Tag: Girl’s Own fiction

Children's books, children's books, series

Girl’s Own Series: Dimsie

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Happy Friday everyone. If all goes to plan I should be on my way to Book Con at the moment, so in honour of a long weekend of bookish delights focused on literature for school girls in the twentieth century I’ve got a Girl’s Own boarding school series for you this week.

Dimsie is Daphne Isobel Maitland and she is the heroine of nine stories – seven set at her school, The Jane Willard Foundation, and two at her family home. As you can see from the photo I’ve read six of the and the missing ones are on my purchase list for conference this weekend. The name Dimsie comes from her initials D I M in case you hadn’t realised and the books follow her from her first year at the school all the way through to her final year as Head Girl. There were originally seven books in the series, but the final two were written in response to reader requests and the final one is actual set during World War Two when Dimsie is married. They were published across a 20 year period starting in 1921, and as was often the case with school series in this era there were also short stories published in various annuals.

Dorita Fairlie Bruce is one of the names when it comes to Girl’s Own boarding school books for girls along with Angela Brazil, Elinor M Brent Dyer (Chalet School), Elsie Oxenham (the Abbey books) and depending on your point of view Enid Blyton. The Chalet School will always be my favourite (and in writing this I’ve astonishingly realised that I’ve never written a proper series post about them so I must rectify that at some point) because those are the ones that were still in print when I was little and so were the ones I could get hold of from the library or buy for myself (see also Drina and Sadlers Wells) but DFB is my favourite of the ohers, all of which I first read as an adult, which is obviously a different experience to when you’re seven or eight and you first come across the idea of a boarding school.

I wrote about Dimsie, Head Girl back when I first read that and it’s fair to say that Dimsie is, like many other a boarding school heroine, a girl that somehow manages to get away with things that others wouldn’t for: Reasons. Dimsie is able to talk to prefects on their level when she’s a junior and have conversations with teachers (and the head!) that others wouldn’t be able to get away with. And yet you still like her. She’s a good friend, she’s not annoyingly smart or talented, and she cares about people. The thing you will have heard of from Dimsie (if you have heard of anything that is) is the Anti-Soppists League – which is Dimsie and her friends in league to not to go soppy over senior pupils or teachers or anyone. And the books follow the usual rules of boarding school – inter pupil drama, trouble with the juniors, trouble with a pupil who isn’t quite undertanding the rules of the school or is out for herself not the group, sports rivalries and illnesses, with the odd exceptional event thrown in – which are where they can be a bit bonkers. The Chalet School has handy mountains and lakes (and Nazis) to provide opportunities for drama, but being set in Britain, DFB has had to come up with her own ideas – which include stolen old masters and secret passages.

As ever there are some old fashioned stereotypes and language that isn’t acceptable today in here which means that I won’t be lending them to the young readers in my life, but they’re also unintentionally hilarious at times and I find them really really readable. This is another day when its not so much a suggestion to read if you’re not already interested in this sort of book, but if you are you really should try one. They’re miles better (to my mind) than Elsie Oxenham! Fingers crossed that I can lay my hands on the missing ones in the book sale.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Book of the Week, Children's books, children's books, Forgotten books

Book of the Week: Vicki Finds the Answer

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Another week, another BotW pick that is a little bit niche. But on the bright side, it’s another of my acquisitions from Book Con, so at least I’m bringing the tbr-pile down a little. And hoo boy, the plot to this one is crazy.

This is the second in the Vicki Barr, Flight Stewardess series, and it should be noted I haven’t read the first. Vicki is newly graduated from the stewardess school and is now being sent out on her first flights with Federal airlines. She’s living in a flat with five other stewardesses and has a bit of romance going on with a handsome co-pilot. SHe’s working on a short hop line and on one of her flights she encounters a young woman called Joan who is clearly in some sort of trouble and ends up helping save a timber business. Yes, you read that right a timber business. I now have a rudimentary understanding of how the timber business worked in late 1940s America, as well as the methods of fire-watching and fire fighting that were in place for forested areas. You weren’t expecting that were you? Me neither.

I feel fairly safe in telling you this, because I don’t think any of you are going to be buying this one. So I also don’t mind spoiling the plot a bit further and telling you that Vicki also rescues her younger sister from drowning in an icy pond, takes a crew of hunters up on a flight to a shooting trip – and one of them shoots a window out on the plane on the way – and that the denouement of the timber plot involves landing the plan on a track in the middle of the fire and then a life or death fight. All this in under 200 pages. You’re welcome.

The good news is that unlike her British equivalent, Shirley Flight, Vicki’s plane doesn’t crash. Shirley is in a worrying number of crashes over the course of her series, but in this one at least Vicki makes it safely down to earth at the end of all of her flights. It’s slightly random that a teenage air hostess is the one to work out how Joan’s father’s business partner is trying to put him out of business, and also that the guy who is organising the hunting trip is also a timber baron, but coincidences like that are the stuff of Girl’s Own adventure stories. And I love them for it.

There are fifteen other books in the Vicki Barr series and I’d happily read more if I can lay my hands on them at a sensible price because this is my sort of crazy. And unlike some of the other books of the ear, I didn’t spot any racism. Which is a low bar to be cleared, but there it is and the same can’t be said about some of the Shirley Flight Books. Helen Wells is also responsible for the majority of the books in the somewhat better know Cherry Ames series about a peripatetic nurse, some of which I’ve read as well and which are generally easier to get hold of.

