Book 59j: Bagthorpes Battered, by Helen Cresswell

The final book in the Bagthorpe Saga! It's taken a long time to get to the end (the first, Ordinary Jack, was among the earliest of my challenge books; I remember reading it on the train back to Scarborough in July). This volume begins with things as chaotic as they were at the close of the previous volume (i.e. quite chaotic). Rather than neatly drawing the threads of this series together, Cresswell opts to introduce yet more unlikely elements in the form of new pets for Daisy - not, as she had hoped, a giraffe, but a rather moth-eaten and decidedly foul-mouthed parrot, and a garden snake in a cardboard box. Mrs Fosdyke's misadventures in the clutches of journalist Patsy Page are indeed rounded off, but at the close of the volume it seems that life in the Bagthorpe family will, alas, continue much as usual.