Autumn Term

It is a lamentable pity that the rest of this series is so difficult to come by. I picked this up because it was supposed to be representative of girl's school stories. If my reading in the genre so far is any indication, it is nothing of the sort. It's so much better than most of the school stories I've read so far, which tend to be peopled with rather two-dimensional characters and predictable plot twists. The Marlow twins and their accomplices are vastly more entertaining than, say, the denizens of Enid Blyton's work. This is the first book in a series of books that all center on the Marlow family. In it, the two youngest members of the family head off to school for the first time, eager to prove themselves worthy of the family reputation for excellence. They swiftly discover that they're unlikely to make a name for themselves in academics or sports, and even the Girl Guides is closed to them due to a nasty misunderstanding (I stayed up long past my bedtime to find out what went down at the Guides court of honor). So the girls are forced to find more creative ways to try and make a name for themselves, which result in escapades both amusing and distressing. Something I especially enjoyed about Forest's writing that I haven't seen in other school stories so far is dynamic characters. The good characters are not always good and the bad characters don't always stay bad. Most of them grow and change as the story and the school year progress, until the reader is left, at the end, with a very different group of girls than the one at the beginning of the story. The Malory Towers books, and even Angela Brazil's less-cardboard-filled books always seem to treat of a heroine who is good, who has good friends and who only gets in trouble because of misunderstandings as opposed to any actual wrongdoing. The antagonists in these stories are always portrayed as without redeeming merit, and they always get some kind of richly-deserved comeuppance in the end. In Forest's portrayal, everybody makes the occasional poor choice, and everybody has a chance to make up for it later, though not everyone chooses to take advantage of that chance. Even then, there are no anvils waiting to drop on those who choose not to redeem earlier mistakes. It's refreshing.

If you are used to school stories like Enid Blyton's and Elinor M Brent-Dyer's, you might find this a welcome change of pace. This painfully observant book about boarding school and the inner lives of young women is at times sarcastic, bitingly witty, thought-provoking, and touching. Nicola is one of my favorite girl protagonists; while I am certain I would have been scorned by her and the other self-assured Marlows, I love getting into their world and experiencing the embarrassingly realistic observations about the lives of girls and young women. Antonia Forest writes with such precision and skill that I find myself nodding in recognition of truths that I have never noticed before. This is the first book in the series, and The Marlows and the Traitors is next, in which the Marlow girls and their brothers have an adventure outside of the school setting.