Yesterday Charlotte and I were spending a casual Saturday book browsing (man I love kids books, they're so fun!) and I wandered past the teenage section where I used to beg Mum every week for a new Enid Blyton or Baby Sitters Club or SVH book. I thought I'd look up my beloved Blyton boarding school books, and do you know what I found? The innocent and girly fun of midnight feasts and school hats and playing jokes on the French teacher were no doubt still within the pages, but the covers have gone all Bratz-style. Yeah I can understand they want to make it modern to compete with hannah montana and all that shit, but these were classic book about boarding school were uniforms were awesome and hard work was rewarded and the girls were wholesome and lovely and English! They don't have collagen lips and glittery hair clips and boobs! I am so gutted. Thank goodness I still have my original collection to pass down to Charlotte. They even glitzed up the Adventures of the Wishing Chair and the Faraway Tree!! I mean these are books so innocent they have characters called Dick and Fanny. They might not have the franchise capacity of Harry Potter but dammit, they were truly original, imagination-stimulating stories. I KNOW the content doesn't shange, but it's sorta slanted by the cover, like when you see the fillum-of-the-book and then re-read the book and you can't help but imagine the characters as they were on film, rather than using your own grey matter to think about it.
If the new covers mean a new generation of young girls (or boys, who am I to judge) pick them up and read, then fine. Go ahead. It's just not the same. It's probably futile, but hands off the Famous Five. Don't turn them into popstars or anything please. Rant over.
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