My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I had a long train journey and The Chalet School Wins The Trick was in my bag. It is not the most glamorous of Chalet School books, I think, but it was my read and in a strange way, it was like coming home. There is a comfort here, even in these later novels which are not the best by anybody’s metric, and this was no exception. It’s an easy, episodic read. It is not what I would call good but then, it is not what I would call bad. It just kind of is what it is. A collection of moments which sort of determinedly gather themselves towards being something. Not a capital letter sort of something but a something nonetheless. And I did think that I might end this review here but then I got to thinking about Audrey.

Audrey, for those of you unfamiliar with the text, is the head of a group of new girls in the area. They are not pupils and busy themselves with getting on the schools wick. Basically shenanigans. Somebody says “oh it’s a bit like [incident that happened in this other book]” and you, the reader, kind of go “ah yeah, the one where you did it a bit better but honestly, i still love you, i’ll let you get away with this because I get it: series are a lot, and you’ll revisit things, and it’s hard to find new things but also because you, ebd, my old chum, have earned this”.

So Audrey and her little gang go through their shenanigans and the inevitable inevitables. What’s interesting, though, is how well-drawn Audrey is. She’s an annoying teenager. Stroppy, grumpy, occasionally deeply frustrating, not actually entirely always pleasant, kind of amazing piece of writing. And she’s indicative, I think (and these are thoughts that I want to elaborate upon at some point) of a trend towards the more unlikeable schoolgirl in the later Chalet School books. Brent-Dyer writes a lot of girls. They, inevitably, share their commonalities. But the bad girls? The difficult girls? They stick out a bit, right? Because they’re interesting. They’ll get reformed by the end of the book, of course, because that’s how it works in this world, but I think Brent-Dyer actually does some of her most interesting character work about them.

And in this, Audrey has a moment of growth that left me suddenly emotional on the train. I, a dehydrated husk in the heat, a grumpy train-rider counting down the minutes until my destination, wondering what the point of reserving a seat was if the train system itself does not share this information with others, questioning all of my life choices, was moved. MOVED. By a Chalet School book this late in the series! In this economy! What is life!




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