Product Description

Reunited for the summer, the Swallows and Amazons with Dick and Dorothea launch a prospecting expedition to find the lost gold mine of the high hills above the lake. But the mining camp runs into all sorts of trouble: not only the danger of fire in the drought ridden countryside but also scary encounters with unsafe tunnels. Worst of all is the sinister Squashy Hat, who appears to be a rival prospector and who's certainly a spy - how can they keep working without him discovering what they've found?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38651 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 433 pages

About the Author
Arthur Ransome was born in Leeds in 1884 and went to school at Rugby. He was in Russia in 1917, and witnessed the Revolution, which he reported for the Manchester Guardian. After escaping to Scandinavia, he settled in the Lake District with his Russian wife where, in 1929, he wrote Swallows and Amazons. And so began a writing career which has produced some of the real children's treasures of all time.

Customer Reviews

Unexpected finds in the hunt for gold.
It's a long hot summer holiday, and the Swallows, Amazons and Ds decide to spend it in the hills. They are on a hunt for gold and they train pigeons to carry messages to Mrs Blackett so she can make sure that they are all right. They know that a friend called Timothy is coming to stay, but who or what is he? Things turn out very differently to how the children expect. It is a very good book by Arthur Ransome.

by Jessie Acton, aged 9.

A tale to fire the imagination of children of all ages
In this sixth 'S & A' adventure, summer has come once more, and the Swallows are back in the Lake District, together with the two D's, on another holiday with their boating friends, the Amazon pirates. This time, the children desert the lake and take instead to the High Topps, prospecting for gold.

While adult readers will be unable to do other than admire the children's enthusiasm (sufficiently infectious to draw most young readers into it wholesale), they will probably have a feeling of impending disaster from quite early on, in this book. The Amazons' impetuous natures, combined with the others' general inexperience and limited knowledge of mining and its chemistry, lead them all (except, perhaps, the more sensible Susan!) into more scrapes, as well as rather more dangerous situations, than usual.

This leads to a different (but no less absorbing) desire to keep reading this tale than that likely to affect the more naïve younger reader. Both young and old are, nevertheless, likely to spend much of the time on tenterhooks during this book, as the young prospectors explore old mine workings, try their hand at charcoal burning and build and operate a blast furnace in their camp, out on the tinder-dry fells! For once, one can only feel something of a sense of relief that times have changed since 1936, when this was written! One can't help feeling - and being grateful for the fact - that modern children would not be terribly interested in repeating some of the activities undertaken here.

In summary, then, "Pigeon Post" is every bit as exciting (and at times far more nerve-wracking) and educational as the other books in this series: another winner from Arthur Ransome.

A really good book but different than Swallows and Amazons
I recommend reading Swallows and Amazons, the first book in the series, first.

I liked Pigeon Post, because it was a different style of book than Swallows and Amazons. Swallows and Amazons took place on the lake and involved sailing. In Swallows and Amazons, the children pretended that everything was something else. Pigeon Post takes place entirely on land. In Pigeon Post, they don't pretend as much. In Pigeon Post, the characters seem more serious and older.

In this book, the children -- the Swallows, Amazons, and Ds -- go prospecting for gold. Squashy Hat, a mysterious character, is looking for it, too. Using pigeons to communicate with home, they go to the mountains behind Beckfoot -- the Amazons' house.

This book is really exciting. I couldn't put it down.