Mrs Johnson, whose name was Olivia, tried to scold the boys for teasing Harriet, but her scolding was not very convincing, because inside she could not help feeling that if a daddy-long-legs had a lot of hair and big eyes it would look very like Harriet.

Since her illness Harriet had looked all eyes, hair and legs and no face at all, so much so that her brothers Alec, Toby and Edward said she had turned into a daddy-long-legs. She was a thin child with big brown eyes and a lot of reddish hair that did not exactly curl, but had a wiriness that made it stand back from her face rather like Alice’s hair in Alice in Wonderland. Good story, satisfying ending, classic literature, you have to love it! Read moreĮVEN WHEN THE last of the medicine bottles were cleared away and she was supposed to have had convalescence, Harriet did not get well. It's a formula that works, and it's in full force in this book - the shadow discovers she has a real talent, the talented star discovers that she's not THAT gifted, the stage mother (aunt, really) gets hers, the poor family is helped by a combination of friendship and bootstraps, the various teachers worry about every aspect of the whole child - pretty much what you expect. But she loves it! I guess it's not THAT much of a surprise, I loved it too at her age : )Just FYI, Streatfeild's books are a little formulaic - you have the talented child and the untalented (but secretly REALLY gifted child), the star and the shadow, and the family togetherness. I'm surprised at how much she's taken to it, given that it's really a fairly old-fashioned book (and British besides!), with long, complex sentences time taken to introspect the grownups and mentions of weird things like pre-1970s English money, rationing, and skating figures. I taped it together, but that didn't keep.So I was thrilled to see it back in print with a spiffy new cover! Look at that!I'm reading it to my just-turned-seven year old niece right now. When I was a kid, I literally read our copy to pieces.

Skating shoes book by noel streatfeild