TREASURE ISLANDS
updates
Treasure Islands: a guide to Scottish fiction
for young readers aged 10–14 is published by ASLS to help
teachers, parents and general readers find quality works of fiction. We are
well aware that our selection is far from comprehensive, and we intend to
expand on it on this website. If you have favourite Scottish novels or
collections of stories which you would like to recommend to young readers, we
shall be delighted to consider adding them to our selection. Please send your
suggestions, ideally using the format of the current entries, to
How to use this guide
The entry for each text outlines the setting of the story, its plot and main
characters. It says something about themes and offers an appreciative comment; it
also suggests the age range within which the work is most likely to be of interest,
and its level of reading demand for that range. The compiling group is convinced
that all of the chosen works are worth introducing to young readers. We emphasise
however that each entry is a statement by one member of the group, and not a
consensus verdict by committee. Personal differences in attitude and style are
therefore to be expected.
For convenience of reference we have arranged our notes into categories according to
our judgements of the type of text. We are well aware that it is not possible to do
this with much precision since category names are largely arbitrary and tend
moreover to overlap. One novel can be a historical horror story, another a humorous
fantasy, and yet another an animal story about a hunted outsider. Nonetheless we
have thought it helpful on balance to arrange our notes in the following groupings:
We have also supplied some keywords as a quick summary for each text. We have made very
rough-and-ready suggestions about the likely interest and age range of each work
within the years 10–14. Again we do this tentatively in the knowledge that it is
rash to generalise about the types of texts likely to be psychologically best
suited to any stage of development.
As further guidance, we have identified for each age range 3 broad reading levels
suggesting linguistic demand:
- texts which in their language are likely to be immediately accessible to
readers in the indicated age range, - those which are likely to be reasonably straightforward for readers in
that range, - those which are likely to be more demanding for readers in that range.
These levels are the most problematic of our codings. Experienced teachers are wary of
such indicators for they know that if young people alight upon a text dealing with
something that interests them, they are willing to persevere at a level that
stretches and extends their reading skills. We recognise also that skilled reading
aloud can make difficult texts more accessible to insecure readers.
The publication details in each note are, we believe, accurate. Wherever possible
these include the date of the first edition and the ISBN of the most recent edition,
whether that is currently in print or not.
ADVENTURE
Age: 12–14 Level: 3 Keywords: |
THE BLACK ARROW Robert Louis Stevenson Cassell, 1888 (op); 1st World Library, 2004, ISBN: 1595405119 Stevenson, who famously tended to deprecate his own work, underestimated |
Age: 11–13 Level: 1 Keywords: |
BORDER RIDING A great wee adventure story for 11- to 13-year-olds, Border Riding is Contributed by Lorna M J Kerr |
Age: 10–12 Level: 2 Keywords: |
CATSCAPE Here we have villainy and sleuthing rampant in the douce environs of
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Age: 13–14 Level: 3 Keywords: |
DICK RODNEY, or, THE ADVENTURES OF AN ETON BOY This novel’s theme is the Victorian equivalent of ‘gap
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Age: 11–13 Level: 2 Keywords: |
ORDERS TO POACH In the range of Scottish fiction for young readers, this recently
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Age: 10–12 Level: 2 Keywords: |
STRANGER ON THE RIVER This lively, clearly told adventure story offers an original mix of
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ANIMALS
Age: 12–14 Level: 2 Keywords: |
THE SINGING FOREST H Mortimer Batten Blackwood, 1955 (op); Puffin, 1958, ISBN: 0140301143 (op) This novel explores a potent theme of animal fiction – the fate of
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Age: 10–11 Level: 1 Keywords: |
THE WATER HORSE Starting on the shores of Moidart in 1930 this captivating short novel for
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FAMILY
Age: 10–12 Level: 2 Keywords: |
CAMERONS ON THE HILLS Jane Duncan Macmillan, 1963 (op); Black Knight, 1965, ISBN: 0340039876 (op) It is the Easter holidays and the three Cameron youngsters (Shona aged 13,
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Age: 11–14 Level: 3 Keywords: |
THE GIFT BOAT This contemporary story is set in the coastal town of Stonehaven with its old harbour and its steep streets where ‘it was always uphill going home’.
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Age: 11–14 Level: 2 Keywords: |
SCABBIT ISLE In this novel a historic Scots burgh is the setting for strange events.
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Age: 10–12 Level: 2 Keywords: |
STRANGERS AT THE DOOR This novel makes an intriguing comparison with the much more recent Lyon produced a sequence of 7 West Highland novels featuring the experiences of Sovra, Ian and Cathie. Among these are The House in Hiding (1950), The Dream Hunters (1966) and The King of Grey Corrie (1975).
