Reading: That Boarding School Girl
Feb. 14th, 2019 07:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartAfter I read Nancy at St Bride's antisoppist lent me a couple more of Dorita Fairlie Bruce's books to try, and I thought I'd start with That Boarding School Girl, the novel to which Nancy at St Bride's is a prequel. It follows Nancy's fortunes in her first year at a large day school in a town in the South of England (which I gather is based on Farnham, which was the next town over from Fleet where we lived for all of my secondary school years); as well as the main plot, about Nancy making good and settling in to her new school, it features that classic of school stories, the School Feud; in this case, a long-running and particularly bitter feud between Maudsley Grammar School and the other local day school which, clearly, has to be overcome.
That Boarding School Girl was published eight years before Nancy at St Bride's, and I think it does feel like an earlier work; in particular, I didn't think the characters felt quite as rounded, and Nancy's transformation from heedless madcap to all-round paragon felt a bit too complete - not only does buckling down to work put her easily at the top of the form, but she performs brilliantly in a music exam, is thrust into the school cricket team at the last moment and is one of the main movers in ending the schoold feud - but it was a fun and relaxing read and made me want to seek out the rest of the series.
antisoppist lent me a couple more of Dorita Fairlie Bruce's books to try, and I thought I'd start with That Boarding School Girl, the novel to which Nancy at St Bride's is a prequel. It follows Nancy's fortunes in her first year at a large day school in a town in the South of England (which I gather is based on Farnham, which was the next town over from Fleet where we lived for all of my secondary school years); as well as the main plot, about Nancy making good and settling in to her new school, it features that classic of school stories, the School Feud; in this case, a long-running and particularly bitter feud between Maudsley Grammar School and the other local day school which, clearly, has to be overcome.That Boarding School Girl was published eight years before Nancy at St Bride's, and I think it does feel like an earlier work; in particular, I didn't think the characters felt quite as rounded, and Nancy's transformation from heedless madcap to all-round paragon felt a bit too complete - not only does buckling down to work put her easily at the top of the form, but she performs brilliantly in a music exam, is thrust into the school cricket team at the last moment and is one of the main movers in ending the schoold feud - but it was a fun and relaxing read and made me want to seek out the rest of the series.
