A Wind Is Blowing

 

I ordered the final volume in Monica Edwards' Romney Marsh series, A Wind Is Blowing, ages ago -- so long ago that I accidentally ordered it twice! (Send me a message if you're interested in taking my spare copy...) I absolutely adored the first two books in the series when I was growing up in PNG; Wish For a Pony and especially The Summer of the Great Secret totally captured my imagination. Something about the combination of close female friendship, Tamzin's warm Vicarage home, the ponies and the beach, along with the quirky presence of hard-bitten Jim Decks... I'm not sure exactly where the magic lay but for years I lived inside those books. It came as a disconcerting shock when I discovered that there were later books featuring Tamzin and Rissa 'grown up.' Fifteen seemed very old to eleven year old me, and I was dismayed by the appearance of boys in the form of Rissa's cousin Roger and dashing Meryon Fairbrass. Boys -- yuck, no thank you. So I deliberately didn't read any later volumes, and now they are very hard to find.

Anyway, so -- A Wind is Blowing. These days I can bring myself to read books about teenage romance without shuddering in automatic disgust, so I can handle the gradually blooming relationship between Tamzin and Meryon which is at the heart of this book. Ponies and boats barely feature in this story, which is a more sober and dramatic tale. Meryon is blinded by ammonia while trying to help stop a bank robbery, and most of the book centres on his struggle to achieve independence, even training his own makeshift guide dog (Meg is gorgeous), and pushing Tamzin's help away. A process that would no doubt take months or even years in real life is compressed into a single summer, and the resolution is also swift. The trip to Barcelona is, I think, the first time the characters have travelled out of England (I think in one crossover book, Tamzin might visit Punchbowl Farm), which is perhaps symbolic of the broadening out of their world as they approach adulthood. I'm happy to leave Tamzin and Meryon there... Though now I would love to know what comes in between!