The Rescue of Ravenwood

This story tells how three children from different families take up the fight to preserve a beautiful house and patch of land in the North of England where they have all come to live in cheerfully ramshackle conditions. But greedy developers are afoot, eager to build a Theme Park and, worst of all, to cut down Yggdrasil, a mighty Ash which also hosts the children’s tree-house. There is no money to fight them off once two of the three adult co-owners of the site decide to sell up. For the children, this would mean losing not just there loved home but their very souls, so much does the house, its barns and the surrounding countryside, mean to them.

What follows next involves some dangerous adventures involving one still quite small child stowing away and then existing alone for a while and without money in a foreign country. Meanwhile a dangerous fire back home makes everything worse, particularly when one of the children is unjustly blame for causing it. In the final stand-off they all occupy their favourite tree when it is about to be chopped down. Local support is strong, but all still seems lost until a last-minute revelation comes along worthy of an Agatha Christie denouement.

Natasha Farrant is an excellent writer. Her writing is clear and her sentences flow. The only drawback in this story is that it does go on and on about the joys of living in unspoilt countryside almost to the point of tedium. Young readers will surely sympathise with the children’s desire to keep things as they were. But will they be as willing to accept the frequent assertions about the contrasting poverty of urban living, particularly if they live in towns or the suburbs themselves? Might they too wonder whether they may actually have quite enjoyed going to the prospective Theme Park so derided in these pages? Town versus country is a perennial theme in literature; this lively story gives only one side of the argument.