Strictest School in the World, The: Being the Tale of a Clever Girl, a Rubber Boy and a Collection of Flying Machines, Mostly Broken (The Mad Misadventures of Emmaline and Rubberbones)by Howard WhitehouseThe clever girl is Emmaline, the rubber boy is Robert Burns, and the flying machines are kite-like things that the two of them cook up for various reasons through the tale. The strictest school in the world is a creepy castle-like place with extremely cruel adults. Sort of. Plot is basic -- Emmaline does not want to be at the school and needs to find a way to escape. I won't reveal whether she actually does or not (or why that is a hard thing to accomplish), just in case anyone does decide to read the book.
I can't seem to find anything along the lines of newspaper reviews or such for this one, but I am also not looking very hard. The casual blogger reviews of this book are good (and there are quite a few of them), so I guess I am supposed to like it. And by the time I finished it, I decided it wasn't a bad book, but I had a hard time actually finishing it. I put it down a number of times during the first half of the book, and fully expected it would end up in the post I'd write one day called "books I just couldn't finish." But I stuck with it, and I will actually try to read the next one in the series, because my hope is that the author worked out some of the kinks that nearly fatally sunk The Strictest School in the World.
I had a hard time deciding exactly what it was that I found so off-putting, but it finally occurred to me that the problem was that book didn't read like a wacky adventure novel set in Victorian England -- it felt much more like a parody of a wacky adventure novel set in Victorian England. The characters were too much, the settings were too much, the dialog in dialect was too much, the whole thing was just pushed a little too far. This appears to be what other people like about the book, but I just think the line was crossed somewhere along the way (like on the second page!) I couldn't help thinking that I was reading a farce of some sort. Once I decided that I would make myself finish (after all, I loved the Lemony Snicket books and they were even more extreme parody), I started liking the book a little better. By the time I finished the book, I generally liked it well enough to consider reading the next one in the series, but it is not one I am going to whole-heartedly recommend to others. I think the book suffered -- as many books do -- from too much time wasted at the beginning trying to establish who the characters are and how they got into the situation and so forth. Since the book did well at linking together various wacky hijinks, it really needed to just skip the whole "Emmaline wants to be an aviatrix but is afraid of flying" and "Robert never gets hurt when he falls" and "oh my isn't Aunt Lucy a goofy lady" parts and just get into the story of the school.
There does not seem to be a website exclusive to this book or series, which is unusual these days. The publisher's site has a bit about the author (http://www.kidscanpress.com/Canada/CreatorDetails.aspx?cid=625) but that's all you are going to get. At least, that's all I could find in the 10 minutes I have had to do web searching related to this review!
I can't seem to find anything along the lines of newspaper reviews or such for this one, but I am also not looking very hard. The casual blogger reviews of this book are good (and there are quite a few of them), so I guess I am supposed to like it. And by the time I finished it, I decided it wasn't a bad book, but I had a hard time actually finishing it. I put it down a number of times during the first half of the book, and fully expected it would end up in the post I'd write one day called "books I just couldn't finish." But I stuck with it, and I will actually try to read the next one in the series, because my hope is that the author worked out some of the kinks that nearly fatally sunk The Strictest School in the World.
I had a hard time deciding exactly what it was that I found so off-putting, but it finally occurred to me that the problem was that book didn't read like a wacky adventure novel set in Victorian England -- it felt much more like a parody of a wacky adventure novel set in Victorian England. The characters were too much, the settings were too much, the dialog in dialect was too much, the whole thing was just pushed a little too far. This appears to be what other people like about the book, but I just think the line was crossed somewhere along the way (like on the second page!) I couldn't help thinking that I was reading a farce of some sort. Once I decided that I would make myself finish (after all, I loved the Lemony Snicket books and they were even more extreme parody), I started liking the book a little better. By the time I finished the book, I generally liked it well enough to consider reading the next one in the series, but it is not one I am going to whole-heartedly recommend to others. I think the book suffered -- as many books do -- from too much time wasted at the beginning trying to establish who the characters are and how they got into the situation and so forth. Since the book did well at linking together various wacky hijinks, it really needed to just skip the whole "Emmaline wants to be an aviatrix but is afraid of flying" and "Robert never gets hurt when he falls" and "oh my isn't Aunt Lucy a goofy lady" parts and just get into the story of the school.
There does not seem to be a website exclusive to this book or series, which is unusual these days. The publisher's site has a bit about the author (http://www.kidscanpress.com/Canada/CreatorDetails.aspx?cid=625) but that's all you are going to get. At least, that's all I could find in the 10 minutes I have had to do web searching related to this review!
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