More G.O.* fiction

I've not been too brilliant this week with one thing or another, not the sort of thing that benefit from "localized heating" not that mind that when it's needed but more bigger things being unwell so between things have been doing a spot of reading as it helps keep my spirits up.

With the Secret Seven's stories I had changed from a mixture of newer copies and old paperbacks to being in hard back editions with original texts over the years as the alterations made no sense.

This lesser known author wrote Jill At Hazelmere in nineteen sixty-four and Jill Investigates both borrowing from the Girl comic strip series Wendy and Jinx school based adventures where both are Forth Formers.

It's the very sort of book I love and actually it's the first time I've owned a copy - mine's from nineteen sixty-six  although I'm sure saw a copy at boarding school in the Seventies.

Sadly the Girls Comic site which had extracts from many British girls comics including Girl that was published between nineteen fifty-one and nineteen sixty-four has disappeared as has the middlescommonroom.com site where mainly older  junior fiction was discussed.

Trying to find a G.O* or mainly G.O discussion board where such staples of the junior fiction I read back then is proving difficult.

*G.O = Girls Only, the very girl centric type of novel or comic writing usually about schools, horses and princesses.

Rent a Bridesmaid

Recently I picked up a copy of book I'd thought about getting late last year but as things are want to do with me at times I'd forgotten all about it, bought a copy  and sat across a few days reading it.

The story is about a nine year old girl, Tilly who can scarcely believe it when her best friend and class mate, Matty, is offered the role of being a bridesmaid for she is as much a tomboy as Tilly is more girly girl and really wasn't looking forward to it.
Tilly's parents had split up and the dress is very much the focus of Tilly's longing for her parents to be reunited as she missed no longer living with Mom.
After her friend had worn it and it had been cleaned, Matty offers her the dress as she could never see herself ever wearing it again and this leads into Tilly's favourite daydream of being a bridesmaid in the must beautiful dress, walking behind the bride and after talking it through with her best friend resolves to sort this by advertising herself as a Bridesmaid for rent at the local store.

This is the dress and most beautiful it is too.
The dress leads to her meeting different people such as an older couple, a same sex couple of professional people and a family who had planned a large church wedding with five other bridesmaids, all of which enrich her life.
The one thing sadly all of this cannot do is the very thing she longs for the most -to reunite her family- so when her Mom who it transpires later on hadn't been well mentally does come to see her after Tilly appears on a tv program about weddings, her hopes are dashed .
This said there does seem to be a relationship blossoming between Miss Hope her teacher and her dad and maybe if there's to be a sequel Tilly will be the bridesmaid at that wedding!
One of things I liked about it was the exploration  of the friendship between Matty and Tilly, that although being in so many ways polar opposites not just their personalities but lifestyles and that despite this they really do gel, becoming best friends. That comes over so well in how it is written showing how disagreements that for those of who remember just high emotional we were around their ages soon get minded with some tlc.
To conclude although on the face of it it's a relatively uncomplicated story about a girl and her dress it has more depth exploring the nature of friendship you can see at a more grown up level very intensely heartfelt and emotional coming over through intelligent use of subtle nuances of mood and character. It is a great joy to read.

Resting

In a world where to be honest I have not been feeling too good apart from listening to a bit of music softly while taking tablets my thoughts were on other things.

I have a bit of an fascination for oldish compilations of short stories usually written by the top authors of the day not least for the quality of the stories with believable characters and rich language that is so much the polar opposite of today's obsession with 'accessible language' that rather than stretching your knowledge of words and means actually holds it back.
They also tend to have a clear idea as to who their audience is, tailoring the topics very much to them so a compilation like this is clearly aimed for and around the interests of girls of that era rather than trying to trying to appeal to boys too which never quite worked when it came to set books for school English Lit as almost inevitably we'd be at odds about which ones we wanted to study and discuss as a group.

Read and in uniform

The weather is a bit better than it had been from the start of this week so I start with saying the last few entries that have been a little different from the the norm on this blog have been fairly well received.
I have been continuing with refreshing some items of my uniform although in certain  others areas I'm well stocked adding a  few replacement blouses and a green jumper to it.

 As most people know I usually look very much like her never happier to be wearing our school dresses although I dare say if I were to accidentally cause the netball to land though Miss Green's window I may well know it for a while!
Seeing it is early September I have been working my though some past stuff connected with roles and courses I've had that were very much paperwork heavy  tidying things up as there comes a point where most of that is no longer needed it just takes up unnecessary space with notes, bulky folders and so on.

As well, I also got around to reading Little Women although I'd had it for a while which is a timeless coming of age story of the four March sisters set in the post Civil War period in the States as though through childhood to adulthood, helped by their mother learning to navigate what it means to be a young woman from sibling rivalry to love, loss and marriage.

Judy, Patrol Leader

The idea of leadership is one that interested me so characters in what I read around that topic always appealed to me.

This is quite an old book -my copy is from nineteen-seventy- and shows it but while not perhaps the best example of Girl Only fiction is one that does tackle that topic when Judy, who does to an all girls school becomes a leader of the Girl Guides section for the school and tells of her many adventures as Patrol Leader.

Candyfloss

As it was my birthday recently, I had this new in paperback book that originally came out a year ago.

Floss's parents are divorced, and she divides up her week, spending five days with her mum, her new stepdad and her baby half-brother. The other two days Floss spends with her dad, helping him to run his greasy spoon cafe. But their simple arrangement is thrown into disarray when Floss's mum decides to move to Australia.

Making the difficult decision to stay at home, Floss moves in permanently with her dad and they muddle along happily together, surviving on chip butties and enjoying visits to the local funfair. But disaster strikes - Dad's money troubles catch up with him and they have to move out of the cafe. They're homeless - but can their new fairground friends help out?
This is what the story explores.

Amanda's New School

This is a paperback I've had from my schooldays that I've always had a soft spot for although it is an update of the 1932 original Nesta's New School story.

The outline of the story is Amanda's wealthy adoptive mother dies, and she goes to live with her birth mother and her sister Alice. After a privileged childhood, she has to adjust to a middle class school as well as a new family.
This sort of theme is one I've always adored being less about midnight escapes and epic escapes than many school stories for girls and rather more on the character of the girls such as Amanda being of more practical import for girls such as I with things we have to overcome and adapting to changed circumstances.