Retirement Rescue - Prove Yourself A Hero

Prove Yourself a Hero by K. M. Peyton

Published - 1978
Pages – 173
In print? – No. But see if you see a copy secondhand, snatch it up.

THEN - 4.5 stars out of five

NOW - 4.5 stars out of five

This was my favourite re-read book for years. It’s definitely my most-travelled because it’s so small and light.

Jacket description:
One can never prepare to be kidnapped: to anticipate the terror, exhaustion and violence: or to understand the disorientation and imbalance that accompanies the return to freedom – if one is lucky.
Jonathan Meredith’s disappearance, apart from anything else, was annoying. It cost half a million pounds and mucked up a lot of arrangements, particularly his parents’. And for Jonathan, things would never be the same again.

You can tell this book is old – look at the use of ‘one’ and the colons! But, the writing doesn’t feel dated. In fact, reading it now gives the impression that it’s a book written recently, but SET in the past. Everyone has their strange favourite book-themes, mine is kidnapping. This book is special in that doesn’t just deal with the kidnapping – that takes up about half of the book – it also deals with the aftermath. Jonathan, the son of a business tycoon, is extremely claustrophobic, but he faces his capture and the prospect of death very maturely. This is as good a book as I remember it being when I first read it.

'He didn’t see how he was going to even notice if he lost consciousness, because there was so little to show for being alive, except the spreading pain of cramps which he would have been all too happy to forego. There was, curiously, no sense of time: time was only as long as he could breathe, and time was running out.' - Page 22

'He could see one solitary star between the clouds, and it’s unwinking eye transfixed him with this extraordinary sense of his own being, because shortly he wouldn’t be.' - Page 65