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Books like Five Fall Into Adventure

Five Fall Into Adventure

2001Enid Blyton

3.9/5

So this one yet again revolves around "bad men" after Uncle Quentin's marvelous inventions. We see again the repeated theme of a dirty gypsy child (or sometimes just a child of the serving classes) in need of betterment being befriended and ultimately parted from their criminal lone parent/guardian. This one happens to look exactly like George ... clearly this will come in useful later.First papers are stolen, then Timmy is drugged and George is kidnapped in circumstances that mean the others don't notice for ages. Then there is a ransom note demanding Uncle Quentin's science writings. The phone line is cut but using a cunning ruse they manage to get Dick out of the house without detection ... but rather than tell the nearby police he dives right back in again on his own.There's some malarky with gypsy caravans (smelly & dirty, though I have always heard that the Roma keep their caravans fastidiously clean) and it turns out that George and Timmy are being held by a mad American scientist who wants her uncle's secrets. The mad scientist has his lair above a cave system of course. Every Famous Five book needs caves. And he plans to escape in a helicopter, which would be pretty far fetched in 2018 and in 1949 when this book was written was arrant nonsense. My guess is that Enid had heard of them as exciting new things just beginning to find service in the military.Once again someone is going to shoot Timmy, but with the help of the gypsy urchin, Jo, who appears in a later book via her connections with circus folk, everything ends happily.Jo is rewarded by being fostered with a friend of the family cook, and all is well.This wasn't a stellar entry in the series. It seems to hit most of EB's repeating themes and to be rather a lazy tale.This one scores on the perennial themes of gypsies, Uncle Q's science, Timmy being poisoned, Timmy threatened with shooting, men with guns, kidnapping, caves, bad Americans, twins (well look alikes), a spare child, and the betterment of a poor child.The title is lazy too. There's no falling involved. Five Assemble Another Generic Adventure From The Standard Kit of Pieces would be more accurate. Join my 3-emails-a-year newsletter #prizes.....
Picture of a book: Five Fall Into Adventure

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