feather_ghyll (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
feather_ghyll) wrote2011-11-20 09:03 pm
feather_ghyll) wrote2011-11-20 09:03 pm
REVIEW: Secrets at St Jude's: New Girl
Secrets at St Jude's: New Girl: Carmen Reid. Corgi Books, 2008.
The new girl at the illustrious old school is Gina Peterson, a Californian who has exasperated her mother by her latest spoiled brat stunt - so much so that she decided to send her daughter away to her old school. As Gina has mainly been thinking of school as a place where her only worries are looking cool and which boy to flirt with, she's horrified to be sent to a single-sex boarding school in Edinburgh (wherever that is) to follow in her high-achieving mother's footsteps.
But the girls she will share her dormitory with aren't impressed with being joined by a newcomer either. Or not at first, anyway. Soon Glaswegian super-shopper Amy; Niffy (upper class, loves her horse, good at sport, has aplomb in a crisis, really named Luella); and conscientious Nin of Daffodil dorm have closed protective ranks around Gina against horrible day girl Penny and their nemesis of a housemistress, The Neb. Life is not a boy desert, by any means, either, but this is chiefly a book about friendship. Amy has shared a room with Niffy since the age of ten - their conversations on the fire exit are really touching; and all four have secrets or worries about their home lives that they gradually share or uncover over the term.
It's a breezy read, although I kept coming across details that kept throwing me, and some of the things that you'd expect to cause a culture clash for an American...didn't. There's also a bit too much of a distance between the author and the characters. It starts when the author describes how Gina doesn't see herself. It's partly because of the comic tone, and yes, the girls hormones' and naivete do make them act like mad things, but I felt I was being invited to laugh at them a little too much. The stereotype of boarding schools looms quite large - the girls have a running joke with a waiter about midninght feasts. But they do have a couple, sort of. Well, one is sharing the spoils of a biscuit raid, the other unvolved BOYS! IN THEIR DORM!!! AND BEER!!!! Not to mention things that I don't remember even happening in Trebizon! There's also a more conventional staple of traditional boarding school stories - the bonkers hockey game. Gina isn't quite a Remarkable New Girl - she finds out that she's quite conventional and responds well to the orderly teaching style and way of life at St Jude's. Reid's attention moves on to Gina's dorm mates and it's in the girls' interaction with each other that the book won me over the most. So I'll probably pick up sequels second hand if they come my way, but I think I might have preferred it if the writer had played it straighter.
Edited on 3 July 2017
The new girl at the illustrious old school is Gina Peterson, a Californian who has exasperated her mother by her latest spoiled brat stunt - so much so that she decided to send her daughter away to her old school. As Gina has mainly been thinking of school as a place where her only worries are looking cool and which boy to flirt with, she's horrified to be sent to a single-sex boarding school in Edinburgh (wherever that is) to follow in her high-achieving mother's footsteps.
But the girls she will share her dormitory with aren't impressed with being joined by a newcomer either. Or not at first, anyway. Soon Glaswegian super-shopper Amy; Niffy (upper class, loves her horse, good at sport, has aplomb in a crisis, really named Luella); and conscientious Nin of Daffodil dorm have closed protective ranks around Gina against horrible day girl Penny and their nemesis of a housemistress, The Neb. Life is not a boy desert, by any means, either, but this is chiefly a book about friendship. Amy has shared a room with Niffy since the age of ten - their conversations on the fire exit are really touching; and all four have secrets or worries about their home lives that they gradually share or uncover over the term.
It's a breezy read, although I kept coming across details that kept throwing me, and some of the things that you'd expect to cause a culture clash for an American...didn't. There's also a bit too much of a distance between the author and the characters. It starts when the author describes how Gina doesn't see herself. It's partly because of the comic tone, and yes, the girls hormones' and naivete do make them act like mad things, but I felt I was being invited to laugh at them a little too much. The stereotype of boarding schools looms quite large - the girls have a running joke with a waiter about midninght feasts. But they do have a couple, sort of. Well, one is sharing the spoils of a biscuit raid, the other unvolved BOYS! IN THEIR DORM!!! AND BEER!!!! Not to mention things that I don't remember even happening in Trebizon! There's also a more conventional staple of traditional boarding school stories - the bonkers hockey game. Gina isn't quite a Remarkable New Girl - she finds out that she's quite conventional and responds well to the orderly teaching style and way of life at St Jude's. Reid's attention moves on to Gina's dorm mates and it's in the girls' interaction with each other that the book won me over the most. So I'll probably pick up sequels second hand if they come my way, but I think I might have preferred it if the writer had played it straighter.
Edited on 3 July 2017