REVIEW: The School on the Moor
Researching for this review, I found out that one of its sequels, Toby of Tibbs' Cross, is that book featuring a Land Girl that I was thinking of the other day. The fact that I didn't remember that I'd read about the further adventures of this character doesn't worry me particularly, but as it wasn't on my main list of girls' own stories, that suggests that it is not stored with the rest of those books, or it wasn't when I made the list to try to avoid buying second copies of books I already own.
(PS: The only tennis I saw yesterday was the entertaining Bryan twins n their way to an easy victory. Doubles always fascinates me, apart from the rat-a-tat volleying, with its psychology. There is some tennis in the book below, but it's mainly a plot device.)
Anyway:
The School on the Moor: Dorita Fairlie Bruce Oxford 1934 reprint
I enjoyed this less than I expected to. My thinking was that it was 'Dorita Fairlie Bruce' - I very much like the Springdale books and I nearly danced at finding my third Dimsie book, let alone her reputation as one of the Big Four/Five. However, reading the book, I found myself taking on a 'mother-y' attitude, and I didn't like that. I have little or no common sense in my own life, but I'm always asking sensible questions in response to fictional adventures, unless if they're too fun to resist.
Here, I wanted to know why heroine Toby couldn't be happy being friends with sensible Jill and kind Jane and the younger Pen Jordan? But no, she's attracted to difficult Dorinda (I'll get to her in a while), who is tough to befriend and due to misunderstandings thinks the worse of Toby, so Toby goes through a lot of grief to become real chums with her. And then there's the episode where Toby takes a good look at an escaped convict's eyes, decides he's honest and was unfairly convicted (make this girl a High Court judge!)and helps him escape. It turns out that he's the brother of a new mistress at the school and the fiancee of a musician Toby admires, who try their best not to involve Toby too much in a plot to get him out of the country. And the authorial voice would have us believe that this is all fine and dandy. WELL, NO, IT ISN'T. NOT ALL ESCAPED PRISONERS ARE HONOURABLE GENTLEMEN WHO WERE UNFAIRLY CONVICTED! It's not NOBLE to help them, it is, in fact as STUPID as breaking bounds to visit bogs when you don't know the country or encouraging less athletic girls to dangle out of window ledges, both behaviours being condemned and punished in this book. But HELPING ESCAPED PRISONERS IS FINE.
Good grief! This book is turning me into Molly Weasley.
Toby Barrett is the motherless daughter of a self-involved artist who has brought herself up, more or less decently, in Dartmoor. At the age of sixteen, she decides that she really needs to go to school and mix with girls of her own age (and class). She and another local girl are the first day girls ever at St Githa's, and headmistress Miss Ashley - very much the wise preceptress - wonders how they will get on with the boarders, particularly Toby, who is innocently unconventional, having been used to wander her beloved Dartmoor and discover its historic secrets. Toby is put into the sixth, headed by the capable Jill and her chum, games captain, Dorinda, who end up becoming her chums eventually.
Toby has a lot of charm - although being part of the post-Bewitched generation, I don't understand her loathing of her full name, Tabitha. How is that worse than Dorinda, anyway? And yes, here's another heroine who chooses to shorten her name into a more boyish one, because girly/girls' names are SO. HORRIBLE. Of course, one can read loads into it (though most of the girls shorten their names in this book, Jill, Dor, Pen and Gay for Gabrielle) and point out that in the Toby-Dorinda dynamic, it is Dorinda who is described as 'boyish'.
Toby's sunniness and originality are likeable, although she's short-sighted enough about certain things (the 'twist' about the Ark of the Covenant, an obsession of hers, is too obvious) that she isn't Pollyannaish and falls into naïve emotional pitfalls. However, I realised and admitted to myself as I closed the book, I really didn't like the object of her affection, Dorinda. (It comes off as something like the crush Primula Mary developed for Peggy's best friend in the early Springdale books, only, apart from being a prefect while Toby is a new girl, it's more a relationship of equals, except that Dorinda doesn't seem to reciprocate Toby's affections to quite the same pitch, although she does appreciate the local knowledge, trips and thus adventure and thrills that Toby can offer.) This lack of sympathy with one of the main driving forces of the book didn't help me like it.
Dorinda just seemed like a mix of attributes that never melded. Granted, it may be me wanting to define types too much, but she is both games captain and artistic. She is devoted to the school and fair play, but ridiculously proud and somehow both impractical and not. Gardener and head girl Gillian Ewing (the calm head girl who thinks about characters and motivations) attracted me more. Of course, that type usually does, I loved Gisela Marani and preferred Joan and Jen to Joy Abbey, even though the Dorinda's and Joy's and the way they affect the people who love them make for more exciting stories.
A lot of other characters add interest, mistress Miss Musgrave is a link to the Jane Willard Foundation (I don't know the Dimsie series that well). There are troublesome members of the junior school who cross paths with Toby, and there's a sharp-tongued classmate who doesn't like the unconventional and belittles Toby and thinks the worst of her - although this is far more in the background than a similar rivalry in Brazil's 'For the Sake of the School'. There was a part of me that wanted this to be a series about the school rather than Toby.
I still don't know what I think of the fact that we sometimes got Algernon the dog's POV. Affectation or not? It sometimes worked as a diversion or twist from whatever was consuming Toby, I suppose… Structurally, it ends weirdly, most of the book is taken up by the summer term - the holidays are given barely a sentence's attention, with no mention of how Toby found having no school to go to or companions to sepnd time with, so that a final confrontation with Dorinda can be covered.
