Flambards in Summer

by K. M. Peyton

Paperback, 1999

Status

Available

Call number

823.914

Publication

Oxford University Press (1999), 192 pages

Description

Widowed during the First World War at the age of 21, Christina returns to Flambards in the hope of picking up the threads of the life she knew before her marriage. But the Flambards Christina returns to is not the same - the paddocks are a jungle, the house buried in ivy, and the once busy stables empty and desolate. Christina sets herself to the task of returning Flambards to its former glory. This third novel in the best-selling Flambards series was reissued in the Oxford Children's Modern Classics series earlier this year, and is now being issued in a mass-market paperback format.

User reviews

LibraryThing member satyridae
I liked this SO much better than the second in the series. Christina is herself again, although widowed and inexplicably sick to her stomach. Flambards is a ruin, and Mark is missing, presumed dead in the war. And there are horses at Flambards again, and I think Peyton is at her best when writing
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about them. I'm not a real romance fan, but once I'm hooked, I have to find out what happens next. So on to the last book I go...
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LibraryThing member rmaitzen
I think I enjoyed this one particularly because of having just read the other two: as a result, the emotional baggage carried right forward, and I could really empathize with Christina's grief, and turmoil, and, eventually, happiness.
LibraryThing member atreic
Again with Flambards books that swerve and swerve hard and catch you out with the change in mood!

The last book ended with Will and Christina married and riding off into the sunset (if with the ominous overtones of war everywhere). Never one to pull their punches, Peyton doesn't give us even a
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glimpse of their married life, but opens this book with Will dead, Mark missing in action, and Flambards even more decayed and run down than usual. The widowed Christina has to work out what to do with her life, which turns out to be a surprising mix of building up a found / chosen family, by having Will's baby, buying Mark's bastard son off Violet, and finally confessing her love to Dick.

Then drama ensues by Mark turning out not to be dead after all and actually being the heir to Flambards, and Violet's son decides that rather than be kicked out to the farm he'll burn the farm down, but with a little storybook magic it is all wrapped up in a bow, Dick and Christina get Flambards and the children, and Mark rides off into the sunset with his rich new fiance Dorothy who has promised him a much nicer house with much better hunting somewhere else.


War and grief, and love, and what we need and what we can have, and social class, and how we treat prisoners of war, and how our early teenage years shape us forever, this book is definitely more of the Flambards magic.
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Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

1969

Physical description

192 p.; 5.12 inches

ISBN

0192750542 / 9780192750549

Barcode

868

Other editions

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