Minnow on the Say (novel) facts for kids

Quick facts for kids
Minnow on the Say

First edition
Author	Philippa Pearce
Illustrator	Edward Ardizzone
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre	Novel
Published	1955
Publisher	Oxford University Press
ISBN	0-486-29256-8
OCLC	71126926
Dewey Decimal	823.8
LC Class	PR4172 .W7 2007

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.

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 serial adaptation, Treasure over the Water, aired in 1972.