What an absolute delight this was! Such a jolly old fashioned boarding school story with so many obvious nods to the Chalet School and Malory Towers etc. Annoyingly I only discovered it was the second in a series when I found it on NetGalley, so now I have to go back and read the first! We definitely jumped right into the action from the get go and it felt as though the book had begun mid-chapter and I had a lot of mental catching up to do. Thankfully a few little bits of back story were eventually sprinkled in! The pacing is very fast - at times it felt too fast and like I couldn’t catch a breath for the first few chapters but it soon settled. I found it to be very long (and I loved it so that wasn’t all a bad thing!) with a lot of unnecessary detail - eg. almost a whole chapter on religion which could have been skipped. I know it’s set in a different time and is emulating books of that period where such things were a big deal, but to a present day audience I don’t think we need to hear that much about it as it got quite dull and skippable. There were also a lot of the girls’ lessons gone over in huge detail which could have been shortened too.

I think that this book should honestly have been two or three books because there were SO many characters to focus on - old girls like Hilary the hockey fanatic, servants Rhiannon and Ivy, new girls such as Josie the actress, horse mad Antonia and her snobby clique, Alice and her stutter, not to mention the teachers and other girls as well! I feel like each of these characters could have had their own book to make their stories a bit fuller and their characters a bit less two dimensional. Antonia was the only girl who really got to have a character arc. It felt like maybe we could have focused on just one new and one old girl, and saved the others for another book. Really I just want more books!

I am intrigued to read book one now, and will eagerly await book three - and hopefully many, many more after that!

To anyone who grew up with Enid Blyton and Elinor M. Brent-Dyer this is a MUST.