Dimsie Moves Up : Dorita Fairlie Bruce

Dimsie Moves Up by Dorita Fairlie Bruce

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In the world of Girlsown literature, there’s a concept of ‘the big four’. These are authors who formed the cornerstones of this genre: Elsie “Abbey” J Oxenham, Elinor “Chalet” M.Brent-Dyer, and Angela “Let’s use all the speech tags in the world” Brazil.

Dorita Fairlie Bruce is the final part of this equation. And this is my first, ever, Dimsie.

(At last! At last! Sound the trumpets, release the hounds, let loose the dogs of war for I have read a Dimsie!)

It’s sort of strange coming to a series when you’ve almost read it through other books. The Girlsown genre really isn’t that diverse (she says, ducking her head) and once you’re familiar with the main tropes, you are more than familiar with them and how they tend to reoccur in various states. It is in how they’re presented, how they’re played with, that the newness comes and the diversity kicks in.

So what is this world of Dimsie? Dimsie Moves Up is the second in the series which presents a slight problem in itself because you’re coming to characters which are already established. If you’ve not read any before it does take a while to catch up, and yes there are moments when the time scales do seem incredibly flexible. It also took me a while to work out who I should be invested for, and why, which partially reflects the nature of the genre as well (Lord knows, if you pick up a late Chalet School you will not have a CLUE who half the people are).

But what’s brilliant is the matter-of-fact reality about Dimsie and her chums. She is a lovely character, but she’s resolutely believeable at the same time. There’s a sort of common sense about her which is (alas) pretty special in the genre. She’s not too brilliant, she’s not too priggish, she is just a really nice kid. And I think that’s probably where the strength of this book lies, in the nuances between Dimsie and her form (and in the AMAZING Anti-Soppist League).

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Bride leads the Chalet School : Elinor M. Brent-Dyer

Bride Leads the Chalet School by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have a soft spot for Bride Leads the Chalet School because it’s one of those books where Important Things Happen. This is one of the ways that the Chalet School is almost impenetrable should you enter it at the wrong point. There are books full of the exploits of daughter X of pupil Y who married Doctor Z and Oh No Not That Time When Julie Lucy Had Peritonitis. This is the book in which the latter happens and in a sort of very wrong way, it’s a massive relief to get there at last. After reading “oh no, you don’t want to remind them about the time when poor Ju nearly died” and “Oh she’s going to die because she got hiccups” for what felt like a thousand books, I finally get to read about the saga.

Other things happen in Bride Leads The Chalet School. We’ve lost the wonderfully named Loveday Perowne who gets to go off to the *best* future. We gain the practically legendary Diana Skelton to the school. And even though she’s recycling the school merger plot, Brent-Dyer recycles it to great effect.

What’s also pleasing in this book is being able to see more of the Bettany house. Mollie and Dick Bettany are some of my favourite characters and the sidelining of them to India at the start of the series always feels like I’m being cheated out of them. I love being able to see the Bettany family just being their family. It’s always a pleasure to see Brent-Dyer just ease herself into familial surroundings rather than throwing people off mountains and into crevasses. When she was good, she was very good and caught the relationships between people perfectly. And the Bettany moments are full of that.

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A Pattern Of Roses : KM Peyton

A Pattern of Roses by K.M. Peyton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have a great love for KM Peyton. She’s one of the authors that has defined my attitude towards children’s literature, to what it can and could be and to what it so very often is. And so it was with great, gleeful, giddy delight that I picked this one up.

A Pattern of Roses is a dual narrative story, balancing modern day Tim Ingram’s life against the story of Tom Inskip who lived in the same house many years ago. It’s a coming of age, timeslip, sort of story which plays the tensions of the boys lives against each others and it’s one that Peyton, as ever, delivers.

“A brief, flaming sunset was scorching the horizon, inked over by a mesh of old elms and black hedgerow and circling rocks.”

