Why a Booktrail?
2000s: Sometimes, a love that can lead us to do extraordinary and unimaginable things.
SAL
What you need to know before your trail
This is a story of something like survival.Sal planned it for almost a year before they ran. She nicked an Ordnance Survey map from the school library. She bought a compass, a Bear Grylls knife, waterproofs and a first aid kit from Amazon using credit cards she’d robbed. She read the SAS Survival Handbook and watched loads of YouTube videos.And now Sal knows a lot of stuff. Like how to build a shelter and start a fire. How to estimate distances, snare rabbits and shoot an airgun. And how to protect her sister, Peppa.
Because Peppa is ten, which is how old Sal was when Robert started on her.
Travel Guide
Scotland
The two girls in the story live in an unnamed city in Scotland, in Linlithgow House. This is one of three blocks named after palaces on a hill above the town and you can see the wall and sea from the balcony.
Sal prepares well for their time in the wild. She tells Peppa stories of the Dakota Sioux “who migrated to the Great Plains in the eighteenth century and built a culture based on hunting the millions of buffalo that lived on the plains in herds so big a man could ride pas tone for a whole day and not see bare ground”
They end up in rural Scotland in places called Magna Bra and Dubna Da which is a loch. Both fictional but reminiscent of the landscape across the country – beautiful but harsh if you have to live or survive there for any length of time. There is a serious side to this story of survival but it’s the childish moments that really make you realise what danger these children are in and what the older sister is trying to do for her younger sibling:
“It was cold and damp in the ferns there on the snow and leaves, but I made us stay there and counted for 180 saying elephant in between each number to make it three minutes”
Booktrail Boarding Pass: Sal
Destination: Scotland Author/Guide: Mick Kitson Departure Time: 2000s
Back to ResultsWhere Next?
