Philip Mannering befriends a pair of orphaned siblings, Jack and Lucy-Ann Trent, while having some extra tutoring one summer. When the tutoring session is through, Philip invites Jack and Lucy-Ann to come with him to his aunt’s house and meet his sister, Dinah. The four children become close friends, having adventures and solving mysteries together, and they end up becoming a family with Philip and Dinah’s widowed mother and the man who eventually marries her and becomes the children’s second father, Bill Cunningham. The Trent children refer to her as Aunt Ally.

Philip Mannering – Philip is amazingly good with animals and has a habit of adopting various animals that he finds as pets. Apparently, his deceased father had a similar skill with animals. He is a terrible tease to his sister, Dinah.

Dinah Mannering – She is younger than Philip, twelve years old when the series begins, and she is known for being temperamental, easily provoked by her brother’s teasing and sometimes getting into physical fights with him because of it. She is not fond of Philip’s pets because she doesn’t like creepy-crawly animals and hates it when Philip puts them on her, which he does often. Dinah is considered stronger than most girls, and is described as being as strong as a boy.

Jack Trent – His major interest in life is birds, and he has a pet cockatoo named Kiki who accompanies the children on their adventures. He wants to be an ornithologist when he grows up and loves to go bird watching wherever the children go. He is bright, but he sometimes has trouble in school because he doesn’t focus on his studies. He is disinterested in anything not related to birds. He does have an interest in photography because he likes to take pictures of birds.

Lucy-Ann Trent – She’s very attached to her older brother, Jack, partly because the children were orphaned very early in life and lived with a disagreeable uncle, so she had no one else to be close to. The first book in the series explains that their parents were killed in a plane crash.

The books were written by Enid Blyton, a famous British children’s author during the mid-20th century. Like other books written by Blyton, some of these stories have also faced criticism for instances of racism, xenophobia, and sexism. Boys usually take more active and daring roles in the books than the girls do, and some of the highest praise a girl can receive comes from doing things that the boys like or being as good or strong as a boy at something. Villains in the stories are typically foreigners or people of different races, although this is shown more in the original versions of the stories. Later reprintings were revised to reduce or eliminate some of the more objectionable attitudes, similar to the way early Stratemeyer Syndicate books and series were later revised to update the characters’ language and attitudes. Since I have only later editions of the stories (original copies are expensive collectors’ items now), my reviews focus on these later, revised reprints.

Some of the books in the series were made into television movies and mini-series in Britain, and some aspects of the characters were changed a little or elaborated in these versions.

Books in the Series:

The Island of Adventure (1944)

Some US copies of this book are titled Mystery Island. A boy brings school friends for a visit to his aunt and uncle’s house by the sea to meet his sister and spend the rest of the summer. The children find themselves investigating mysterious circumstances around a nearby island.

The Castle of Adventure (1946)

While staying in a house near an old castle, the children discover that the castle isn’t as empty and abandoned as it appears to be.

The Valley of Adventure (1947)

The Sea of Adventure (1948)

The Mountain of Adventure (1949)

The Ship of Adventure (1950)

The Circus of Adventure (1952)

The River of Adventure (1955)