This is a very short, bitter-sweet story about a girl on holiday with her parents.

There's obviously something going on with Clare's parents - the tension went beyond "everyone's parents have disagreements", but neither the narrative nor Clare herself seemed to notice that, and it is left unresolved. Which is perhaps the right choice, since the story isn't long enough to resolve things adequately.

I was also surprised by the attitudes of Clare's father and (great?) aunt - their disapproval of Clare wandering off and talking to a neighbour is framed entirely in terms of their prejudice towards said neighbour, and no one mentions stranger danger. That seemed odd. Especially since there was nothing to explicitly signal that the story was set in the past, when attitudes were different. Clare mentions some of her favourite character by their first names, and those names implied a present day setting.

Later, I realised that although the copyright page said 2015, it also said that the text had originally been published in 1975 as Thatcher Jones. I suspect a few references were changed to update it, not entirely successfully.

But - it was a quick story and the illustrations were lovely. ( )