The Thursday Kidnapping

Covering one day—a Thursday, naturally—in the life of the four Ramsay children, this British children's novel from 1963 follows Ellen (AKA Len), Neil, Jamie and Bobbin as they set out to do the family shopping, with baby Bart—the child of Freddie and Marika, the Hungarian couple who also live in their house—in tow. A crisis ensues when said baby, left in his pram outside of the library by the impatient and careless Jamie, who was meant to be watching him, is taken by the Ramsays' neighbor, Kathy Fisher. What follows is a day of terrible panic, frantic searches, and extreme emotional distress for the four siblings, until finally the truth is revealed, and they go to confront Kathy...

I am not entirely sure why, but it has taken me show more quite a long while to read this book. It has been on my "currently reading" shelf since September 2021, and I have picked it up, started it, and then put it down, countless times. It's not that the book held no interest—the opening, in which we meet Ellen, and then Kathy and the Ramsay family are introduced, is engaging enough—but somehow I could never seem to proceed beyond the first few chapters. In any case, now that I have finally read it, I can say that it is not the equal of Antonio Forest's other books, but is still fairly engrossing. Forest does a good job capturing the emotional turmoil of her characters, who (unlike the reader) have no idea that Bart is mostly safe in Kathy's keeping. Kathy herself is quite the character. I'm not sure if we're meant to feel badly for her—Ellen clearly does, at some points—but she struck me as seriously damaged, psychologically speaking. Perhaps even psychopathic, from the way Forest described her thinking. The almost cold-blooded way she approached people, calculating how to make them like her, and then becoming enraged when they didn't, was very disturbing to read. I don't think this was intentional on the author's part, as I think she meant for the reader to think the character's flaws were owing to her unfortunate family life, but I came away with the impression of a very disturbed person.

In any case, leaving Kathy aside, I ended up enjoying The Thursday Kidnapping well enough, and am glad to have finally read it, as it was the last of Antonia Forest's thirteen children's novels I had yet to read. That said, I am not sure that I strongly recommend it, save to those who are fans of the author, and are (like me) completists. show less

A nerve-wracking book. Perhaps not as scary to a child in 1963 when it first came out. As an adult these days I found it very unsettling. Good characters, very real, quite the page turner. Each chapter ends with a cliff-hanger. Hard to put down.