Nancy at St. Bride’s by Dorita Fairlie Bruce
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
While this is nominally the story of Nancy’s intensely chaotic first term at St Bride’s, it’s actually the story of a friendship and its fractures and its slow careful suturing back together. The friendship in question is between two of the senior girls and it’s pushed apart due to jealousy and misunderstandings and envy and although Nancy herself is a pivotal part of this, she’s kind of also not because this is a story about people and their flaws and also their good points.
How interesting is that? Enormously, she says, answering her own question because there’s nobody else in the room, because Fairlie Bruce is telling you that there’s a thousand different ways to be human and all of them are complicated and all of them require you taking the step forward to meet the other person where they are rather than wanting them to come to you. Delicious, thoughtful, incredible, really, to present this in such a calmly matter of fact manner, to not judge but rather present life as it can be and a way through it.
Nancy, herself, is frank and charming and a bundle of hard work for any adult who comes into contact with her. If you’ve come to the series in a kind of left-handed manner, as I did, and accidentally read another before this, you might know how this book resolves itself but there’s still an intense amount of charm in the journey. The school is set on an island off the West Coast of Scotland, madly evocative in every step, the children are allowed an intense amount of freedom and take full advantage of it, you kind of desperately want to have gone there to school yourself and that’s exactly what these books should do.
Bonus points for being one of the few books I’ve come across from this period to include a student who uses a wheelchair however please do note some dated and now offensive language here.
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Daisy May Johnson 