Class By Jenny Colgan Review
When I think back to when I first discovered my love of reading, it was when I discovered the Mallory Towers series by Enid Blyton. I couldn't get enough of reading about Daryl and Gwendoline and all their escapades at the Mallory Towers, boarding school for girls.
Over 30 years later I still look back at those books with a smile on my face, I've even bought the series for many of my friends Children. Why am I telling you this? Well the Little School By The Sea series was launched with people just like me in mind. A boarding school book for grown ups. So you can now see the attraction and why I chose to read this.
Class, Welcome to the little school by the sea, is the first of 6 books in the series, as you'd expect it's an opportunity to get to know the characters.
INTRODUCING THE CHARACTERS
There are 4 main characters and a whole supporting cast. On the whole most of the characters are hugely likeable but it would be nice to see a really nasty girl that gets her comeuppance.
Maggie Adair is the new English Teacher, newly engaged to Stan back home in Glasgow, though she finds herself attracted to her opposite number at the Boys school over the hill. Both likeable characters but I'm not convinced there is enough chemistry here, for a grown up boarding school book, I really wanted the romance to be electric. It's more like a luke warm cup of tea than an Espresso Martini!
Veronica, is the head teacher and personally one of my favourite characters, as a young girl she was forced to give away her baby boy. A touching storyline, that I look forward to reading more of in the second book in the series.
Fliss & Simone are both new to the boarding school, one from a wealthy family and frankly doesn't want to be there, the other a scholarship girl who struggles to fit in due to her background.
SUMMARY
I love the concept of this book, in fact I haven't read anything like it for years. It was very enjoyable but didn't quite live up to my Mallory Towers expectations. Would I recommend it? Absolutely, if you were a fan of boarding school fiction growing up. I'll certainly be moving on to the second book in the series, Rules, pretty quickly. Hopefully things will hot up on the romance front, and now the characters are established, the plot will be slightly more interesting. I can't quite put my finger on what lets this book down, it's pretty fast paced, there is plenty going on but I'm just not that connected.
You can buy Class By Jenny Colgan from Amazon.
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