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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Christmas Blockbuster, 15 Jun 2002
An action packed, atmospheric entry in Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine series. A film version(unlikely thought!) would need a big budget to show the sweeping forest fires, blizzards, plane crashes and, yes, even gunfights (well, almost, one of the villans tries to shoot a dog and misses.)The big finale of the movie would be a red winged glider smashing into the top of a lookout tower, on which two of our heroes cling, a roaring inferno blazing below them.Typically of Saville, though, this scene is dealt with very swiftly, played down in fact. The youngsters' climb up to the tower top, conquering mild vertigo, helping each other to save face and keep their nerve is much more important.These moments are dealt with in much more depth and detail than the death-defying pyrotechnics. Although the plot in this book is less wafer-thin than in other Lone Pine stories, it is still his characters and setting that really interests the author, as usual. Tom's assertion that he can't imagine anything worse than people stealing young Christmas trees not only shows a disturbing lack of imagination, but a strangely poor memory. But, if the investigation is hardly into the Crime Of The Century, the gang's good humoured enthusiasm is engaging. As it is a children's book, I am probably alone in finding Oedipal echoes in David Morton's curiously addressing his mother as "darling"(while "ignoring the girls".) But even so, he is as worthy and wooden as ever; the much more fallible Tom Ingles is given a chance to shine in this story as, somewhat mercifully, David's entry is rather delayed. A well paced and exciting tale, I only hope some contemporary children's fiction has anything like as much heart and integrity. The Shropshire film industry starts here ?
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by Malcolm Saville
by Malcolm Saville
by Malcolm Saville
by Malcolm Saville
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