If you’ve not discovered Peyton yet, that’s how she writes. A sort of vivid understatement, a painterly writer that draws her images together with a very precise control and vivid skill. She is intoxicating to read for me because I always find something new in her work. Here, she catches that subtle beauty of falling in love when you don’t ever know what love is:

“[She] put out her hand and touched his. His own hand shied away, frightened, but hers followed and took it very firmly and held it. She still walked along, not saying anything, with the primroses round her neck, and he walked beside her, very carefully, feeling that the day had come to a standstill.”

She makes me cry does Peyton, and she makes me very envious. She makes me cry at how she can just – capture – things and hold them and make you see them. She’s one of, if not, the greatest writer of children’s literature that I’ve ever read.

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A Genius At The Chalet School

A Genius at the Chalet School by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It strikes me as curious that I’ve never actually reviewed this until now. Nina Rutherford is very much a fascination of mine and so this is a book that is very much overdue a review.

Brent-Dyer once wrote a book populated solely by gifted and talented characters (The School by the River). And she did this with great success. The School By The River is a school story with a Ruritanian twist and possesses some of the most attractive characters ever to feature in the school story genre (I’m looking at you Molly). It’s strange then that in her main series, her big life-defining series, Brent-Dyer featured gifted and talented characters with almost palpable reluctance. Of course we have people like Joey, Margia, Jacynth and Nina herself but they are notable in their rarity. The Chalet School was a series built on fitting in and ‘being a real Chalet School girl’ rather than being some icon of God-Given talent. And I think that’s where this book struggles. Nina is so patently a cipher for her talent, a functionary device (have a think about how many of the ‘new girl’ books actually feature their names) that any character development is put quite patently on hold.

And yet I find A Genius At The Chalet School rather remarkable, because Brent-Dyer does something quite strange here. She delivers a plot of glorious linearity but ties herself up in knots through the spectacular un-linear nature of the new girl herself. Nina doesn’t fit in. She can’t and never will. She is a foreign object in a community that does not know how to deal with her and her wild talent.

So yes, this book is pedestrian. Spectacularly, brain dribblingly, so at points. But it’s also fascinating because of the way the Chalet School ideology is displayed, challenged and contravened all due to the presence of this new girl who really is quite unlike anyone else.

Here’s a longer piece I wrote on Nina and genius in the Chalet School series. It elaborates on some of the points mentioned above. Also this is a post I did about the nature of genius and giftedness in the wider GirlsOwn genre.

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Follow Me Down : Tanya Byrne

Follow Me Down by Tanya Byrne

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So I need to tell you something, and it’s something you may need to sit down for. I like school stories. I really, really do. I know right? It shocked me too. There’s something about the genre (something that I explore more here) that appeals to me and I think it is this. The school story is a tiny, tiny thing, set in tiny tight places with fixed boundaries and rules and demands and yet, when done well, it can be about everything in the entire world.

Byrne’s second novel after Heart-Shaped Bruise (my review of that is here) was something I’d been looking forward to ever since I heard on the Twitter that she was setting it in a boarding school. There’s not enough modern boarding school stories in this world, books that explore this genre and fling it at the shadows and bring you along for the ride.

Follow Me Down is something that I greatly, greatly laud because it does that. Byrne’s competence is unmistakeable and even managed to keep me hooked in, me who is hideous at figuring out ‘the twist’ in things and has to flick back a thousand chapters (always) to figure out what’s going on. Byrne’s got a really lovely solidity to her work, a thickness to her worlds that make them believable and make them very, very potent.

And what I really loved is that this is like the after-dark edition of a genre I rampantly love. It steps away from the double entendres and the genre mocking so many other titles seem to do, and it gives us a real and dark and powerful world where people cannot escape the things that burn them. Love, loss, obsession, lies. It’s all here and there’s nowhere for it go other than round and round until everyone’s caught up in it.

Byrne’s really good, you know? And everything should be set in a boarding school from now on. Everything. It should be a rule.

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