Coot Club
4/5
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About this ebook
Danger and excitement await a vacationing brother and sister when they team up with local children to stop poachers in eastern England.
Dick and Dorothea Callum came to the Norfolk Broads during the Easter holidays, eager to learn to sail. There, they run into the Coot Club Bird Protection Society―children who protect the local birds from thoughtless tourists.
Trouble begins when a coot’s nest is disturbed by a ship full of “Hullabaloos” ―rude holiday boaters. The children try to convince the “Hullabaloos” to moor their noisy boat somewhere else. This fails, and frantic chases, calamitous boat collisions, daring rescues (including by a dog, William the pug), and rewards ensue!
Friendship and resourcefulness, dangers and excitement: Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series has stood the test of time. More than just great stories, each one celebrates independence and initiative with a colorful, large cast of characters. Coot Club (originally published in 1934) was ahead of its time in its concern for protecting wildlife. It is the fifth title in the Swallows and Amazons series, books for children or grownups, anyone captivated by a world of adventure, exploration, and imagination.
“This exciting story of the Norfolk Broads is definitely the best Mr. Ransome has written. It is genuine adventure, and yet there is not an incident which could not easily occur sailing about the waters of East Anglia.” ―Daily Mail (UK)
“There is satisfactory realism about all that happens to the Coot Club, and the atmosphere and detail of the odd part of England where they navigate are conveyed with a charm and accuracy that only this author perhaps could bring to bear.” ―Guardian (UK)
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Reviews for Coot Club
142 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is the first of a subseries within the Swallows and Amazons series, involving similar boating adventures but in the Norfolk Broads instead of the northern lake where the first books are set.This and especially the second in this group, The Big Six (which was my favorite when young) involve a certain crime fiction element not in the earlier subseries.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Somehow, this one is less satisfying than the other books. Possibly because Dorothea is mostly the POV character, rather than Dick, and as usual she's so busy making up "exciting" stories that she's not really paying attention to what's actually happening. And the scenes that would be the most interesting - the D's learning to sail - are told rather than shown - external viewpoint. Tom's adventures are actually very strong, and real, though mostly unpleasant (or at least, the consequences would be unpleasant if they actually happened). The bit I like best is when Port and Starboard are chasing after the Teasel - going from the familiar to the barely familiar to the completely unfamiliar, chasing a will-o-the-wisp...and then the consequences of those postcards. Again, it would be interesting to see the whole thing from a grownup point of view (the Admiral barely counts, she's more casual than the children most of the time). And the final crisis, and the way the cloud that's hung over the whole story passes off is excellent. Heh, I bet the boat owners weren't any too happy with the Hullabaloos either, wrecking the Margoletta twice in a week. Good story, just not one of my favorites.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The first of the two Swallows and Amazons books set on the Norfolk Broads, linked to the other books in the series by Dick and Dorothea from Winter Holiday. It's a few months after their trip to the North Pole, and they are still smitten with the sailing bug. So naturally they are very pleased when an old friend of their mother invites them to stay with her on a yacht in Norfolk. Unfortunately, it looks as though the boat won't actually be going anywhere... Of course, they make friends with some local kids who are all keen sailors, and find themselves involved in a complicated scheme to protect one of them when he has to go underground to hide from a bunch of Hullabulloos. Tom-Dudgeon-the-doctor’s-son (there is always a bit of a Happy Families aspect to Ransome) is an interesting new character: a bit like Captain John in the boyish way he carries the heavy weight of responsibility around with him, but with intriguing extra elements of handyman and ecoterrorist thrown into the mixture. The twins Port and Starboard are fun, but maybe a bit too generic. You get the impression that Ransome must have built them up out of a brief glimpse of two little girls in a racing dinghy, filling in the details where needed with bits of generic Nancy-and-Peggyness. Something I hadn't noticed when I read these books before is the cunning way Ransome never commits himself to saying how old the children are. That way he allows readers of a wide range of ages to identify with the characters, and he also gives himself the maximum freedom to make them independent or vulnerable as required by the plot. The three working-class lads who make up the crew of the Death And Glory seem to be a slightly too obvious concession to objections against the cosy middle-classness of the earlier books. They don't really emerge as individuals in this book, although of course they do have a much bigger role in The big six. The working-class adults who appear are portrayed affectionately and quite convincingly, but there is always a slightly patronising edge there. An elderly barge-skipper is shown to us as someone who should be respected for his experience and craft knowledge, but we’re left in no doubt at all that he has to acknowledge the little daughters of a country solicitor as his social superiors. We’re definitely still in 1930s England! Unlike the Lake District books, where Ransome found it necessary to obfuscate the locations a little bit, these Norfolk books are very specific geographically. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, it's now easy to find old Popular Edition Ordnance maps from the 1940s where you can follow their entire journey, including all the old railway bridges that aren't there any more. Ransome’s own sketch-maps are part of the fun of reading these books, of course, but it's nice to be able to relate them to a wider context, especially in places like Yarmouth, where so much has changed in the last fifty years.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I re-read Coot Club (and the Big Six) after seeing an episode of "Rivers" on TV and realising how I recognised the places from Arthur Ransome's descriptions and drawings. A perfect story, evoking what it is to develop a passion for sailing and the importance of looking after wild places.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5This was the last book in his Swallows and Amazons series, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. John, Susan, Titty, Roger, Nancy, Peggy, Dick, and Dorothea are on a voyage in the Shetlands when they find both the nests of a rare bird and an egg hunter who wants to kill the birds for the eggs... and you'll need to read it to see how the children's conservationism plays out.