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GROWING UP
Age: 12–14 Level: 2 Keywords: |
DOUBLEHEIDER//: Sheena Blackhall, Hamish MacDonald Itchy Coo, 2003; ISBN: 1902927729 This groundbreaking volume juxtaposes for young readers two novellas in
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Age: 12–14 Level: 2 Keywords: |
THE GARBAGE KING Contemporary African child poverty and exploitation are the urgent themes
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Age: 12–14 Level: 3 Keywords: |
THE YOUNG BARBARIANS This largely forgotten novel seems to be the only account of the
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HISTORY
Age: 12–14 Level: 2 Keywords: |
FLESHMARKET Nicola Morgan Hodder, 2003, ISBN: 0340855576 Set in Edinburgh in 1822, the grim beginning of this novel describes a
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Age: 10–12 Level: 1 Keywords: |
A NATION AGAIN This brief and graphic work for younger readers packages together fiction people at that time.’ She is a poor, hungry 10-year-old girl, a ‘wee sparrow’, living near Kelso in 1699. The crops have failed in the ‘ill years’ and her family is starving. When her mother dies and her father Tam in desperation joins the Darien enterprise, Annie at first lives with her relatives in the town. Later when she hears a rumour that Tam has returned to Scotland, she resolutely sets out northwards to find him. She meets up with cattle drovers and then becomes a bonded child labourer working with her father in the Lothian coal mines until he perishes in a fire underground. Gradually as she is growing up, her natural talent for singing brings her into contact with cultivated local gentry, the Clerks of Penicuik, and with a kind, lively youngster, Alan Ramsay, who has ambitions to be a poet. She is drawn with him into the political excitements and controversies of Edinburgh, and witnesses on the streets the dying throes of the old Scottish parliament in 1707. Despite all the chicaneries of the politicians, the two youngsters remain confident that some day Scotland ‘will be a nation again’. This is an unusually challenging little book which casts a fictional historical light upon our present-day Scottish affairs. In the story the political sympathies of Alison Prince are clearly on the side of an independent Scotland, but in the second part of the text she appends a simple, informative account of the persons and issues involved in Annie’s adventures. Taking the two sections together young readers and their teachers may also find links into other areas such as Scottish poetry and folk song: What are the words and tune of Annie’s favourite song, ‘Bide ye Yet’? What does the music of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik sound like today?
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Age: 10–12 Level: 2 Keywords: |
SPINDLE RIVER The year is 1819 and the setting is Robert Owen’s famed cotton
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HUMOUR
Age: 10–11 Level: 2 Keywords: |
MY FRIEND MR LEAKEY J B S Haldane Cresset Press, 1937 (op); Jane Nissen Books, 2004, ISBN: 1903252199 JBS Haldane, the great Scottish evolutionary scientist, once advanced the
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LOVE
Age: 12–14 Level: 2 Keywords: |
ANNAN WATER Kate Thompson Bodley Head, 2004; Red Fox, 2005, ISBN: 0099456265 Through this intensely romantic tale of Michael and Annie, two star-crossed
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Age: 12–14 Level: 3 Keywords: |
THE SEAL-SINGING Set in the late 1960s this is a romantic tale of first love which
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Age: 12–14 Level: 3 Keywords: |
TAMLANE That wear gowd on your hair To come or gae by Carterhaugh For young Tam Lin is there. —‘Tam Lin’ This romance of perilous young love may not be to all tastes but it is it’s hot.’ The narrative is encrusted with lush imagery which is sometimes distracting, but it does not really impair the structure or movement of the the story. The confection of eerie superstition, violence and stubborn love is likely to appeal to young readers who enjoy historical fiction. If so, they should be encouraged to explore also the traditional ballads ‘Tam Lin’ and ‘Thomas Rymer’ and perhaps other related works such as Andrew Lang’s The Gold of Fairnilee (1888) and Naomi Mitchison’s The Big House (1950). Some may also try a more demanding novel of enchantment in the Border forests, John Buchan’s Witch Wood (1927).
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OUTSIDERS
Age: 10–11 Level: 1 Keywords: |
TOMMY TROUBLE Stephen Potts Mammoth, 2000, ISBN: 0749739525 ‘What’s the trouble, Tommy?’ asks the teacher one day. It
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SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY
Age: 12–14 Level: 3 Keywords: |
BEADBONNY ASH Winifred Finlay Harrap, 1973, ISBN: 024552066X (op) This richly overloaded fantasy exploits the popular formula for summer
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Age: 10–12 Level: 2 Keywords: |
THE CHAOS CLOCK Time is running out. Kate and David, ordinary youngsters leading
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Age: 10–13 Level: 3 Keywords: |
PETER PAN IN SCARLET This novel is being marketed as ‘the official sequel’ to J M The chain that is round us now.’ In the best Barrie tradition the treasure turns out be whatever you want it
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Age: 10–12 Level: 2 Keywords: |
PETER AND THE STARCATCHERS This cheeky American take on the myth of Peter Pan displaces
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Age: 10–12 Level: 2 Keywords: |
THE PIRATES IN THE DEEP GREEN SEA Imagine that our Earth has always depended for its spherical shape on a
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Age: 10–12 Level: 3 Keywords: |
THE WEE FREE MEN This playful fantasy is highly inventive in ideas and language. It across the Downs in search of a new clan matriarch and thinks that Tiffany, as a potential wise woman or Hag, will meet their requirements. With the highly irregular help of the wee free men and a lawyer aptly mutated into a toad Tiffany confronts all the dreamlike torments and and transformations deployed by the Queen. In an echo of the Tam Lin story her steadfastness wins back not only baby Wentworth but also the son of the local Baron. Finally she is received into the sisterhood of witches and the Wee Frees retreat bashfully to seek a more suitable matriarch elsewhere. A demanding theme of the novel is Tiffany’s maturing awareness of the Gaia-like harmony and power of the ancient chalk downlands with their underlying traces of geological change and centuries of human impact:
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Age: 10–12 Level: 2 Keywords: |
THE WIND TAMER This novel draws in the young reader with early, unnerving signs that all is not quite right in the apparently normal Stringweed household.