My copy came from one of the sales at Book Con (the dealer one I think) and as it’s an American series, they’re not the easiest to lay your hands on if you want them. I can see a couple on the sales sites, but although the actual books are cheap there’s often a hefty whack of postage attached to them because they need to be shipped from somewhere else. But as I don’t think you’re going to be buying them anyway, it doesn’t matter – I just hope you’ve found this as entertaining as I did when I was reading the book!

Happy Reading!

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: November Quick Reviews

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We’re into December now and I have lots more Christmassy books to tell you about, but today I’m sticking with the quick reviews – because after all, everyone needs a break from Christmas at some point in December!

Better than Fiction by Alexa Martin

As previously mentioned, Alexa Martin wrote some of my favourite American Football romances, and this is her second standalone rom-com. Drew has inherited her beloved Grandmother’s book store in Colorado, and feels way over her head as a self-proclaimed non-reader. Jasper is an author who comes to the store to do a reading and event and who decides to try and change her mind about books in return for her help with his settings for his new novel. I’m not usually a fan of people tryng to turn others into readers – or telling them that they just haven’t found the right things to read yet, but this actually manages to make it work. Drew and Jasper are engaging characters and the gang of old ladies are a delight. Plus Martin makes hiking in Colorado sound so beautiful that even I started thinking that it might be fun – and I *hate* hiking

Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra*

Cover of Mercury Pictures Presents

This tells the story of Maria Lagana, an Italian in Los Angeles in the 1940s. I really like stories about the movie industry, and stuff set in World War Two and this is both of those – split between Mussolini’s Italy and California, it looks at the immigrant experience in America in war time and the risks that people will take to survive and the sacrifices people will make for the people they love. If you’ve read non-fiction (or fiction) about the studio system or the Hollywood blacklist, this might well be of interest to you.

Chester House Wins Through by Irene Smith

And finally another from my Book Con haul and this makes it onto this list as it’s a massive curio really – a book about a girls school where there is rivalry between the day girls and the boarders. That’s not unusual in itself – but here, the day girls have their own house and are deeply unpopular with the rest of the school for not pulling their weight and for behaving badly in town. It’s also from the late 1960s so it has a side order of society changing and girls wanting to go out and do things in the evenings and not be so protected. So far, so interesting, except there’s a lot of talking about doing things, and not a lot of actual doing on the page. The day girls do turn it around, but it has to be said that there’s not a lot of likeable characters here. One for the Girls Own collectors really.

Happy Wednesday everyone!

Book of the Week, Children's books, children's books, Forgotten books

Book of the Week: Strangers in Fleet Street

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This week’s BotW returns to my old stomping ground of Girl’s Own fiction.  However it is slightly out of my usual wheel house in that it’s not a school story, but a career book. Compared to my reading of school stories, I haven’t read many career books, but one of my favourite books that my mum passed on from her childhood was Shirley Flight, Air Hostess so a book in a series called Sally Baxter, Girl Reporter definitely appealed to me.  I found it in the Oxfam Bookshop in York (on the same trip that I picked up two Oxenhams and Dorita Fairlie Bruce) and I bought it, because after all, I am a journalist after spending my childhood pretending to be one, so what could be more perfect?!But this is definitely a recommendation for people who are afficiados of the genre – because it has some… let’s call them issues.

Hardback copy of Strangers in Fleet Street

So, Strangers in Fleet Street is apparently the 15th book in the Sally Baxter series and it sees Sally, who is a teenager working as a reporter at a national newspaper, taking charge of a group of foreign readers of the Evening Cry (her paper) who won a competition to spend two weeks in London.  She’s their guide – but she’s also hoping to get some stories from their visit.  Sally soon makes friends with most of the visitors but a series of disappearances – of money, of earrings and of a person – lead to suspicion being thrown on her little group and Sally is determined to unmask the real culprit – not just for the scoop but to save her new friend’s reputations.

This ticked pretty much all of my boxes – it’s got a mystery and a bit of adventure.  It has a fun cast of characters and it has a lead character who is doing an interesting job, in a male-dominated profession.  OK Sally may be on human interest duty in this book, but she’s definitely doing the job and she’s not the only one – there’s a more senior woman reporter too.  Looking at the information about the other titles in the series that I found here, it seems that Sally seems to get a lot of the softer stories – as opposed to crime, trials or politics, but then court rooms and council meetings are hard to make sound exciting – but a lot of it involves globe-trotting.  Even without that list, Sally mentions trips to Hong Kong and North Africa – so it does sound like an exciting and appealing life, which has got to be one of the major aims of a career novel.  My quibbles with it are all around some of the rather old-fashioned (putting it nicely) attitudes.  Sally herself is very fair but the way the young North African boy is portrayed is definitely very stereotypical and of its time.  And the resolution to the mystery involved another trope that I’m not very keen on, but I can’t say more than that because it’s a huge spoiler.  So lets say that I won’t be lending this to my 10-year-old niece.  But if you are a fan of Girl’s Own fiction and know where its weaknesses and blind spots are, this is a very enjoyable way to spend a few hours.  And I’ve already been on the second hand book sites looking for more in the series.

As I mentioned, my book came from a charity bookshop, the secondhand dealers have lots of copies of various books in this series (please don’t beat me to them) but unless this is your secret niche book love, it’s probably not going to be one for you- and if it is, you already know how to source this sort of thing, so no links this week!

Happy Reading!