Strong Winds series Strong Winds series The Strong Winds series is a series of children's books written by English author Julia Jones. The books reference many of the settings and characters of the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome. The books use adventure stories about sailing to provide action and structure amid developing themes of foster care, mental illness, disability and corrupt officialdom. Donny Walker (aged 13) and his deaf mother Skye travel in a campervan to Shotley to meet Donny's long-lost great aunt Ellen. Following a car accident authorities place Donny in foster care and his mother in a psychiatric hospital.
Swallows and Amazons series shaggy heads of hair or hats". The sixth book in the series, "Pigeon Post", won the inaugural Carnegie Medal from the Library Association in June 1937, recognising the best 1936 children's book by a British subject. It was reviewed in "The New York Times" the month after J. B. Lippincott & Co. of Philadelphia published the first U.S. edition. Ellen Lewis Buell welcomed the latest work in the six-year-old series that had firmly established "a special niche in juvenile literature". She noted the children's "vivid collective imagination which turned play into serious business" (hunting a gold mine on the moors)