One of the handful that doesn’t feature life in the Chalet School at all; instead it’s mostly set in Austria, where the Maynard family regularly take their summer holidays. I quite like the family-oriented books, more so than I did when I was younger.

Mélanie Lucas is the new addition to the series who appears in this book. Her parents work abroad and she lives with her aunt and uncle in the UK. By a sequence of coincidences, she ends up staying with the Maynard family. I quite liked reading about Jo and Jack’s ‘singleton’ sons, Steve, Mike and Charles, who don’t appear in the school-based stories. They’re perhaps a bit caricatured but likeable enough, and with quite distinct characters.

There are several expeditions made, with a great deal of overtly educational content about history, geography and myths pertaining to the places. This happens in the school-based stories too, but I wasn’t expecting it in this one. There was rather too much detail about the food taken on picnics, in an almost Blyton style, and who exactly was going to do which job in preparation. This Armada version isn't cut down much, if at all, from the original, but I thought it could have done with losing just a little of the extraneous detail.

Still, it made a good story, an easy read ideal for evenings when I was tired. Certainly worth reading for those, like me, reading through or re-visiting the entire series. ( )