Customer Reviews

Ask for King Billy

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I first read Ask For King Billy in my early teens and have always held a fond memory of enjoying this book. So when I was having a little nostalgia fest looking up books I remembered from childhood (mostly Rosemary Sutcliffe) I was delighted to find there were copies of AFKB to be had.
It landed on my doormat about a week later and took me about three hours to read it - it is not a long book. So is it as enjoyable as I remembered? Well, a couple of points to bear in mind. Written in 1954 it is very much of its time, modern readers will be bemused by the idea of a journey from London to Hull being a major undertaking, and it was written for a young audience so don't expect any great depth of characterisation. The plot is decently complicated and the action cracks on at a fair old pace, though I must remark that the alledgely resourceful hero seems to rely on a great deal of unexpected help from a veritable parade of incidental characters. But yes I still enjoyed it, the story holds the attention and you do want to know what happens next, surely the most important criterion of any book.
So was it worth spending eight and a half of my hard earned sovs having it shipped from America? Well it is very much a nostalgia piece, the Britain it describes was virtually gone even when I read it (circa 1968), though oddly enough the McGuffin of the plot, a virus that could wipe out fish stocks and the humans who eat them, would fit into a modern story, and there are books that are far better written (the aforementioned Rosemary Sutcliffes for instance)and yet and yet and yet.
There is just something about that evocative and slightly mysterious title that has stayed in my head for forty years and any book that can do that has got to be worth a few quid of anybody's money.