contents & illustrations lists to front; this is a magnificent story of action and suspense. Most of it happens in one weekend - a weekend when time stood still for the Marsh folk, including Rissa and Tamzin, Roger and Meryon. Out of a warm November day when the sun felt like high summer, came disaster - gale, storm, flood. All Jim Decks the ferryman said to Rissa, 'Tidn't nacheral, choose how! Stands to reason you gotter pay for them frolics, see?' They paid. Maroons called out the lifeboat, and everyone in the village came forward to help. In a moment of light Roger saw that' the tide was high above the highest mark they had ever known it reach before, and the whole sea under the white moonlight was a range of towering, melting mountains, white-topped as any other peaks, but terrifyingly mobile' - and the lifeboat was out in it. The suspense is tremendous, but so truly based that the whole great story reads like something actually experienced and lived through. It is real life, and told with the responsibility felt in any great emergency when all possible help is needed and even children do the right thing as though inspired.