Minnow on the Say (novel)

''Minnow on the Say'' is a children's novel written by Philippa Pearce, first published by Oxford University Press in 1955. Like many of her books, the novel is set in the area where she grew up, specifically in an old mill near Cambridge. It was published in the United States in 1958 under the title ''The Minnow Leads to Treasure''. The novel has been twice adapted as a television drama.

Plot

One summer in the 1930s, two boys use a canoe to search for a treasure lost on the river at the time of the Spanish Armada. They believe a short poem holds the clue to its location.

Inspiration

Philippa Pearce grew up in an old mill house in Great Shelford. In 1951 Pearce spent a long period in a Cambridge hospital recovering from tuberculosis. She passed the time thinking about a canoe trip she had taken many years before, which became the inspiration for her first book. According to ''The Guardian'', "She brightened the long days in bed by savouring in her imagination every second of a canoe trip on the river that had run beside the garden of that childhood home five miles away. Convalescing, she wove those memories into Minnow on the Say (1954) which, after being rejected by one publisher, became a runner-up for the Carnegie Medal."

It was inspired by the area where she had been raised: the villages of Great and Little Shelford became Great and Little Barley. Cambridge became Castleford in the book and lost its university; the River Cam became the River Say.

Reception

Pamela Whitlock in ''The Spectator'' commented at the time of first publication: "''Minnow on the Say'' will provide a fresh experience for readers who expect every book to whirl them into quick fire thrills. From its first pages they will become snared in a delightful web that is more than just a new adventure."

American writer Daria Donnelly commented in '' Commonweal'' in 2000: "Philipa Pearce's 1958 ''Tom's Midnight Garden'' ..is considered one of the finest novels written for children, "as near as any book I know to being perfect in its construction and writing" according to critic John Rowe Townsend. But I think Pearce's recently republished first novel, Minnow on the Say ..is even better."

It was a commended runner-up for the annual Carnegie Medal."Carnegie Medal Award"
2007(?). Curriculum Lab. Elihu Burritt Library. Central Connecticut State University (CCSU). Retrieved 9 July 2012. In 1959, it was conferred the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award for books deemed to "belong on the same shelf" as ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' and ''Through the Looking-Glass''.

Adaptations

''Minnow on the Say'', a Canadian TV drama based on the book, aired in 1960. In the UK, the story was read on '' Jackanory'' in 1966 and a BBC
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