Seven Sunflower Seeds by John offers Verney

Seven Sunflower seeds by John Varney. First Edition Published in USA in March 1969> Holt, Rinehart & Winston. No other dates.

Hardcover 3-3/4" x 8-1/2" with bright yellow boards in excellent, "nearly new" condition, with sharp corners. Dust jacket, though slightly imperfect is also "near fine". Its 256 pages are pristine clean; book appears unread. No names, no writings. In a new Mylar cover.

The intrepid young heroine in this book is February's next younger sister, Berry Callendar, fourteen years old. The older siblings Friday and February are still around and still involved in international skullduggery (having experience in the previous books of saving the world and foiling international art thieves and so forth) but Berry was too young to know much about that. The fun begins when she goes up to London to attend the ballet with an eccentric great-aunt and gets mistaken for her older sister by one of the bad guys.

The first hint of the adventure in store is when a 15-year racehorse fed on a diet that includes sunflower seeds rockets to the front of the Grand National and then is disqualified under mysterious circumstances. Then the editor of the Messenger, John Gubbins, disappears. His nephew Rupert comes comes to stay with the Callendars during the Easter holidays and almost burns down the barn with his Alchemical experiments (trying to turn base metal into gold).

The plot continues to thicken. Every character in this book is funnier and crazier than the last. Berry, our touchstone of normality, tries to follow all the twists and turns of this hilarious, complex, thoroughly crazy story, getting as lost and confused as the reader. There's romance, intrigue, double-cross, triple-cross and the usual Verney sleight of hand. Finishing a Verney story requires, as soon as one can stop laughing, to turn the book over and start reading it again, hoping that this time, you be able to figure out what actually happened. Recommended for young and old who love puzzles and who enjoy the dotty family-based comedy of this fine British writer. Especially poignant for folks who've been to London, fans of the English countryside, lovers of horses and people who came of age in the 60s and 70s. This is offers intelligent writing that challenges the reader even as it tickles the funny bone.

From a smoke free home.

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