REVIEW: Well Done, Denehurst!
Apr. 28th, 2011 09:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllBefore posting this, I feel I should mention that I overwrote the review I drafted immediately after finishing this book. Said draft has achieved mythic status in my mind. I'm sure I expressed myself wonderfully in it. What I have to offer here is what I scrambled up from memory.
Well Done, Denehurst!: Gwendoline Courtney. Girls Gone By publishers. 2005
But Avice did not answer. She was staring in perplexity at her captor. Then suddenly recognition showed in her eyes.
"You!" she gasped. "So it's you!"
This is a slimmer volume (by some forty pages) than its prequel and the title is misleading. Sisters Elaine and Moira, their chum Avice and her brother Bob are invited to join Cousin Deryk and his new wife Vere in a New Forest cottage over the summer holidays. Deryk asks them to help him hunt down some fifth columnists/spies in the area, as he has three suspects and can't keep an eye on all three at the same time. The girls are ordered not to mention Denehurst, for fear of a link being made to their successful foiling of spies there. But when Vere is called away by a convenient family crisis and Deryk receives a head wound while spying at night, the youngsters are left in charge of the house and the mission. The first doesn’t seem to be a problem at all (I kept wondering who was getting the milk and other supplies, although the worry didn't bear down on the characters). They somehow manage to provide themselves with piles of sandwiches for their continual spying. I found this lack of grounding the story in reality disappointing given Courtney’s family books.
Obviously the school strand has been dropped (instead, we get Bob, who is as reckless as Moira and can't be expected to make up for a whole school) and so has the theme of what ordinary schoolchildren can do to be part of the cause for an adventure that no reader could really expect to emulate. Again, the patriotism and propaganda are rampant – understandably so, with Bob in particular being very John Bullish. A pacifist (who is not quite the extreme figure that Miss Marshall aka the Dumpling was in the last book) influences a soldier to desert, although the deserter sees what Bob would define as sense when faced with a real-life Nazi doing a villainous deed. Deryk tries to explain (but not very hard) that things are more complicated than the way that Bob sees them. But the flow of the story isn't concerned with that.
One thing that Courtney did do well was carry on the characterisation of the first book. Avice and Elaine are more mature and sensible than the other two, Elaine is plagued by imagination, and her German-speaking skills come in handy again, as does Moira’s fearlessness, but it’s not enough to combat the feeling of disposability created by the book.
Well Done, Denehurst!: Gwendoline Courtney. Girls Gone By publishers. 2005
But Avice did not answer. She was staring in perplexity at her captor. Then suddenly recognition showed in her eyes.
"You!" she gasped. "So it's you!"
This is a slimmer volume (by some forty pages) than its prequel and the title is misleading. Sisters Elaine and Moira, their chum Avice and her brother Bob are invited to join Cousin Deryk and his new wife Vere in a New Forest cottage over the summer holidays. Deryk asks them to help him hunt down some fifth columnists/spies in the area, as he has three suspects and can't keep an eye on all three at the same time. The girls are ordered not to mention Denehurst, for fear of a link being made to their successful foiling of spies there. But when Vere is called away by a convenient family crisis and Deryk receives a head wound while spying at night, the youngsters are left in charge of the house and the mission. The first doesn’t seem to be a problem at all (I kept wondering who was getting the milk and other supplies, although the worry didn't bear down on the characters). They somehow manage to provide themselves with piles of sandwiches for their continual spying. I found this lack of grounding the story in reality disappointing given Courtney’s family books.
Obviously the school strand has been dropped (instead, we get Bob, who is as reckless as Moira and can't be expected to make up for a whole school) and so has the theme of what ordinary schoolchildren can do to be part of the cause for an adventure that no reader could really expect to emulate. Again, the patriotism and propaganda are rampant – understandably so, with Bob in particular being very John Bullish. A pacifist (who is not quite the extreme figure that Miss Marshall aka the Dumpling was in the last book) influences a soldier to desert, although the deserter sees what Bob would define as sense when faced with a real-life Nazi doing a villainous deed. Deryk tries to explain (but not very hard) that things are more complicated than the way that Bob sees them. But the flow of the story isn't concerned with that.
One thing that Courtney did do well was carry on the characterisation of the first book. Avice and Elaine are more mature and sensible than the other two, Elaine is plagued by imagination, and her German-speaking skills come in handy again, as does Moira’s fearlessness, but it’s not enough to combat the feeling of disposability created by the book.
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