CS re-read: Joey Goes to the Oberland

I dislike Joey Goes to the Oberland so much that I didn't even finish it before I started blogging about it - though sadly, I will after I click "publish" here. This book is in my bottom five, for certain - and given how much I'll complain about Jack Lambert and Mary-Lou in books to come, that's saying quite a lot.
Where to start? Aside from Daisy, Frieda and (to a lesser extent) Simone, there's no character that I really like in this book. It's worth pointing out that no character I like is present for more than a chapter or two. I do like that Simone just can't be bothered to tell Joey (or Frieda, but that seems less of a slight) about the whacking great house and the rest of her inheritance, even though it's been six months. On the negative side, here's a list:
1) Well, let's start with Simone's inheritance. She waits around for Joey to tell her how to arrange the house, and what to do with the jewelry she inherited. It's even odder because it's Simone's husband's inheritance. This despite
2) Joey's inexplicable, and annoying, fragility throughout the book. She's perpetually exhausted by moving from Britain to Switzerland with eight children. Fair enough, except that she does very little of the actual work, thanks to her husband, her servant, the teenager helping her out, Robin, Simone and her husband, and even Mr. Lannis.
3) Toward the end of the book, Joey tells Miss Annersley and Rosalie, the school's secretary, that Joey can't sit around "nattering" because she has work to do. Given that Joey just added to the school's work by foisting herself, her husband, and her eight children on the school for several days while the school staff were in the middle of setting up the new school in Switzerland, this seems unbearable. (Joey's "work", by the way, is unpacking and directing where furniture should go.)
4) Joey doesn't let her older daughters call her youngest children by nicknames, though she calls her older daughters by their nicknames on the same page (and, rather unforgivably, saddled a new girl at the school with a nickname in Highland Twins at the Chalet School). The lesson here is that only Joey can decide on nicknames.
5) Joey's wacky sandwich-making in the last chapter - she gets bored with ordinary sandwich fillings and invents some pretty disgusting combinations, which everyone has to eat. She's just relentlessly attention-seeking.
6) The fact that Daisy's best friends aren't invited to her wedding, though one of them lives in the same village.
7) And, of course, the moment that even fans of Joey's admit is pretty awful: when she tells her friend Simone that she's so glad Simone had a second child, because "the rest of us were steaming ahead with real families!" Apparently, happy parents and only children don't constitute a real family.

On the bright side, I have a vague memory that I liked The Chalet School and Barbara, which comes next in the re-read.

Changes for the Chalet School, and the re-read

I've been collecting Elinor M. Brent-Dyer's Chalet School series for 15 or 16 years, and last fall I got the last book I needed in the main collection (she wrote 58 books in the series, and then at least ten connectors. I'm missing at least one of those). So I celebrated - though I think that increasingly, "celebrated" isn't the correct word - this achievement by re-reading them all.
I wish I'd thought to rank the books as I read them! But no time like the present! I finished Changes for the Chalet School a few days ago. I'd guess it would fall around the 40th percentile. It features Bride Bettany and her friends as Head Girl and prefects, which saves it from the bottom third of the percentile. On the other hand, I think this is the book in which Joey jumps the shark as a character. Also, this book marks the departure of Miss Slater - also a favorite character of mine, due to her impatience with Margot Maynard, reminiscences of Old Chaletians, and the assumption that a teacher in a Welsh school would be delighted to teach in German several days a week.
I think the negatives outweigh the positives here.

I look like a Chalet reader!

I've been lending some of my Chalet School books to a family of readers who grew up reading some delightfully British authors: Heyer, Blyton, Brent-Dyer. Anyway, I hadn't met the whole family of readers until today, when two of them came to the library to check out some items - I just happened to be at the desk. To my delight, we talked for a bit about books we like, and one of them said I looked like someone who would read the Chalet School! I assure you, this wasn't meant as an insult.

random Streatfeild reference

I wasn't expecting to see Streatfeild mentioned on Go Fug Yourself today, but I'm delighted that she was. My answer to the question of which Streatfeild heroine is intended: Rachel, in the Little Wonders dress that takes all of her dignity away, and makes her look silly instead.

Schoolgirls, sleuths...

I've been cross about this book lately. I'm still reading it, but it's strange and pointless - especially because the subject matter (girls' series books from the U.S.) is of great interest to me. The author doesn't seem to have an argument, unless it's that most series books for girls are socially conservative and have a great number of well-off white girls in them. That's not an argument.
Also, she makes mistakes that drive me crazy. She misses the point of some series (Jane Allen isn't really a series about an athlete, though there is a lot of basketball - her place on the team is a metaphor for her moral excellence), and spreads the Victorian era over too wide a period (she counts books written in the 1830s as Victorian, but also calls books Victorian that are written well after 1901, because she believes the author still had a Victorian mindset. Sorry, but it can't be done both ways).
She over-emphasizes some series (Sweet Valley High) at the expense of others (Baby-Sitters Club, Cheerleaders, Canby Hall) that would have weakened her point about series focusing on well-off white girls. She makes the irritating, and increasing prevalent mistake of referring to Blair and Serena as Gossip Girls. I'm telling you, it's time for me to start that revolution.
It's just such a waste. The book just summarizes series, without much substantive analysis. It's possible that I wouldn't have written the book better, but it wouldn't have been worse either.

returning to blogging, hopefully

I hadn't realized how long it has been since I blogged. I have been re-reading Chalet School and other GO books, reading fanfic, and avoiding most other books. For example: I have a copy of Megan McCafferty's Perfect Fifths on my desk, which I've been avoiding because it doesn't look very good at all. No Bridget and Percy? Endless (and self-indulgent) exchanges between Jessica and Marcus? Some passages which should have been left to fanfiction? Check, check, and check. Sigh.