Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series has captured the imaginations of two generations of readers (young and old). Jon Tucker conceived his Those Kids set of books as a potential feeder series to draw kids into Ransome’s larger twelve books.
Jon has crafted these books to cater for reluctant readers in the upper-primary and secondary school age-group who are likely to find the length and complexity of Arthur Ransome’s books too daunting. With chapter lengths limited to under 2500 words, the books are also suitable for adults to read aloud to children, and for time-challenged contemporary kids to read in manageable bites.
Already it appears that having gained confidence and interest from this series, a number of pre-teen readers have moved on to longer books of a similar genre, such as Arthur Ransome’s.
The following review by Molly Michel for the North American Arthur Ransome Society magazine draws a wonderfully expressed comparison between the Ransome and Tucker series of books:
Barbecued jack-jumpers!
Those Snake Island Kids, by Jon Tucker
“Jake had built his own pirate ship and tomorrow would be sailing it to a deserted island. At least he hoped it would be deserted. Not like last time…”
Red sails and pirates, islands and treasures and rivers and bays and inlets. Sailors marooned on an island. A fine villain or two, wildfire and storm. All the elements of the best adventure stories, and lots of illustrations by the author.
If you think this sounds familiar, you’re wrong. Or rather, you’re right. Okay, you’re right and wrong. The familiar mingles with the new and exotic. Two sets of children peer at one another across the decks of their seagoing vacation homes. Two sets of parents happy to maroon the lot of them and sleep late. ” If us kids can camp ashore it’ll be heaps more comfortable for Mum and Dad,” Jake says. Everyone knew that his main reason was more about pirates… but Mum and Dad had privately agreed about the chance for more peaceful mornings.
After that one adventure tumbles breathlessly upon the next in a familiar way – but it’s today. And Tasmania, where the spray is salt. The villains ogle and harrass one of the girls. The kids pitch dome tents and argue about where to dig the camp latrines. Their mobile phones run out of battery.
Of course we meet all kinds of interesting people on their island and on the high seas. The simultaneous similarity and contrast between Ransome’s stories and Tucker’s sets up a sort of ghostly resonance in the air, like making one harp string sound by plucking another. There’s more than a bit of this when the Kiwis (New Zealanders) and the Aussies finally get together too, and I had the same sort of feeling as I felt my way around the island with those island kids, or maybe it was more like stubbing a toe –hot, dry, brushy, and steep, like my own nearby coast, but then – a blue wren flits across my view, or a parrot… or a Jack Jumper…
All this is not to say that a child who’s never yet heard of Ransome wouldn’t enjoy the books. They’re good to read aloud and there’s lots in them to talk about during the readings. It might even be better to start one’s kids with the Kids books. The language and pace and situations will be more familiar to today’s children and perhaps they’ll find the settings and social relationships in the Ransome books all the more interesting.
Did I forget to mention a most interesting grandmother? You might almost feel you knew her… once…
Those Snake Island Kids, by Jon Tucker. And there are more, three more at this time: Those Eco-Pirate Kids, Those Shipwreck Kids, and Those Sugar-Barge Kids, but I hope you’ll start with the first. I’m glad I did.