11th January 2025

The Secret Seven come into possession of a Telescope, and as well as spying on their neighbours finally get to visit the Enid Blyton classic venue of a ruined castle.

As I read through the Secret Seven novels I’m more and more convinced that they are terrible children.

They bully Susie relentlessly, and I am almost always finding her a much more sympathetic character than I think I’m meant to be.

The boys in particular are really sexist again in this story, which is a weird counter to how other women in this story are presented. But the girls are even joining in with the sexism in order to hate Susie even more. It’s bizarre, especially with the knowledge of how girls are treated in later Blyton novels.

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28th December 2024

The seven reappear for another Bonfire Night. My copy is from the 90s so the currency at least has been decimalised, and I don’t know if that means other changes have been made too.

It’s just a bit of a nothing. There’s the usual conflict with Susie (who as an adult I increasingly identify with), biscuits for Scamper, sexism against the girls in the group.

But the plot is just a string of coincidences - it doesn’t feel like there’s any agency on behalf of the main characters that helps it along (with maybe one small exception right near the start), and this makes it a disappointing mystery.

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4th November 2023

Book ten sees the Secret Seven confronted with a brief mystery at the end of what almost feels like some sort of social commentary without a moral at the end. I remembered barely anything of it from reading it as a child.

It’s a weird entry in the series because the mystery is almost the third plot, after the social one and the continued bickering with the group’s nemesis, Susie.

I felt slightly uncomfortable reading it, because there’s a very clear class divide, and although it’s not treated in a negative way it does feel like there could be a tad more sensitivity in presentation, and indeed more support provided by the state rather than relying on kindly middle class farming families.

Additionally my copy has clearly been altered from the original - it’s from the 1990s and has decimal currency throughout - so I can’t help thinking that the narrative might have originally been different, and again might be different now.

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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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