Review: The Strong Winds Series [Classic Boat]

We’re delighted to see the following review in the Sept 2023 edition of Classic Boat:

“Confession time. We have probably not paid enough attention over the past decade or more to the Strong Winds series of novels written and published by sailor and classic yacht owner Julia Jones. The story of the series starts in 2006, when Julia, owner of the ex-Arthur Ransome yacht Peter Duck, was watching her children learning to sail on Suffolk’s Alton Water. How, she wondered, would Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons - the Blackett and Walker kids - cope in the 21st century? And what if they didn’t come from the stable, affluent backgrounds of those fictional children of the 1930s? Her first novel, The Salt-Stained Book, was published in 2011, with a new, modern cast of teenage heroes and heroines. Five more books followed, as younger characters aged and had their own adventures. This, Voyage North, is the seventh and last in the series. Set in the summer of 2012, while the newly-elected Russian president tightens his grip on power, and Britain gets ready to stage the Olympics, series character Donny drops out of school and sails north on an oligach’s superyacht with a canister of toxic waste. His journey across the Arctic Circle and into the Barents Sea will provide answers to questions that have troubled him all his life - and others he never thought to ask. The Strong Winds series has gained quite a few fans over the years, appealing to adults as well as the intended readership of older children.”