feather_ghyll

Sally Travels to School: Muriel Fyfe

This rather short book (published in Blackie’s Summit library) is a quick and breezy read, ( Read more... )
[Lightly edited 30/5/25.]

Here’s my annual round-up of highlights from 2018 posts. ( Read more... )

Last year's post.

Captain Anne: Dorita Fairlie Bruce Sprong Books (Halycon Library)

It’s been a while since I posted, because, sadly for me, it’s been a while since I read any books. I’m going to be making up for that over the next few days, I hope and intend.

As I’ve probably said before, I came across the Springdale books by Dorita Fairlie Bruce before her Dimsie series, ( Read more... )

Last May, I posted a list of links with the title 'LINKS: VARIOUS', saying ‘Here are some links I have meant to post for a good long while’. This is the case again, only the links are different:

Here’s an enthusiastic review of Daddy Long-Legs (I must find a copy of Dear Enemy!)

And in the same series of ‘Squee’ features, one for The Blue Castle (the comments praise A Tangled Web, which is one of the few LMM books I don’t own…yet).

Here's an overview of the Dimsie series and its appeal which led me to something similar about the Abbey girls series.

The confessions of a sci-fi and fantasy bookseller (some of this is specific to SFF, but some points would be echoed by other booksellers, I think.)

That Boarding School Girl: Dorita Fairlie Bruce (Oxford University Press)


‘But that was not the way of the Lower Fifth, who did nothing by halves, except, perhaps, their lessons’ (p. 153).

It amuses me that OUP published this when Girton gets name checked.

I enjoyed this much more than I expected, more than the Dimsie books by DFB that I’ve read of late. This is set after the first world war, when women went to Girton...and came out of it to be a chauffeur to nieces and assorted schoolgirls, and then got married. It was a time without telephones, which would have resolved one plotline.

It’s got an unusual premise: ( Read more... )

I've mainly been reading:

To Davy Jones Below: Carola Dunn

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Under a Cornish Sky: Liz Fenwick

( Read more... )

Clover Cottage: Frances Cowan.

( Read more... )

The League of the Links: E. M. de Foubert

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And I got a bundle of Angela Brazil books for a reasonable price per book.

Dimsie and the Jane Willard Foundation (The Dimsie short stories): Dorita Fairlie Bruce, Girls Gone By, 2011

I first came across Dorita Fairlie Bruce via the Springdale books, and until I bought this collection, I owned an equal amount of Dimsie and Springdale books. If I ever do get a complete collection of the Dimsie books, I should probably read them in order!

Anyway, this is a complete collection of the stories about Dimsie and her school written by Fairlie Bruce for various annuals. They are ( Read more... )

I’ll post an overview of a few books I’ve read over the holidays eventually, but this post is a look back at 2015, following a tradition started by my first post of 2015 when I said I looked forward to the next adventures of Wells and Wong. Well, Arsenic for Tea by Robin Stevens (in which the 1930s schoolgirls investigate another mystery, this time in Daisy Wells’s country house home) lived up to my expectations. I enjoyed Kate Saunders’s Beswitched, originally published a few years ago, but taking the reader back to a 1930s boarding school, a fraction more, even. I loved reading Jane of Lantern Hill by L.M. Montgomery and Gail Carriger’s Etiquette & Espionage.

Turning to hadrbacks, I enjoyed The Little Betty Wilkinson by Evelyn Smith, even though I think she’s written better books. I did read a book each by the ‘big four’: Elinor M. Brent-Dyer’s Chudleigh Hold, Sally’s Summer Term by Dorita Fairlie Bruce, Tomboys at the Abbey by Elsie J. Oxenham, which I didn’t review, and For the School Colours by Angela Brazil.

(In the first paragraph, I build up to my favourite and do the opposite in the second.)

Perhaps the best book I read this year was ‘Rose Under Fire’ by Elizabeth Wein, which is wonderful and harrowing, and I feel incapable of writing about it. I also really loved Helena McEwen’s Invisible River.

I reread Katherine L. Oldmeadow’s The Fortunes of Jacky, which stands the test of time, and now I have no more Oldmeadows to reread. I am, obviously, looking out for more by her in all the shops that sell second-hand books! I hope to read the next case Hazel Wong writes up and the second in the Finishing School series, but I expect to read EBD's 'Fardingales' as I have a copy in the depths of my 'to read' pile.

Sally’s Summer Term: Dorita Fairlie Bruce. Blackie 1961.

You mustn’t grumble when you get what you wished for! This is a moral for me, not from the story. After reading quite a few girls own books where the main character is a new girl, remarkable in some way, I wanted a story about an established schoolgirl. Here is one – the third, I believe, in the Sally series, which I haven’t come across before, although I have Springdale and Dimsie books, and, indeed, the one where they cross over.

So, ( Read more... )