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Reading: Prefects at Vivians
Jul. 7th, 2018 09:48 amI hadn't come across Patricia K. Caldwell's Vivians series until a friend mentioned it recently when we were discussing school stories we enjoyed, so she lent me her copy of the first one, Prefects at Vivians to try.
First published in 1956 and republished by Girls Gone By in 2010, Prefects at Vivians is fairly standard school-story fare. As the title suggests, the main focus is on the prefects of the titular school, and the plot centres on the rivalry between new prefect Lesley Trevor and some of the other prefects who feel that Lesley is too irresponsible and too inclined to break rules herself to be a prefect and enforce rules for the younger girls. (I do kind of agree with the anti-Lesley brigade, as she does seem to be quite happy wandering off by herself with a complete disregard for the school rules, though she is also clearly a Good Sort and seen as a leader.) Alongside this there are the typical pranks, excursions and Scenes of Mild Peril, as well as the activities of the school's fledgling Guide company.
From the introduction I discovered that Caldwell was only seventeen when she wrote this, and that when it was accepted for publication the publishers asked her to cut the manuscript from 70,000 words to 45,000. I suspect that these two facts explain the oddities of the novel; the pacing feels a bit off, with quite a few occasions where Caldwell builds up tension only to have it resolved so easily that I was left wth a sense of anticlimax, and characters being introduced in rather a haphazard way (we find out some key background of one of the main characters in the very last chapter), while there are also a lot of named background characters who only appear once, and it often feels as if we're supposed to recognize them even when we haven't seen them before. Despite this, I thought the novel had a definite charm and it was an enjoyable read if not a great one.
First published in 1956 and republished by Girls Gone By in 2010, Prefects at Vivians is fairly standard school-story fare. As the title suggests, the main focus is on the prefects of the titular school, and the plot centres on the rivalry between new prefect Lesley Trevor and some of the other prefects who feel that Lesley is too irresponsible and too inclined to break rules herself to be a prefect and enforce rules for the younger girls. (I do kind of agree with the anti-Lesley brigade, as she does seem to be quite happy wandering off by herself with a complete disregard for the school rules, though she is also clearly a Good Sort and seen as a leader.) Alongside this there are the typical pranks, excursions and Scenes of Mild Peril, as well as the activities of the school's fledgling Guide company.
From the introduction I discovered that Caldwell was only seventeen when she wrote this, and that when it was accepted for publication the publishers asked her to cut the manuscript from 70,000 words to 45,000. I suspect that these two facts explain the oddities of the novel; the pacing feels a bit off, with quite a few occasions where Caldwell builds up tension only to have it resolved so easily that I was left wth a sense of anticlimax, and characters being introduced in rather a haphazard way (we find out some key background of one of the main characters in the very last chapter), while there are also a lot of named background characters who only appear once, and it often feels as if we're supposed to recognize them even when we haven't seen them before. Despite this, I thought the novel had a definite charm and it was an enjoyable read if not a great one.
