The Places You Will Go

Prep and Ecstasy

If you like boarding school books, don't bother with High Jinx. Read the unabridged, uncensored version of today's Tots to Teens column.

A Beauty School with a Difference

Offering cosmetics and perms to the hungry and oppressed may seem a bit Marie Antoinette-ish but what value can one place on a smile where, before, there wasn’t any?

Junior Reading Room

Fairy tales and wild things feature in this week's Junior Reading Room.

A 25% discount is available with the coupon (only in today's StarTwo).

Reading Pictures

End of Story

People read books for any number of reasons; finding out how the story ends is one among many and not even the most important. If it were otherwise, nobody would ever bother to read a book twice. Reading is about spending time with characters and entering a fictional world and playing with words and living through a story page by page. The idea that someone could ruin a novel by revealing its ending is like saying you could ruin the Mona Lisa by revealing that it's a picture of a woman with a center part. Spoilers are a myth: they don't spoil. - From Harry Potter and the Sinister Spoilers by Lev Grossman and Andrea Sachs, Time Magazine online.

If I suspect that the book will have a sad ending, I read the last few pages first. (I like being prepared for the worst.) If it is indeed a bad ending, I might not bother starting the book even. And if the ending's good, I will read in happy anticipation of it. OK, so I'm crazy!

Crab Village

I've owned this book, Crab Village, by Julia Clark, for a few years now, but only got around to reading it this past week.

It's a charming, slightly surreal story set in a seaside village. Fact and fantasy mingle seamlessly and the magical is described in such a matter-of-fact fashion that it becomes quite  a natural thing to expect and enjoy.

I was drawn to the book by its illustrations, by Bernard Brett, which are black ink, with lots of details done in simple lines.

Super Sleuth

My only reservation about the wonderful Nancy Drew is the soft spot she has for Ned Nickerson.

 

Jolly Cigarette Sticks

Jinx Slater is delighted to have reached the giddy heights of the lower sixth at Stagmount, England's most exclusive school for girls. Her ground-floor window affords her an excellent view of Brighton's bright lights, and Jinx is a girl with escape on her mind and a miniature screw driver kit in her tuckbox. Liberty Latiffe, Jinx's best friend and all round perfect partner-in-crime, is not at all worried about being caught out by her very strict Muslim father. Nor are the rest of the girls. Until, that is, Stella Fox - Stagmount's newest new girl - arrives, determined to make her mark.

So goes the blurb for High Jinx (Faber Children's Books) by Sara Lawrence (who attended Roedean School, obviously the school Stagmount is based on).

Mallory Towers (also, I've been told, based on Rodean) for the 21st century? Ummm ... not quite, but I guess it's more accurate to write about girls who booze and bonk than describe first formers planning midnight feasts and skiving off prep. Do they still do that?

By the way, Julie Burchill's comment about heroine Jinx Slater linking "the wholesome Tom Boys of the past with the girl-power pop tarts of the present" is a load of bollocks. There's no link. Just a huge jump into utter tackiness. The book'll probably be a huge hit.

Reading Room

Go around the world in an armchair or (if you're like me) curled up in bed, with sausage rolls ...

A 25% discount is available with the coupon (only in today's SectionTwo).

Reading Pictures