The Castle Of Adventure (Adventure Series)

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Bill Cunningham: An important member (holding the rank of inspector) of an unspecified secret service force (possibly based upon the British Secret Intelligence Service). His most prominent bodily feature is his half-bald head. He meets the children upon their very first adventure and makes regular appearances in the series from that point on. Mostly the children get tangled up in adventures which are connected with Bill's work at the time and end up solving them for him.

If Is actually almost scary in parts. Maybe it’s because I’m looking at them from an adult perspective now, the mess the kids are in, the creeping sense of danger earlier in the book, the slightly claustrophobic feelings. Very good. Very well written. Unlike the intriguing hook of the first book in the series, The Castle of Adventure seems to start out like a lot of Five Find-Outer and Famous Five books, where a couple of the children are waiting impatiently for the hols to begin. In this case, Dinah and Lucy-Ann provide a decidedly transparent infodump for the readers' benefit: "One more day and then the hols begin," said red-haired Lucy-Ann. "It's a good thing there's only one day between our breaking-up days... " And Dinah says, "I wonder what this place is like, that Mother has taken for the hols. I'll get out her letter and read it again." And Lucy-Ann reads the letter again and says, "Yes, it's a place called Spring Cottage... " And so on. One thing I find about these books though is that the criminal elements seem too soft. Enid Blyton portrays a world where sex and death do not exist. There is rarely any romantic sentiment expressed ever in her book and even the villains usually do not die. Villains always only imprison the kids and at worst whip the boys. That way it is fairy tale of sorts. Real world criminals would kill without slightest compunctions and going to lonely places like castle and islands of adventure carries a great risk of running into sexual perverts. As a child I wanted so much to emulate the children in the stories. But now as an adult, I realize how dangerous it could turn out to be. Like one of my friends told me – he prefers all adventures in dangerous jungles and all in the safety of his bed at home curled up with book rather than actually going to such places and exposing himself to real dangers. While on this point, I also wanted to mention about this talk of not exposing sisters to dangers that comes up often. In a sexless world, what extra dangers would a girl be exposed to that a boy is not? Here what is talked about is dangerous climbing and such which kind of implies women are less suited to physical exertion than men which might not go too well with modern ethos. Dinah Mannering: Philip's younger sister of about twelve at the beginning of the series. Like her brother, she has a tuft of hair standing up atop her head, but she shares neither his gift in attracting, nor his love for, animals, especially the small creeping types (mice, insects, snakes etc.). Temperamental as she is, she often finds herself the target of her brother's teasing, but otherwise she is quite level-headed, tough, intelligent and grown-up for her age.If you cannot open a .mobi file on your mobile device, please use .epub with an appropriate eReader. This is got to be one of my favourite Enid Blyton books. I really like most of the Adventure series, But this is my favourite one of all of them.

The Castle of Adventure (published in 1946) is a popular children's book by Enid Blyton. It is the second book in The Adventure Series. The first edition of the book was illustrated by Stuart Tresilian. When Bill buys a plane, he decides to take the four children for a holiday, but events at the airport lead to the four getting into the wrong plane. When the plane lands they find themselves in an unfamiliar valley scarred by war and, once again, the four children fall into an adventure involving a lost treasure sought by a band of villains.Bill takes the foursome on a trip to a Scottish island to help them recover from measles. But amongst the islands, they stumble upon a sinister plot; Bill disappears, and the children are left alone to find out where he is, what is going on and how they will escape. I just have to make comment on bill smugs. I remember him in The ship of adventure. A slightly odd character who makes himself quite comfortable in the house the children are staying in even though no one is there. He seems so hugely unconcerned about the children’s welfare it made me laugh a lot.🤣 The children run across good old Bill "Smugs" in a nearby town, and he invites them to lunch at a posh hotel. The Castle of Adventure Review by Keith Robinson (March 25, 2005) Following the events in The Ship of Adventure, Bill marries Mrs Mannering and adopts all the children as his own. The children call him Bill Smugs due to the fact that he introduced himself under that alias on their first adventure.