Book Title: Blue Door Venture
Author: Pamela Brown
Series: Blue Door #4
Date Started: June 30th 2024
Date Completed: July 25th 2024
Genres: Adventure, Mystery
Quality Rating: Four Stars
Enjoyment Rating: Four Star
Final Rating: Four Stars
Review:
My saga of finishing off childhood book series continues, this time with a classical and beloved one: the Blue Door Theatre books. These stories, like Ballet Shoes and Malory Towers, sustained me as a child on magical dreams of the theatre and performance. It was a joy to revisit the world - and poetically at a time when I had finally been able to fund a creative passion project with a team of wonderful people; arguably the thing these stories had persuaded me to do all those years ago.
I loved the road-trip mystery plotline, it felt fresh from what I remembered of the series. Touring around all these places in the UK, many of them now familiar to me, as the characters discovered them for the first time was a lot of fun - and of course incredibly wholesome. As with a lot of old-fashioned ensembles, the characters blur a bit and end up divided into the boys and the girls. But Brown has such a respect for all kinds of hard work that the relationships and drive of the friends and siblings felt genuine and inclusive. For a book from the 40s, it holds up impressively well.
While it was a shorter story in the series, I massively enjoyed reading it. I can't believe there's only one left (she says after not reading this book for a decade) - and with Maddy, the only real protagonist, no less.
