2014 Bloggers Challenge – Favourite Book
Topic 3 of the 2014 is your all time favourite book, I used to read a lot when I was a child and I continued to read regularly up until a few years ago. I decided to post about Enid Blyton’s Folk of the Faraway Tree, this was my most favourite book when I was younger and I still have it. It was given to me by one of my Great Aunties at Christmas 1984 which makes it nearly 30 years old! And also makes me feel very old!! This edition was selling on eBay recently for £7 upwards and I thought about selling mine but I just didn’t have the heart to do so. There are a few other books in the series but this one was my favourite. The other titles are: The Enchanted Wood, The Magic Faraway Tree, The Folk of the Faraway Tree and Up the Faraway Tree.
The story is about four children Jo, Bessie, Fanny and Connie. Connie has come to stay with the other children as her mother is ill and she is quite a bossy, stuck up child who doesn’t believe in magic and needs some convincing about believing in the Faraway Tree. The Faraway Tree is an enormous tree that reaches into the sky and has fairy folk and characters such as Moonface, Saucepan Man and Silky living in it. There are new magical lands that arrive regularly at the uppermost branches.
Some of the lands that appear at the top of the tree are:
The Land of Marvels
The Land of Giants
The Land of Nursery Rhymes
The Land of Dame Slap
The Land of Tea Parties
The children have adventures in whichever land that they are in and sometimes they end up in trouble. Some lands are nice such as the Land of Tea Parties where you are served by rabbit waiters but others such as the Land of Dame Slap are awful.
As with other Enid Blyton books, the stories and characters have been updated and re-published. The children’s names have been changed to Joe (Jo), Beth (Bessie), Frannie (Fanny) and Dick who is mentioned in this story but appears in an earlier book also has his unfortunate name changed to Rick. Dame Slap who runs a school where she slaps naughty children has her name changed to Dame Snap, she also has stopped slapping them and shouts at the children instead.
I have just collected the book from my Mum’s loft so I am going to relive my childhood and read it again :)! What was your favourite book as a child?
3 responses to “2014 Bloggers Challenge – Favourite Book”
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I use to remember reading Enid Blyton as a child, although I sadly don't remember too many of the tales. I remember much more of my early/first books mainly because they are still around – Big Bad Bertie was a tale of a naughty child who grew into a naughty adult – I loved the book so much I named by cat Bertie.I had a really bad habit of tearing the books I loved to pieces up as a child – i'm not really sure what that was all about!
I've never heard of Big Bad Bertie so will need to have a look at Google for that. Tearing your books up seems a strange thing to do, especially when they were books you loved :D. I used to colour in (badly) any illustrations in some of my books. Sometimes we do strange things as children :). I've still got quite a few of my Enid Blyton books, find it hard to part with some of them.
I have always LOVED this series. I was a big Enid Blyton fan as a kid but the Faraway tree was a favourite.