Cuckoo Summer

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The story is gently spiced with natural history to give a sense of space and surroundings, a backdrop to the dramatic events that take place amongst the characters. The remoteness of the setting and life in such a place brings a different element to the war stories. Meanwhile, Tommy’s having doubts, not only about the size of this secret, or Sally’s circumstances with the hateful Mr Scarcross, but about his father.

Jonathan Tulloch's writing takes you straight into the story's time, during WWII, and place; a small Lake District village. Cuckoo Summer is lovingly written and a celebration of the Lakeland and the beauty and remoteness of the area. There is an innocence to the children’s attitude to the wounded airman and the accompanying press release for the book mentions the suitability for fans of Whistle Down the Wind and I can well understand why. He is a villain in the mould of some of the worst in children’s literature and quite terrifying at times. There are echoes of that great storyteller Robert Westall, of Machine Gunners fame, but the story brings Goodnight Mister Tom to mind too – high praise, and thoroughly deserved.Initially, the plot appears straightforward, but it is the relationship between Tommy and Sally which holds the magic to this story. Sally’s language took me a little while to get used to but would give teachers who like ‘doing the voices’ during a class read aloud a chance to shine! The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

Set in the Lake District in 1940 Cuckoo Summer is a beautiful novel of friendship, secrets, loyalty and childhood innocence, bringing to life both the people and the landscape of fells and tarns of the author’s beloved Lakeland. I’m pretty sure that this is the only children’s novel that mentions the hidden treasure of betony, lady’s bedstraw and hare’s-foot clover. Birdsong fills these pages, and I’ve also let the book ring with the music of Geordie and Cumbrian dialects.Some are lucky, others, like Sally, less so; she ends up with farmer Scarcross, an ill-tempered, abusive carer. Together the children seek to keep the airman’s whereabouts a secret, which sets off a chain of events that changes their lives. The characters in Cuckoo Summer are living, breathing beings and each of them has a distinctive role in the story, which is told from the perspective of Tommy, a loyal and compassionate friend who instinctively knows that all's not right in Sally's world, when she refuses to tell him anything about her former home life. Andersen Press) Although Tommy’s holding in his worries about his missing father, his aunts are aware of his feelings. Tommy’s learned some of her Geordie speech patterns, enough to know that the German gadgie she’s discovered in the woods is the airman who’s parachuted out of the plane crashed in Woundale woods.