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.