REVIEW: Audrey - A New Girl
Sep. 8th, 2017 06:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllAudrey – A New Girl: Joanna Lloyd Blackie
The focus of the book is, indeed, on Audrey, who is a new girl at Bramber Manor and Shaftesbury House, but the indefinite article in the subtitle is important. She’s a variation on a certain type of fictional new girl, one who hasn’t been to a school of any kind before, but who has read a lot of boarding school stories. Lloyd has fun with the silly ideas that have filled her heroine’s head, and so did I. I would say I was lucky to read this book so soon after Breary’s ‘Give a Form a Bad Name’, which is even funnier, but the truth is I bought both when shopping somewhere where there were so many girls own books that I could pick starred authors.
Brought up by an old-fashioned grandmother, Audrey is a gullible idiot. A daydreamer, she has fond hopes of becoming The Most Popular Girl at School very quickly. Attracted by lively Lalage, she puts the best possible spin on what that young damsel tells her on Audrey’s first night and swallows it all. Apparently, the staff are a shady lot and a few girls are not the most mentally stable.
Her belief in this poppycock and her desire to get noticed lead to Audrey getting noticed, all right, but everyone at school thinks she’s a bit mad and a lot of a nuisance, until the truth that she took Lalage seriously is uncovered and becomes a huge joke.
Very gradually, Audrey stops thinking so much of herself and becomes immersed in lower school life. Instead of Lalage, she befriends the duller, but more sympathetic, twins Nora and Dora. She discovers new interests and finds her niche. Her experiences at school also help her family, dragging her grandmother into the here and now from a long-gone-by time and a more useful life, which can only be to the good for Audrey’s younger sisters.
All the characters’ habit of taking things literally wasn’t always as funny as the writer thought it was, though the ‘place name & vegetable’ formula always got a chuckle out of me. Lloyd also writes a very anti-climactic midnight feast (Audrey’s idea, inspired by books).
It was only when ‘Kate’ (Jill’s older sister) aka Catherine Maitland, an old girl, returned to Bramber Manor that I realised this was a sequel to ‘Catherine, Head of the House’ by the same author – the only book by Joanna Lloyd that I own – I first read it about fourteen years ago. I thought I might have reread it more recently, but Joanna Lloyd didn’t have a tag previously.
The focus of the book is, indeed, on Audrey, who is a new girl at Bramber Manor and Shaftesbury House, but the indefinite article in the subtitle is important. She’s a variation on a certain type of fictional new girl, one who hasn’t been to a school of any kind before, but who has read a lot of boarding school stories. Lloyd has fun with the silly ideas that have filled her heroine’s head, and so did I. I would say I was lucky to read this book so soon after Breary’s ‘Give a Form a Bad Name’, which is even funnier, but the truth is I bought both when shopping somewhere where there were so many girls own books that I could pick starred authors.
Brought up by an old-fashioned grandmother, Audrey is a gullible idiot. A daydreamer, she has fond hopes of becoming The Most Popular Girl at School very quickly. Attracted by lively Lalage, she puts the best possible spin on what that young damsel tells her on Audrey’s first night and swallows it all. Apparently, the staff are a shady lot and a few girls are not the most mentally stable.
Her belief in this poppycock and her desire to get noticed lead to Audrey getting noticed, all right, but everyone at school thinks she’s a bit mad and a lot of a nuisance, until the truth that she took Lalage seriously is uncovered and becomes a huge joke.
Very gradually, Audrey stops thinking so much of herself and becomes immersed in lower school life. Instead of Lalage, she befriends the duller, but more sympathetic, twins Nora and Dora. She discovers new interests and finds her niche. Her experiences at school also help her family, dragging her grandmother into the here and now from a long-gone-by time and a more useful life, which can only be to the good for Audrey’s younger sisters.
All the characters’ habit of taking things literally wasn’t always as funny as the writer thought it was, though the ‘place name & vegetable’ formula always got a chuckle out of me. Lloyd also writes a very anti-climactic midnight feast (Audrey’s idea, inspired by books).
It was only when ‘Kate’ (Jill’s older sister) aka Catherine Maitland, an old girl, returned to Bramber Manor that I realised this was a sequel to ‘Catherine, Head of the House’ by the same author – the only book by Joanna Lloyd that I own – I first read it about fourteen years ago. I thought I might have reread it more recently, but Joanna Lloyd didn’t have a tag previously.
