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Grizel has left school for university, and Mary Burnett is head girl. She’s fairly quiet and innocuous but seems to make an able head of the prefects. Joey Bettany and her three friends Frieda, Simone and Marie are sub-prefects and there aren’t any memorable new girls in this story, although many old friends reappear.
Instead, the very British Miss Browne decides to move her girls’ boarding school from the UK to Austria. She is aware of the Chalet School but assumes that’s only for ‘foreign’ girls. So when she meet Joey, out for a walk with two of her relatives, she asks if they might consider sending her to the school. Naturally this upsets them but it was an innocent enquiry, albeit fuelled by some mild xenophobia.
The Chalet School head hopes that the two schools can be friendly rivals, meeting for sports matches and sharing some facilities (such as their chapel). Unfortunately there are one or two highly unpleasant girls in St Scholastika’s, and they make some nasty comments. Possibly they didn’t realise that the Chalet School girls all speak English, but that’s not seen as any excuse for direct rudeness.
So the book is mostly about the enmity between the two schools, something which recedes for a while and then returns. There are a lot of walks and some winter sports - this is the winter term - which lead to clashes of various kinds when the Chalet girls come across the newcomers. It’s the main theme of the book, along with a low-key (but overt) contrast between the way the Chalet School runs and the way Miss Browne runs her school.
It doesn’t show Brits up in a good light - the St Scholastika girls tend to be biased and condescending to anyone who is not British. I imagine that a book showing this was quite unusual for the era, but must have given a positive and possibly shocking message to girls who read it back in 1929 when it was first published. The Chalet Girls are well aware that they are the foreigners in another country, and Brent-Dyer is quick to point out the good things about many cultures (albeit caricatured at times).
There were a couple of places in the book where I chuckled aloud, something I very rarely do when reading fiction. And there’s one chapter, after a horrible incident on the ice, where I found myself in tears. That despite knowing what was coming, and knowing that the scene was a tad over-dramatic and the resolution not necessarily believable. But the writing is strong, and the situation very moving.
I was surprised how much I enjoyed this book, as I had not recalled it as one of my favourites in the series. I have it in hardback, in one of the early editions. Apparently there were no major cuts in the Armada paperback edition, but frequent minor ones; so the storyline won’t change if you have an Armada edition but some of the side comments or descriptions may be lost. A full edition was published by Girls Gone By in 2015 though that is now out of print. But it can occasionally be found second-hand.
Definitely recommended for teenagers and nostalgic adults; it could stand alone though it’s best to read as part of the series.
Review copyright 2020 Sue's Book Reviews
1 comment:
I found your site by doing a internet search. I read the Rivals of the Chalet School at fourteen years old. In those days I was at boarding school. After more than ten years later I re read the book again for the second time last year. Not many girls would harass a parent of a pupil from a rival school on their own.
Nor would they go to save another pupil without anyone else. I felt that the book was hit and miss. Some of the situations were unrealistic (see above).
But it did make me realise how life was back then. I learnt a lot about life at school without modern technology to cling to literally.
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