Susan, a child born blind into a rich family has a life where she struggles to be allowed to do things and to experience life, her mother and nurse treat her like a doll, incapable and lacking in her own agency. Her father wants to give her opportunities to explore and encounter things in her own way and this is best done with the support of her friend Jacob who her father buys (more on this shortly) from the West Indies. Jacob is clever, funny and inventive and always finding ways to support Susan to do things in her own way.

The story gives a really good sense of how people's perceptions around disability can impact how they treat people and how even well meaning decisions can come from a point of deciding for rather than with the person with a disability. This is Susan's father's strength, he centres Susan in thinking about what she needs and wants and uses her interests to guide him. It is also easy to see how this impacts Tolly, he becomes curious how it would feel to be blind and both talks about that, experiments with a blindfold and wonders how Susan would have felt. Whenever I see themes like this I am reminded of the wonderful exploration of blindness in Goldengrove, this doesn't give as good as sense of what it would feel to be blind but does explore well how people react to disability and form identities for people based on that disability.

The treatement of race is less nuanced. The problem is not the out and out racism that is mainly spoken by Sefton (Susan's unpleasant brother) and other characters who the story has already cast (by their treatement of Susan) as unsympathetic; it is clear that the racism of these characters is not endorsed and is used to highlight the racism of society. Much more of a problem are the actions of Susan's father. Throughout the book he is portrayed as a thoughtful and caring character and in the scene where he buys Jacob he is introduced thinking with disgust of the slave trade, he is reluctant to buy Jacob and only does so at Jacob's insistance. We are clearly meant to see him as a character to look up to. He then ends up presenting Jacob to Susan as a present and carrying out various other acts of subtler cultural imperialism. It is easy to see how a well meaning person could fall prey to that hypocrisy and, if expanded upon would have been a wonderful addition to the story, but it is taken at face value and the benevolence of his actions is never questioned. This avoids giving racism the complex investigation that the book gives disability.

It would have been easy to do, the Green Knowe stories are perfectly set up for an exploration of this hypocrisy. One of the things we often talk about when considering how (or if) to use classic books with problematic elements is the role of an adult reader alongside to have contextualising conversations and to generate thought and learning around the flaws characters show. This story, far more than the first book, is a story of a story being told and the reaction to it. It would have been easy for a few comments from Mrs Oldknow to have stirred conversation and reflection in Tolly of the kind he experiences about disability and to prompt readers to reflect on a wider spectrum of racism.

It is clear that Lucy wanted to explore and tackle both racism and disability and it is to her credit that she wanted to. She does many things well, Jacob has considerable agency and is both the most likeable and the most capable character in the book. Her characterisation is largely good, although at times her treatment of his culture smacks of Orientalism. I am sure that, in giving this portrayal of Jacob as someone to look up to, many children will have taken inspiration, but they will have also taken, unchallenged, the idea of the benevolent 'white saviour' and his 'civilising' influence. This book has many good parts but I would not recommend it without the critical lens that could have so easily been provided by Mrs Oldknow.