SMOKY HOUSE

A story of spies and smuggling, of an Inn in west England a hundred years ago, and of five children, whose father was the inn keeper, and who learned, at a cost, that all of life was not what it seemed, the the dour fiddler they befriended was not a good man, and that even their father and the squire and others of their neighbors were breaking the laws. Elizabeth Goudge has drawn wonderful child characters in many of her adult books. Personally, her children in those books were, to me, more effective and more convincing than these children, who seem to drift in an aura of near fantasy much of the time. But the charm of her writing carries it across.