Boxcar children in paradise?

[cimorene]

Does anyone else remember the book where the boxcar children are... shipwrecked? On a tropical island?

Even though so the books in that series are so formulaic that I couldn't read more than four or five of them, I used to go back and reread that one. They're all mostly concerned with the children planning and executing themselves more or less improbable nesting and building projects using bits of nature, like when they build a dam (hence a swimming pool) and a fireplace in the first one, but this tropical one combined tropical escapism with the usual in a fun way.

It's probably not as fun as I remember it, like Nancy Drew books weren't, when I tried to pick one up as an adult. And given that there's a tropical setting, it's probably racist somehow too, though I can't remember any outside characters...

This fondness probably lines up with my liking for This Old House.

Comments

[vass]

They're all mostly concerned with the children planning and executing themselves...

???

...more or less improbable nesting and building projects using bits of nature

Oh. That would have been a very different book.

(Although there is a scene in Arthur Ransome's Secret Water in which the Swallows and Amazons, in their persona as Indigenous people, ritually kill and eat the Swallows' younger sister. In play. She's very enthusiastic about this, since she's not old enough to come play with them on the island most of the time.)

[cimorene]

😂😂😂

[princessofgeeks]

I read a bunch of them but I don't remember this one!

[cimorene]

There's improbable climbing on vines and I think a suspected shark? It's fun.

[alexseanchai]

I don't remember that one (though I also haven't read nearly all of the series), but the description reminds me of Baby Island by—*googles*—Carol Ryrie Brink, which is from 1937 and therefore definitely more racist than I remember it being

apparently there's a whole subgenre named after either Robinson Crusoe or Swiss Family Robinson? and this one is one of the few focused on girls? though as you might gather from the title and decade, specifically girls as caretakers of even younger children

[cimorene]

Oh wow, that title!😅😨 But the whole concept is pretty genius, in a way, I suppose. I could envision a post modern comedy treatment of it as a cartoon.