2023

The Seven have a mystery to solve when a girl is reported missing from her boarding school and rumoured to be hiding in their local area.

As a mystery, it’s a good one - with plenty of investigating to do. The old dichotomy of sexism toward the main female characters, while presenting independent guest female characters with proper agency, continues.

I think this one struggles a bit against the modern reader though. The central plot point feels very scary in the modern world and I think perhaps the books ends up over glamourising running away from home, and so I suspect some parents might not be as comfortable reading this as parents would have been when it was written.

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27th May 2023

For nostalgia reasons, I’m revisiting the Enid Blyton series that I read as a kid, and have now arrived at this entry.

Three Cheers is a great Seven story, seeing them randomly find a mystery and need to investigate it. It shows a level of social consciousness that’s not often present, and paints a picture (maybe unintentionally) of the class divide of the era.

However as a modern reader there’s a hugely clear level of sexism within the seven - the boys must do almost everything, and only one of the girls gets anything to really do as part of the plot, most of the time just being told to stay at home or otherwise being excluded. Weirdly though this doesn’t extend to the protagonist character Susie, who although the boys act towards with sexism, refuses to partake herself and demonstrates a lot of agency. It’s an odd contrast between the characters and I’m not really sure what it’s meant to be saying to the reader.

Overall though a very simple, quick tale, without any risk or danger.

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31st October 2021

In this holidays the seven have to find a new meeting place when Peter and Janet’s father recklessly approves the refurbishment of their usual shed at exactly the time they most want to use it.

As a child, I only ever had this story as an audio book, and I remember it being one of the scarier of the series. As an adult reading it, it does seem less scary, possibly because I’m more in control of the flow of the narrative.

It’s a good little adventure, with some classic moments.

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2nd May 2021

I found it really interesting to return to this story in the Secret Seven series. As the children prepare for Bonfire Night, Peter and Janet are shocked as they witness a car theft, and set out to find the culprits.

As a child, I only had this as an audiobook, and even now some thirty-odd years later it still felt in places like I could hear the narrator’s voice floating somewhere in my memory.

However the narrative does seem to have changed since I was a child. My memory is of fireworks playing a more prominent role, however they seem to have been edited out of that to just an aside - presumably so as not to encourage younger readers of the 21st Century to do anything dangerous. Yet the cover image hasn’t been similarly edited, and so doesn’t depict any scene that’s in the story.

I’m not really sure what to think as a result. Probably one of the weaker stories that I’ve read in the series again so far.

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17th April 2021

Book five, and we’re a third of the way into Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven series. This time out the seven are split up after one of their number is caught practicing tailing a suspect.

The stories are all still quite cute, but this does continue the sexism that feels very dated to a modern reader, with the three female members of the team being left out of most of the adventure.

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11th October 2020

The fourth Secret Seven story is a classic of the series.

The seven children’s antagonism with Jack’s sister Susie and her friends is in full evidence, and there are several nice interactions between the groups, and some meta-references which are mildly amusing.

The mystery is straightforward but solid, with a good number of clues and peril for a younger audience. The only letdown is that once again Blyton’s characters demonstrate their now-extremely-obvious sexism, and Peter in particular has started to come across as a bit of a prat.

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24th July 2020

The third Secret Seven novel felt exceptionally weak to me.

It’s clearly aimed at a younger audience than the Five Find-Outers novels that I’ve read more recently, but this story in particular seemed to spend all of its focus on setting, and very little on plot.

The characters barely do any detective work, and almost everything just happens around them, or happens by mechanism of talking to parents. The story doesn’t live up to that in the previous two stories.

It feels slightly less dated though - there’s still some sexism and classism, but the sexism is at least partly challenged.

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