A Girl’s Stronghold by E.F Pollard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Delightfully nutty in the way that only turn of the century children’s literature can be, this starts as something quite typical and then escalates to quite the heights. Were I the sort of scholar to throw around labels in a willy-nilly sort of fashion, I’d label this as Mills and Boon meets Young Adult literature, but I’m not so I’ll settle for calling this dippy and loving it for that. Any book called A Girl’s Stronghold, (with six illustrations by Victor Proud no less), featuring nuns and devoted servants and brave and noble young women would never be the sort of story to mess about.
And it doesn’t. It races from Belgium to England to France; skirting around several wars, one inevitable parental death (as ever, these books do not refrain from knocking everybody off left right and centre) and at the heart of it rests our girl. She’s called Faith (who would have thought it!!!!!!!). She’s devoted to her father, but has A PAST. Honestly, I love how melodramatic these books can be. They have absolutely no shame about them, and about halfway through A Girl’s Stronghold, the plot goes absolutely off the rails. One sandwich short of a picnic. Two stops short of Dagenham. And it doesn’t care one bit. We get death, war (like – about seven? just sort of there?), a couple of beseiged cities, a case of GOSH DOESN’T THIS GIRL REMIND ME OF SOMEBODY ELSE IF ONLY I COULD REMEMBER WHO, and it’s great. I thoroughly recommend it.
View all my reviews
Daisy May Johnson 