REVIEW: Terry's Best Term
Dec. 13th, 2014 08:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllTerry’s Best Term: Evelyn Smith Blackie (an inscription reveals that my copy was a gift in Christmas 1959, although the content suggests that it was first published during the interwar period, and an article in Folly says it was 1926,)
She thought of Terry, and her firm little face softened. She liked Terry, liked her tremendously. People always laughed at schoolgirl friendships, but then people laughed at mothers for thinking their babies so wonderful, at old maids for coddling their dogs—at lots of things, nearly all women’s things. Julia thought over that, and decided that it wasn’t fair.
(p. 170)
There are a lot of familiar day girl/family story elements to this book, but they’re done well, with the interest in character and sense of humour shown in Evelyn Smith’s other books that make you feel for the characters. At the start of the book, Terry Wynne is convalescing from pneumonia*, but time has not dragged, for a new family, the Martins, have moved in next door and she’s been watching them avidly. Mr Martin is a bit of a crank, rejecting all modern contrivances from cars to electricity. He found his eldest daughter Lydia cutting off her long hair something of a calamity. Along with Lydia come Cyprian (Cyp), Lucian (Stubby), Julia, baby Ambrose and Beecham the horse. As an only child, Terry is fascinated by them, especially after she discovers that Lydia and Julia are going to her school. Suddenly she wants very much to get a clean bill of health and be allowed to return to Jane Latimer’s.
For the Martins are the type of people that things happen to. The main characters along with Terry are: Lydia, the charmer; Stubby, the determined; and Julia, the independent and capable, who is Terry’s age and who becomes her special friend. Both girls profit from the friendship. Terry likes the companionship and Julia, who is taken for granted because of her vim, likes being important to someone else too.
How Julia fares in the Fourth – initially much less well than Terry, or than her sister does in the Sixth – comes together with a subplot about a scheme she and Stubby have afoot. For their father’s abhorrence of all things modern, which partly arises from nerves (perhaps something to do with the Great War, although that’s never stated explicitly in the book), has roused the opposite in his children. Labour-saving devices and fashion appeal to Lydia, while Stubbs longs to be a mechanic, and even though she loves their horse Beecham, Julia would adore to drive. Their dreams and various personalities combine with a school drive to raise funds and foiling some criminality to make for a story that, as I said, treads familiar ground, but is well done.
*Pneumonia would go on to kill the author.
She thought of Terry, and her firm little face softened. She liked Terry, liked her tremendously. People always laughed at schoolgirl friendships, but then people laughed at mothers for thinking their babies so wonderful, at old maids for coddling their dogs—at lots of things, nearly all women’s things. Julia thought over that, and decided that it wasn’t fair.
(p. 170)
There are a lot of familiar day girl/family story elements to this book, but they’re done well, with the interest in character and sense of humour shown in Evelyn Smith’s other books that make you feel for the characters. At the start of the book, Terry Wynne is convalescing from pneumonia*, but time has not dragged, for a new family, the Martins, have moved in next door and she’s been watching them avidly. Mr Martin is a bit of a crank, rejecting all modern contrivances from cars to electricity. He found his eldest daughter Lydia cutting off her long hair something of a calamity. Along with Lydia come Cyprian (Cyp), Lucian (Stubby), Julia, baby Ambrose and Beecham the horse. As an only child, Terry is fascinated by them, especially after she discovers that Lydia and Julia are going to her school. Suddenly she wants very much to get a clean bill of health and be allowed to return to Jane Latimer’s.
For the Martins are the type of people that things happen to. The main characters along with Terry are: Lydia, the charmer; Stubby, the determined; and Julia, the independent and capable, who is Terry’s age and who becomes her special friend. Both girls profit from the friendship. Terry likes the companionship and Julia, who is taken for granted because of her vim, likes being important to someone else too.
How Julia fares in the Fourth – initially much less well than Terry, or than her sister does in the Sixth – comes together with a subplot about a scheme she and Stubby have afoot. For their father’s abhorrence of all things modern, which partly arises from nerves (perhaps something to do with the Great War, although that’s never stated explicitly in the book), has roused the opposite in his children. Labour-saving devices and fashion appeal to Lydia, while Stubbs longs to be a mechanic, and even though she loves their horse Beecham, Julia would adore to drive. Their dreams and various personalities combine with a school drive to raise funds and foiling some criminality to make for a story that, as I said, treads familiar ground, but is well done.
*Pneumonia would go on to kill the author.
