Wednesday, the 29th of December, and time for Shelf Control once again–the last one of 2021 if one can believe it! Shelf Control is a weekly feature hosted by Lisa at Bookshelf Fantasies, and celebrates the books waiting to be read on your TBR piles/mountains. To participate, all you do is pick a book from your TBR pile, and write a post about it–what its about, why you want to read it, when you got it, and such. If you participate, don’t forget to link back to Lisa’s page, and do also leave your links in the comments below as I’d love to check out your picks as well!
Today my pick is from a series of school stories that I haven’t ever read, though I seem to have almost always known of them. The Chalet School series by Elinor Brent-Dyer is a series of 58 books, published between 1925 and 1970 by English author Elinor Brent-Dyer. Born in South Shields, she was educated at a small private school in South Shields itself to which she returned after training at Leeds Training College. She had a teaching career in state and private schools which spanned 36 years. In the 1920s, inspired by a holiday in the Austrian Tyrol, she created the Chalet School. Over the course of the books, the school changes location from Austria to Guernsey (after the Nazi invasion), then Herefordshire and a fictional island, and finally Switzerland.
The Rivals of the Chalet School (1929) is book 5 in the series. This one sees a rival school, St Scholastica open on the opposite side of the lake to the Chalet School. What does this mean for the school? Will the girls in the two schools be friends or foes? Pretty obviously the latter, for there are misunderstandings and practical jokes aplenty, and soon students from the two are at daggers drawn!
As a child I enjoyed reading school stories, and even recently revisited the Malory Towers books by Enid Blyton; I like the school setting, and one is presented with students with different traits, in a way, a microcosm of the wider world–while also enjoying the usual classes, activities, and treats. The Chalet series is one I’ve known of from (it would seem) forever, but somehow never got the chance to read, and this is something I want to remedy soon. So this one’s definitely finding its way on my 2022 reads!
Have you read this one or any others of the Chalet books? How did you like it? Any other school stories that you particularly enjoyed and would like to recommend? Looking forward to your thoughts!
Cover image and description from Goodreads as always, and author info from Goodreads and Wikipedia
Lisa has her 300th Shelf Control post up today, and her pick is Deep Secret by Diana Wynne Jones, another author I really need to get to soon!
This made me smile. I have all 58 of the Chalet School books in a box in my loft. I started to read them when I was 10 and carried on collecting them as they were republished when I was an adult. I used to love them and would reread them constantly hoping one day to be whisked away to Austria to join them all. Rivals was always one of my favourites.
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How lovely. My mom had read them but the library I used back then never had any and we never came across them in the shops either. But am glad I’ve finally found some, and encouraged to hear that Rivals is a favourite for you🙂
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I love boarding school books. I’ve know of this series, but haven’t been able to get my hands on any of it.
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Me too; My staples as a child were ones by Enid Blyton but I read some others as well
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I’ve only read one (reviewed here: https://wp.me/s2oNj1-chalet) though I have to say this isn’t my favourite genre, nor am I the target audience! Having said this I do actually have a couple of girls school titles on my TBR. 🙂
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Thanks, I think I did read your review, but will look it up again. Glad to see you enjoyed it though.
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I have not read any of this series, but I hope you enjoy this one!
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Thanks Wendy 🙂
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Interesting — I’ve never heard of these books. Can’t believe there are so many! I hope you enjoy this one!
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Thanks Lisa. I hadn’t realised either until doing this post that there were quite so many in this series.
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I read a few of these, not sure where I got them from now, they got a bit much after a while but are certainly nice to sink into once in a while!
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Let’s see how this works for me.
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