Reading: Three Twins at the Crater School (254/365)

[white_hart]

Chaz Brenchley's Three Twins at the Crater School is a pastiche of classic girls' boarding school stories (particularly, I think, the Chalet School), set on a steampunky British Imperial Mars. Obviously, this was utter catnip to me, and I really wasn't disappointed. The novel features such typical boarding-school hijinks as girls having to scramble to safety and spend the night in a remote mountain hut (in this case, the peril below is the merlins, water-dwelling nonhuman inhabitants of Mars, rather than landslides or floods), spies and attempted kidnappings, as well as new girls overcoming their initial reluctance to become fully integrated in the school, pranks and parental troubles. It's simultaneously exciting and deeply soothing and cosy, and I loved it so much I immediately signed up to Brenchley's Patreon, where there is a complete second instalment and several shorter works, as well as the opportunity to read works in progress in regular instalments, which I very much look forward to doing.

Comments

[mrs_redboots]

Ooh, I might even do that. I absolutely adored "Three Twins".

[crinolinerobot]

That sounds very cool! Kim Newman's The Secrets Of Drearcliff Grange School might appeal to you. (I need to go back and reread that one.) Gail Carriger's Finishing School series, set aboard a dirigible in the 1850s, is also jolly good fun. Have you read any of those?

[white_hart]

No, I haven't, though Amazon does keep recommending them to me and they do sound fun!