AustLit

'Without doubt Judy was the worst of the seven, probably because she was the cleverest.'

'Her father, Captain Woolcot, found his vivacious, cheeky daughter impossible – but seven children were really too much for him and most of the time they ran wild at their rambling riverside home, Misrule.

'Step inside and meet them all – dreamy Meg, and Pip, daring Judy, naughty Bunty, Nell, Baby and the youngest, 'the General'. Come and share in their lives, their laughter and their tears.' (From the publisher's website.)

An accident on a foggy Australian country road brings together the lives of five children and five adults.

The Kirkus Review in 1969 offered the following synopsis:

Four children alone in an isolated lakeside cabin on a cold, foggy night, the oldest, Max, an edgy fifteen, the youngest, David, infantile at nine; the sound of a crash, of repeated thuds from the hairpin road on which their parents should be returning . . . the situation is so portentous, its demands so exacting and conflicting, subsequent occurrences so compelling that one wishes Mr. Southall had foregone a proclivity for simultaneous plot strands and intersecting paths, past and present. Along with the Shaw children waiting tensely in the cabin, there's Alison McPhee and her father approaching warily in his truck, their relationship as explosive as the cyanide it carries. The impact when the Shaw car overtakes and overturns the McPhee truck is more than a matter of strong parents cut down tragically, of a weak father cut away, perhaps fortunately; more, too, than the lightning tenderness between Alison and Max. For it seems–though there's little reason to anticipate it, less to accept it–that Alison is also the abandoned daughter of a television personality–a selfish, shallow type–who has a cabin near-by, and that her father was on his way there before the accident.

Source: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ivan-southall-5/finns-folly/ (Sighted: 28/5/2014)