Treasure of Green Knowe

I bought this book to add to my collection of Greene Knowe Books that I read to my children when they were small. The stories kept the kids on the edge of their seats wondering what would happen next.

I almost had a fit when I saw this title, but with a little research learned that I already had it. The whole series is first rate.

Tolly has returned to Green Knowe and his Grandmother full of excitement at being there once more, but an unhappy surprise lies in wait for him: the portrait of the children Toby, Alexander and Linnet is missing from the wall. It would seem a small loss but for the fact that its absence means that the children's spirits are also not present in the house. Grandmother Oldknow explains the painting's loss due to poor finances, though soon sparks hope in Tolly for its return due to the tale of the missing treasure of Green Knowe (which he vows to find), and stories of another family ancestor: Susan Oldknow. Born to a vain mother, a kind but absent father, a spoilt older brother Sefton, and an overly pious grandmother, Susan knows her blindness is a terrible blow to the family's pride: "I can't take her into society, she'll never be married, and I'll have her *always*!" her mother laments when the sad truth is revealed. Smothered by a good-hearted but utterly disillusioned Nanny, Susan is not allowed to do a thing on her own, till her Captain father brings back a gift from his travels that shocks the entire family: a West Indian boy named Jacob to keep her company. Their extraordinary friendship can only be describe through L. M. Boston's beautiful prose, as when the two meet:"'Who is it Papa?' Susan asked. Jacob answered for himself, in a voice whose smallest half-utterance she was never afterwards to mistake for any other. 'It's me, Missy.'" As with Tolly's previous summer in the house, the line between past and present blurs, and he once again interacts with the older inhabitants of the house, though this time in a far more influential manner, going so far as to actively participate in the stories his Grandmother tells him each night. While other time-travelling stories leave me completely cross-eyed, the "Green Knowe" stories treat it as something utterly natural, and thus so do the readers. As a sequel to "Children of Green Knowe", this second part (also published as "Chimneys of Green Knowe") is undoubtably superior to its predecessor. Though I missed Toby, Alexander and Linnet, their part in the first story was as whimsical spirits - Susan and Jacob have a definite story assigned to them, and interact with Tolly in a more important way, stirring events into being on both sides of the centuries. Lucy Boston creates a sophisticated commentary on prejudice that still rings true today in her use of blind Susan and West Indian Jacob. As she comments, blind people were either poor and beggars, or rich and had servants to live for them, and Susan was certainly of the latter group. As such, the poor girl often finds herself strapped to a chair with her doll tied to its arm, disliked by her grandmother who thinks her condition a judgement for her mother's vain lifestyle, and punished for fingering things. Boston's descriptions of blindness in both Susan's life: "things stuck out of space like icebergs out of the sea", and Tolly's experiments (he discov

It's the spring immediately following the events of "The Children of Green Knowe," and young Tolly Oldknow returns to the ancient manor of his family to stay with his great-grandmother over the Easter break. He barely steps through the door when he senses that something is wrong--and how horribly wrong it is: his ghost-friends, Toby, Alexander, and Linnet, have accompanied their portrait on loan-out to an exhibition, and may never return, for Mrs. Oldknow is desperate for money to make repairs to the house and has been offered a high price for the picture. Tolly resolves to search for the long-lost jewels of Maria Oldknow, the stylish wife of his 18th-century ancestor, which disappeared when the grand "new annex" of the manor burned down in a suspicious fire in 1798. Yet he soon finds that ghosts still lurk in Green Knowe--or perhaps not ghosts at all, since his blind ancestress Susan and her young black companion Jacob lived far beyond the ages at which they manifest to him. As is often the case at this house, time becomes a half-meaningless concept, past and present blend and communicate, and Mrs. Oldknow's stories of Susan and Jacob, Susan's vain and flighty mother and spoiled older brother Sefton, her young tutor Jonathan Morley (who, years later, she married), and the sinister manservant Caxton seem to draw these Georgians even closer to Now. Tolly himself finds that his modern-day actions resonate into the past and that--in one memorable sequence--he can even travel back to it and help Susan and Jacob conceal a young poacher from Caxton in a secret tunnel he has discovered. And in the end, even before those stories lead him to the hiding place of the jewels, the portrait is returned, and in a beautiful closing scene we get a hint of the possibility that Susan and Jacob may come to know Toby and his sibs as Tolly does. A worthy sequel to the first book and nearly as good.

This is the second of the Green Knowe series. Tolly returns for easter vacation to find that the portrait of Toby, Alexander and Linnet is missing -- loaned out by his grandmother to a museum, possibly to be sold at the end of the exhibition because she needs money to mend the roof. Tolly is horrified, and then with the help of Susan and Jacob (Susan an ancestor of his from 1800) he learns about Green Knowe during their lifetime, and -- yes -- finds the treasure which was lost while they were living. Every bit as wonderful as the Children at Green Knowe. The next in the series is The River at Green Knowe.