Nayana Currimbhoy, Miss Timmins’ School for Girls
I wanted very much to like this more but it felt like a bunch of disparate elements thrown together without enough commitment to really explore any of them. Reviewed for TSG here....
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Reading (and rereading) Antonia Forest
I don’t remember how old I was (eight or nine, judging from memories of where I read it) when I first found a copy of Antonia Forest’s End of Term. It was secondhand, and the last few pages were...
View ArticleAutumn Term (AF 1)
(Part of my readthrough of Antonia Forest’s Marlow series) Autumn Term is the first of the Marlow books, and one of Forest’s school stories. It was published in 1948 and in some ways follows the...
View ArticleEnd of Term (AF 4)
(Part of my readthrough of Antonia Forest’s Marlow series) My first Forest book, as I mentioned in the introduction linked to above. It is also the best school story ever written. In terms of plot,...
View ArticlePaul Murray, Skippy Dies
I tend to think I’m not harsh enough on most things I review, but have recently been made aware that this is not an opinion shared by everyone. So for last week’s column I went with a book I could gush...
View ArticleRonald Searle, St Trinian’s: The Entire Appalling Business
In last week’s Left of Cool column I talked about school stories. Again. (I’d apologise to those of you who are sick of hearing me do this, but …no.) ********************************************** I...
View ArticleRobin Stevens, Murder Most Unladylike
I bought Stevens’ book about ten minutes after I’d discovered its existence (via Daisy Johnson and Farah Mendlesohn, who both had good-to-gleeful things to say about it). So obvious was it that it was...
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Bhimrao Ambedkar, The Boy Who Asked Why/The Strange Haunting of Model High...
Sowmya Rajendran and Satwik Gade, Bhimrao Ambedkar: The Boy Who Asked Why This was one of the picture books on the Hindu/Goodbooks shortlist, and has text by Sowmya Rajendran, who’s generally reliable....
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Alice Pung, Laurinda
I only discovered a few days ago (when I saw the Reading While White review of the book) that Alice Pung’s Laurinda had been retitled Lucy and Linh in its American edition. My own copy of the book is...
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Swapna Dutta, Juneli’s First Term, Juneli at Avila’s, An Exciting Term
(I wrote most of this last year and for some reason abandoned it in draft form. Recently I read another series of girls’ school stories from India, and thought that before I wrote about them I should...
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