A Fortunate Name

Cousins Quartet #2

by Margaret Mahy

As the only Bancroft in a family of Fortunes, Lolly has always felt left out of her Fortune cousins' exclusive gang but when her parents separate Lolly discovers a new inner strength and aspects of kinship that go beyond names.

Genres: Childrens

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Margaret Mahy was a well-known New Zealand author of children's and young adult books. While the plots of many of her books have strong supernatural elements, her writing concentrates on the themes of human relationships and growing up.

Her books The Haunting and The Changeover: A Supernatural Romance both received the Carnegie Medal of the British Library Association. There have 100 children's books, 40 novels, and 20 collections of her stories published. Among her children's books, A Lion in the Meadow and The Seven Chinese Brothers and The Man Whose Mother was a Pirate are considered national classics. Her novels have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Italian, Japanese, Catalan and Afrikaans. In addition, some stories have been translated into Russian, Chinese and Icelandic.

For her contributions to children's literature she was made a member of the Order of New Zealand. The Margaret Mahy Medal Award was established by the New Zealand Children's Book Foundation in 1991 to provide recognition of excellence in children's literature, publishing and literacy in New Zealand. In 2006 she was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Award (known as the Little Nobel Prize) in recognition of a "lasting contribution to children's literature".

Margaret Mahy died on 23 July 2012.

On 29 April 2013, New Zealand’s top honour for children’s books was renamed the New Zealand Post Margaret Mahy Book of the Year award.

For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret...

Reviews

[Sarah Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

* I think Lorna was a little premature telling her daughter Lolly that they were going to stop being Bancrofts, and instead revert to her maiden name of Fortune after one fight with her husband.
* Lolly immediately talking to her cousins and telling them that her parent's were getting divorced and that she would be a Bancroft seemed a bit premature also.
* Lolly's paternal grandmother did not seem very nice at all. Referring to Lolly as 'the child' instead of calling her by her name was a little odd. It was funny how Lolly scared her by jumping out of the back of the car wearing an owl mask 🤣
* And now the Fortune cousins have let Lolly join their gang anyway, even though she's still a Bancroft. If they'd just done that in the first place, there wouldn't have been need for any of the drama.

[Elise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another short and sweet little story. I liked the first one better, but I did enjoy this. I liked most that she gets to join the gang (and of her own volition, not because of Pete). She showed pluck, and I like that.

[Sharon Buxton · Rating 2 out of 5]

D. fiction, upper elementary; family discord, from stash, discard

[Mir · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm glad Lolly got her own book; she seemed so left out of everything in the first book. I wish there had been a little more interaction with the cousins here. Another 20-30 pages, concentrated toward the end of te book, would have made it much stronger. As it was it seemed incomplete and the end felt very abrupt.