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feather_ghyll) wrote2018-01-13 11:36 am
feather_ghyll) wrote2018-01-13 11:36 am
REVIEW: Challenge for the Chalet School
Challenge for the Chalet School: Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, Armada, 1991
Oh, look, I’m quibbling about titles again, but perhaps ‘Challenges for the Chalet School’ would have been better, with new girls to mould into Chalet Girls and the rarer, but not unknown problem of being without a headmistress. Miss Annersley has been asked to be an educational inspector, travelling to several schools in different countries to produce a report on good practice in schools. It all sounded very modern, although I wondered if the report would be available in three languages, or if anything would change in the Chalet School as a result.
Deputising for most of the term is youngish Nancy Willmot. Jolly out of school, she is believed to have enough steel for the job. Proving that she’s not the Abbess, on the first night, she uses the phrase ‘complete moron’ and then the issue of slang is discussed in at least every other chapter!
The first new girl is Evelyn Ross, aged 16. Used to being a big fish in a small pond, she doesn’t quite see why she has to continue with her education and makes a poor first impression on the girls in her form. She keeps having run-ins with Margot Maynard, now Games Prefect. Evelyn is at the Chalet School because her mother is being treated at the Sanatorium, but no-one seems to have spelled out clearly what that means to the girl. Gradually, Evelyn loses her attitude, and matures as her mother’s health worsens and improves.
However, it’s as if the author loses interest in her and decides to turn to the safer bet of a mischievous Junior Middle. Jocelyn Marvell’s guardian sent her to boarding school after one prank too many, and Jocelyn seems to be quite capable of leading her fellow 12 year olds in Lower IV into all sorts of naughtiness, some of it dangerous, some of it more like wickedness. Can the substitute Head quash them sufficiently?
Add to that what happens to Miss Ferrars (The New Mistress at the Chalet School), Nancy Wilmot’s particular friend. There’s a classic ‘did Brent-Dyer not notice how that could be interpreted?’ moment with those two. Kathy Ferrars is hors de combat, anyway, for a reason that has afflicted one Chalet girl in the past – I thought Brent-Dyer used the difference in cases well here.
There are a lot of footnotes containing titles available in Armada, as characters reference events in previous terms, particularly in the Tirol and Swiss years. Of course, this book, which I was reading for the first time, comes towards the end of the series. Stacie Benson handily steps in to teach a few lessons, and despite being at university, Mary-Lou also pays a visit.
For me, the sub-plots all deserved further development. It’s as if Brent-Dyer forgot to write the episode she was building up to involving Jane Carew, and Joey’s influence over Evelyn would be more credible if we’d seen more of it. As Joey’s role in this book is mainly to give updates on her daughter Phil’s health – good news – why not do more with Evelyn coming across the Courvoisiers at the start of the book? Why not do a little more with the Maynard girls at the school? Bits of the book are oddly perfunctory, but then it is book 59 by Armada counting, and bits of it are satisfying too. Set during the Christmas term, the book closes with the Nativity Play, and its effect on Jocelyn and Evelyn is given a lot of weight.
I was irritated by how blasé the author and the Chalet School authorities are about the trilingualism. It would be difficult for a girl (of average ability, which mean not passing the 11-plus!) who was 16 and had had no German to pick it up, certainly to a level where she could profit from reading atlases in the language and being taught in it. And what about the Continental girls of all ages who have to deal with the slangy English that’s used so much? Okay, I could believe that immersion would work better with them, especially the younger girls, but ugh there isn’t even the fig leaf of coaching!
Oh, look, I’m quibbling about titles again, but perhaps ‘Challenges for the Chalet School’ would have been better, with new girls to mould into Chalet Girls and the rarer, but not unknown problem of being without a headmistress. Miss Annersley has been asked to be an educational inspector, travelling to several schools in different countries to produce a report on good practice in schools. It all sounded very modern, although I wondered if the report would be available in three languages, or if anything would change in the Chalet School as a result.
Deputising for most of the term is youngish Nancy Willmot. Jolly out of school, she is believed to have enough steel for the job. Proving that she’s not the Abbess, on the first night, she uses the phrase ‘complete moron’ and then the issue of slang is discussed in at least every other chapter!
The first new girl is Evelyn Ross, aged 16. Used to being a big fish in a small pond, she doesn’t quite see why she has to continue with her education and makes a poor first impression on the girls in her form. She keeps having run-ins with Margot Maynard, now Games Prefect. Evelyn is at the Chalet School because her mother is being treated at the Sanatorium, but no-one seems to have spelled out clearly what that means to the girl. Gradually, Evelyn loses her attitude, and matures as her mother’s health worsens and improves.
However, it’s as if the author loses interest in her and decides to turn to the safer bet of a mischievous Junior Middle. Jocelyn Marvell’s guardian sent her to boarding school after one prank too many, and Jocelyn seems to be quite capable of leading her fellow 12 year olds in Lower IV into all sorts of naughtiness, some of it dangerous, some of it more like wickedness. Can the substitute Head quash them sufficiently?
Add to that what happens to Miss Ferrars (The New Mistress at the Chalet School), Nancy Wilmot’s particular friend. There’s a classic ‘did Brent-Dyer not notice how that could be interpreted?’ moment with those two. Kathy Ferrars is hors de combat, anyway, for a reason that has afflicted one Chalet girl in the past – I thought Brent-Dyer used the difference in cases well here.
There are a lot of footnotes containing titles available in Armada, as characters reference events in previous terms, particularly in the Tirol and Swiss years. Of course, this book, which I was reading for the first time, comes towards the end of the series. Stacie Benson handily steps in to teach a few lessons, and despite being at university, Mary-Lou also pays a visit.
For me, the sub-plots all deserved further development. It’s as if Brent-Dyer forgot to write the episode she was building up to involving Jane Carew, and Joey’s influence over Evelyn would be more credible if we’d seen more of it. As Joey’s role in this book is mainly to give updates on her daughter Phil’s health – good news – why not do more with Evelyn coming across the Courvoisiers at the start of the book? Why not do a little more with the Maynard girls at the school? Bits of the book are oddly perfunctory, but then it is book 59 by Armada counting, and bits of it are satisfying too. Set during the Christmas term, the book closes with the Nativity Play, and its effect on Jocelyn and Evelyn is given a lot of weight.
I was irritated by how blasé the author and the Chalet School authorities are about the trilingualism. It would be difficult for a girl (of average ability, which mean not passing the 11-plus!) who was 16 and had had no German to pick it up, certainly to a level where she could profit from reading atlases in the language and being taught in it. And what about the Continental girls of all ages who have to deal with the slangy English that’s used so much? Okay, I could believe that immersion would work better with them, especially the younger girls, but ugh there isn’t even the fig leaf of coaching!