Derring-Do for Beginners

This is the first thing I've read by Victoria Goddard, and it was a pleasant enough experience. Indeed, ‘pleasant' might be a good one-word summary of it.

It reads like a well-written book for children, of a rather old-fashioned kind—although it's not about children. The main characters are young, but old enough to function as adults.

Compared with the books that I usually read, almost nothing happens in it. There are no wars or other disasters, no revolutionary social changes, no sex, only slight violence not resulting in death or lasting injury, no significant crime of any kind. There is slight mention of magic, but very little display of it.

It's about the meeting and interplay of various different characters, and that was interesting enough to keep me reading, even though I was amazed at how little was happening in the early part of the book in particular (later on it becomes a bit more lively).

One of the characters, Damian, is a young but unusually skilled swordsman, and it was brave of the author to create him, because I suspect that she knows rather little about swords and how they're used. I can't be at all sure, never having handled a sword myself; but I've read books by other writers who are more convincing on the subject.

Someone else has commented that the sudden entrance of Fitzroy into the story resembles the appearance of a new Doctor in Doctor Who, and it does indeed, although Fitzroy makes a determined attempt to outdo the Doctor in eccentricity.

Overall, I'm sufficiently encouraged to try another Goddard book sometime, although at this stage I don't feel entirely confident about it.