Wave Me Goodbye

Sensitive, bookish, somewhat naive girl - check. Bigger child whose unpleasantness turns out to be owing to family problems - check. Smaller child, rather disgusting in some way, of whom the protagonist nevertheless becomes quite fond - check. This time, they and their 21st-century attitudes are wrapped in the clothes of 1939, but the story is basically the same as usual.

Wilson seems to have got a little slapdash in her research of late. I appreciate her wish to share with her readers the books she presumably enjoyed as a child, but how hard would it be for her to check their publication dates? In the last book of hers I read, she had Opal reading the Chalet School series at least six years before the first book in it was published, and this time 10-year-old Shirley, in 1939, claims Orlando the Marmalade Cat as a favourite of her earlier childhood, despite the first book in that series only having been published a year earlier!