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Age: 10–12 Level: 2 Keywords: |
WINTERBRINGERS Set in a village in the East Neuk of Fife, Gill Arbuthnott’s latest
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Age: 10–12 Level: 2 Keywords: |
THE WITCH OF CLATTERINGSHAWS Two lively English youngsters venture north from London and encounter growing old and didn’t have the energy for a long one.’
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SUPERNATURAL & HORROR
Age: 12–14 Level: 2 Keywords: |
THE DROWNING POND Catherine Forde Egmont, 2005, ISBN: 1405221763 Class 4c’s project may focus on witchcraft but this disturbing novel
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Age: 10–12 Level: 2 Keywords: |
HUNTRESS OF THE SEA Neer mell wi selchies o the sea. (from Sealchie Sang) Young readers may find this novel both gripping and perplexing since its ambition is to fit an old folk tale of the supernatural into the realistic setting of a modern crofting community on the bleakly beautiful grey coasts of Caithness. The narrator, 12-year-old Ewan, has been brought up courageously by his mother Jessie since his father deserted them. The theme of single-parent childhood is common enough in junior fiction but what makes this story strikingly different is that Duncan, the father, has been lured far away from home in thrall to the deadly siren song of the selchies, the fabled people of the sea who are half human and half seal. The story starts with a tense description of the boy’s return over the moor from school on a bleak winter’s evening, shadowed by a dishevelled stranger. This unwelcome arrival turns out to be his lost father, who tries to take up with wife and son where he left off seven years earlier, but he has changed in frightening ways: fantasy based on the legend of the fatal attraction of the seal folk for humans. Duncan is revealed to have a second and parallel family, his seal wife and seal son who are beautiful but malign. In their struggle to win back Duncan the selchies enlist the aid of other creatures from the Celtic bestiary, the black dog and the water horse, who wreak horrifying havoc on the local crofters. This is a tragic story in which there can be no happy reunion of Ewan’s mother and father, for the seal wife Neiraa deploys the intoxicating power of the selchies’ song … in the end successfully. Temperley’s style is spare, fast-moving and highly readable. He expertly evokes the alien presence of the sea: its smells, sounds, creatures and flotsam; its submarine landscape of shipwrecks and mariners’ bones. The novel’s ending and the role of Ewan’s mother may come as a surprise to young readers. How fitting is it? How otherwise might the story have concluded? Scotland’s strange legends of the seal folk can be further explored in, for example, The Gift Boat (Peter Dickinson, 2000); Broonies, Silkies and Fairies (Duncan Williamson, 1985); The Wheel of the Finfolk (R E Jackson, 1972); and The Seal-Singing (Rosemary Harris, 1971). Also well worth visiting is the traditional ballad, The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry.
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Age: 12–14 Level: 2 Keywords: |
LOCH The first thing to be said about this strange novel is that its ending
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Age: 10–12 Level: 3 Keywords: |
THE WHEEL OF THE FINFOLK We are back in the 1930s. Katy, the 12-year-old narrator, travels north
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THRILLERS
Age: 13–14 Level: 3 Keywords: |
MALARKEY Keith Gray Red Fox Definitions, 2003, ISBN: 0099439441 John Malarkey is a streetwise teenager newly arrived in Brook High, a
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Age: 10–12 Level: 2 Keywords: |
SILVERFIN James Bond’s Schooldays? The period is the 1930s. 13-years-old
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TRADITIONAL STORIES
Age: 10–11 Level: 2 Keywords: |
THE GIRL WHO MARRIED A LION Alexander McCall Smith Canongate, 2005, IBSN: 1841957291 Like at least two other Scottish novelists (Naomi Mitchison and Elizabeth
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Age: 10–11 Level: 1 Keywords: |
WHEN THE WORLD BEGAN Elizabeth Laird personally collected this miscellany of different types of
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Last updated 26 August 2010.