I just expected to like this more than I did.
Comprehensive Dorita Fairlie Bruce website.
(PS: The only tennis I saw yesterday was the entertaining Bryan twins n their way to an easy victory. Doubles always fascinates me, apart from the rat-a-tat volleying, with its psychology. There is some tennis in the book below, but it's mainly a plot device.)
Anyway:
The School on the Moor: Dorita Fairlie Bruce Oxford 1934 reprint
I enjoyed this less than I expected to. My thinking was that it was 'Dorita Fairlie Bruce' - I very much like the Springdale books and I nearly danced at finding my third Dimsie book, let alone her reputation as one of the Big Four/Five. However, reading the book, I found myself taking on a 'mother-y' attitude, and I didn't like that. I have little or no common sense in my own life, but I'm always asking sensible questions in response to fictional adventures, unless if they're too fun to resist.
Here, I wanted to know why heroine Toby couldn't be happy being friends with sensible Jill and kind Jane and the younger Pen Jordan? But no, she's attracted to difficult Dorinda (I'll get to her in a while), who is tough to befriend and due to misunderstandings thinks the worse of Toby, so Toby goes through a lot of grief to become real chums with her. And then there's the episode where Toby takes a good look at an escaped convict's eyes, decides he's honest and was unfairly convicted (make this girl a High Court judge!)and helps him escape. It turns out that he's the brother of a new mistress at the school and the fiancee of a musician Toby admires, who try their best not to involve Toby too much in a plot to get him out of the country. And the authorial voice would have us believe that this is all fine and dandy. WELL, NO, IT ISN'T. NOT ALL ESCAPED PRISONERS ARE HONOURABLE GENTLEMEN WHO WERE UNFAIRLY CONVICTED! It's not NOBLE to help them, it is, in fact as STUPID as breaking bounds to visit bogs when you don't know the country or encouraging less athletic girls to dangle out of window ledges, both behaviours being condemned and punished in this book. But HELPING ESCAPED PRISONERS IS FINE.
Good grief! This book is turning me into Molly Weasley.
Toby Barrett is the motherless daughter of a self-involved artist who has brought herself up, more or less decently, in Dartmoor. At the age of sixteen, she decides that she really needs to go to school and mix with girls of her own age (and class). She and another local girl are the first day girls ever at St Githa's, and headmistress Miss Ashley - very much the wise preceptress - wonders how they will get on with the boarders, particularly Toby, who is innocently unconventional, having been used to wander her beloved Dartmoor and discover its historic secrets. Toby is put into the sixth, headed by the capable Jill and her chum, games captain, Dorinda, who end up becoming her chums eventually.
Toby has a lot of charm - although being part of the post-Bewitched generation, I don't understand her loathing of her full name, Tabitha. How is that worse than Dorinda, anyway? And yes, here's another heroine who chooses to shorten her name into a more boyish one, because girly/girls' names are SO. HORRIBLE. Of course, one can read loads into it (though most of the girls shorten their names in this book, Jill, Dor, Pen and Gay for Gabrielle) and point out that in the Toby-Dorinda dynamic, it is Dorinda who is described as 'boyish'.
Toby's sunniness and originality are likeable, although she's short-sighted enough about certain things (the 'twist' about the Ark of the Covenant, an obsession of hers, is too obvious) that she isn't Pollyannaish and falls into naïve emotional pitfalls. However, I realised and admitted to myself as I closed the book, I really didn't like the object of her affection, Dorinda. (It comes off as something like the crush Primula Mary developed for Peggy's best friend in the early Springdale books, only, apart from being a prefect while Toby is a new girl, it's more a relationship of equals, except that Dorinda doesn't seem to reciprocate Toby's affections to quite the same pitch, although she does appreciate the local knowledge, trips and thus adventure and thrills that Toby can offer.) This lack of sympathy with one of the main driving forces of the book didn't help me like it.
Dorinda just seemed like a mix of attributes that never melded. Granted, it may be me wanting to define types too much, but she is both games captain and artistic. She is devoted to the school and fair play, but ridiculously proud and somehow both impractical and not. Gardener and head girl Gillian Ewing (the calm head girl who thinks about characters and motivations) attracted me more. Of course, that type usually does, I loved Gisela Marani and preferred Joan and Jen to Joy Abbey, even though the Dorinda's and Joy's and the way they affect the people who love them make for more exciting stories.
A lot of other characters add interest, mistress Miss Musgrave is a link to the Jane Willard Foundation (I don't know the Dimsie series that well). There are troublesome members of the junior school who cross paths with Toby, and there's a sharp-tongued classmate who doesn't like the unconventional and belittles Toby and thinks the worst of her - although this is far more in the background than a similar rivalry in Brazil's 'For the Sake of the School'. There was a part of me that wanted this to be a series about the school rather than Toby.
I still don't know what I think of the fact that we sometimes got Algernon the dog's POV. Affectation or not? It sometimes worked as a diversion or twist from whatever was consuming Toby, I suppose… Structurally, it ends weirdly, most of the book is taken up by the summer term - the holidays are given barely a sentence's attention, with no mention of how Toby found having no school to go to or companions to sepnd time with, so that a final confrontation with Dorinda can be covered.
I just expected to like this more than I did.
Comprehensive Dorita Fairlie Bruce website.