Second Hand Family

Second Hand Family (1965)
By Richard Parker | The Children’s Book Club
ISBN: none (families, not numbers, were the priority)
Condition: Good, with a slight charming lean to the spine
Offered by: Crappy Old Books

Some children get brand new families. Shiny, matching, straight out of the box. Others, as Richard Parker cheerfully points out, get something a bit more… previously owned.

Second Hand Family is a wonderfully 1960s children’s novel about what happens when life does not come packaged as the tidy nuclear setup the school posters promised. Instead, you get a family with history, dents, attachments, odd relatives, unexpected steps, and at least one person who doesn’t know where the teaspoons live.

What’s it about?

Without giving away the whole plot, you’re looking at something like this:

• A child (or children) suddenly finds themselves in a reassembled household:

  • new guardians or step-parents

  • extra siblings they didn’t order

  • an unfamiliar house with someone else’s wallpaper and rules

• Grown-ups insisting that “you’ll soon settle in” while clearly winging it.

• A slow, funny, occasionally painful process of working out:

  • who belongs where

  • who calls whom what

  • and whether this cobbled-together arrangement can actually feel like home.

This isn’t a saccharine fairy tale where everyone loves each other by page 10. It’s closer to real life: suspicious, awkward, often very funny, and full of small, stubborn kindnesses.

The tone: wry, warm, very human

Richard Parker has that classic mid-century children’s writer knack for:

• Taking kids’ feelings seriously

• Refusing to talk down to them

• And still managing to be entertaining rather than unbearably worthy

Expect:

• Sharp little observations about adults who don’t quite know what they’re doing

• Sibling friction, misunderstandings and the occasional spectacular strop

• Moments where you realise that “second hand” doesn’t necessarily mean “second best” – it just means everyone’s turning up with a backstory.

It’s the sort of book that quietly says, “Yes, this is weird, and yes, you’re allowed to feel odd about it,” before gently leaning you towards hope.

This particular copy

• Condition: Good – perfectly sturdy, definitely readable, and very much ready for another round of emotional reshuffling.

• The cloth boards and pages are in decent shape, with the usual mild signs of age and former ownership:

  • softening at corners

  • gentle tanning of pages

  • possibly the faint aura of having lived on a child’s bookshelf for several decades.

And:

Has slight slant to spine.

Which feels… thematically appropriate. This is not a perfectly straight, never-touched specimen. It’s a book that literally leans a bit, much like its characters leaning into a family arrangement that’s not quite standard issue.

Think of it as:

• structurally fine

• cosmetically tilted

• spiritually on-brand.

Why you might actually want this

• You collect mid-century children’s fiction that deals with real-life issues before “issue books” became A Genre.

• You like stories about step-families, foster situations or patchwork households that are honest but not bleak.

• You enjoy that flavour of 1960s British kids’ writing where everyone still calls adults “sir” or “ma’am” sometimes, but emotional chaos is quietly acknowledged.

• You have a taste for slightly obscure Children’s Book Club editions—sturdy little hardbacks from a time when libraries and book clubs did the heavy lifting of getting decent stories into young hands.

It’s also a very good candidate for re-reading as an adult and going, “Ah. So that’s what it was trying to tell me back then.”

Condition vs. Content

• Physically: Good, with that endearing spine slant which simply proves it has actually been read, not shelved purely for display.

• Emotionally: more truthful and resilient than a lot of modern “everything is fine now” endings, but still fundamentally kind.

Ideal for:

• Grown-up kids from “second hand” families who recognise the title a little too well

• Teachers, parents and librarians with a soft spot for thoughtful vintage stories

• Anyone who finds it beautifully on-the-nose that a book called Second Hand Family is being sold—in Good but slightly skew-whiff condition—by Crappy Old Books

Because sometimes the best families, like the best books, are the ones that have clearly been used, leaned on, and loved a little sideways.

Keep browsing: See more Kids books Other books by Richard Parker