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...but this isn't a rant. Not really. No, I meant it's really not! Really. I'm beyond confused by the Lady Grace Mysteries, and would love a bit of input, by anyone who has read them, or read Patricia Finney's adult books written either as Patricia Finney or as P.F. Chilholm -- or who just feels like speculating as to what on earth might be going on.

What do I mean by asking what might be going on? Well, these are books for younger readers, with Grace, "Maid of Honour to Her Gracious Majesty Queen Elizabeth I of that name" being 13 and writing in her "daybooke", given to her by the woman in charge of the maids of honour, to write her "prayers and meditations in". Which makes sense, and is a good way to allow for the diary format. And there's a ton of real detail given about the Elizabethan court, with many an explanation in the glossary and author's note after the book. As well as having a sensible explanation for the book's format, there's a reasonable explanation given for how and why Grace comes to be a sleuth - if one takes the conventions of the children's mystery (series - aren't they almost always?) as the standard for "reasonable". You know the kind of thing - kids stumble onto heinous crime that no adults seem willing or able to solve, overhear just what they need to know, while hiding under a bed or behind a curtain, and are never in the slightest bit of danger throughout their huge adventures. Grace comes to be Elizabeth's "first Lady Pursuivant" - i.e., spy - in a way that fits in with these conventions (and the part of the note describing Elizabeth's secret service and the "tantalizing hints" that she had her own personal sources of information aside from that.)

Which is fine, but these departures from the realm of the at-all-probable aren't so much the conventions of the children's historical novel, and the contrast between factual, accurate bits and things like a Maid of Honour being close friends with a black, Muslim tumbler and a laundrymaid, is just odd. I've read one or two of the other books and just came back to the first, Assassin, to see if there was some explanation for how Grace could have got to be friends with the laundrymaid especially, but there's nothing.

The laundrymaid, Ellie, especially confuses me, as she's described so inconsistently: she's an orphan, has the "poor chapped hands" you might expect, sleeps in one of the storerooms in the laundry, and never has enough to eat. And the three have to keep their friendship secret because Ellie and Masou (the acrobat) would be in a lot of trouble if they were caught. And yet every time Grace goes anywhere, Ellie appears to be available to be sent out of the palace on errands or just to take a look at Grace all dressed up for a ball. I certainly find it very, very hard to believe that the lowest of workers in the laundry would be the one going into the rooms of the Queen's ladies - and indeed, even into the Queen's own rooms - to pick up the dirty laundry.

And then there's the language. It's not too difficult, obviously, but there are lots of words and phrasings used to make it sound Elizabethan, if not very consistently. The Queen, for example, says "But wherefore is Lady Grace's kirtle still not finished? [..] Surely this is not your wonted service to me. Why so long a-making? I had desired to see it before she wears it." Pretty clunky, but definitely period. There's also a description of why Grace knows that the dead man who appeared to have been stabbed had actually been killed some other way, as she remembers what her uncle, a physician, told her about the "sanguine humour" and how it ebbs back and forth like tides, but those tides stop when the body is dead. She also believes they might see an image of the murderer in the dead man's eye, which is really a nice addition, I think. So far, so younger-reader-adapted Elizabethan-ish.

Then, someone

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...and our young protagonist has OCD and is self-harming.

Okay, deep breath, and don't get caught on this too much. She doesn't actually use either of these terms, although she does use 'compulsion' to describe her OCD behaviour, which is not right.

She's the only child of a bell-founder in London, and he 'indulges' her, employing 'a boy' as well as an apprentice so that she can 'spend time learning to read and write'. [more deep breathing] Then she causes an accident which cripples her father, because she's not really paying attention but is 'reading a little book' he'd given her for her fifteenth birthday. [starting to hyperventilate] Because, of course, she spends all her time imagining and wants to be a writer. Just like Chaucer, whom she meets to her great excitement, because he's the 'most famous person' she's ever met. [headdesking starts]

If this sounds like a book you're going to want to read, stop now, because I'm going to spoil this one big time.


Yeah, so she ends up going on pilgrimage to Canterbury, in company with Chaucer, his scribe-for-the-journey (which takes a *very* long time, given the distance, and the fact that they're all traveling on horses) Luke, Sir Knight, the Squire Walter, a Summoner, Prioress, etc, etc. Yup, it's Chaucer experiencing the pilgrimage of which he wrote - a topic that's going to get its own post. Luke had promised to become a monk, in France (why France, I've no idea), if he beat off the many other applicants for the job of recording the pilgrimage for Chaucer. Walter is lovely, and not at all too uppity to hang out with a lowly bell-founder's daughter - or indeed, after noticing that she has cut her legs all up, to gently apply salve to them himself. The Summoner is a vile, blackmailing lecher, and also one of those who've declared themselves 'enemies of the king', Richard II. He blackmails our heroine by threatening to accuse her crippled father of treachery for hanging out in his local. (Don't ask *me* to explain this.) Chaucer is a self-confessed coward, who chooses his loyalties to save his skin. The reasons he gives for helping King Richard actually make him look more like an idiot, as he's planning to help Richard ask the French king to -- er, invade England in order to keep Richard on the throne. (And then go away nicely, of course, although the French were 'the enemy' at the time.) Adventures, fear, spying and romantic tension ensue.

And then it really gets good, when Luke, who is the son of an alchemist, and has never learned to joust, takes part in a 'blood-feud' in the tournament, and when he's injured, Belle and Walter rush over to him and - light-bulb moment! - protag realises something she 'should have understood all along' - Walter's gay. Duh! Protag thinks of the priests 'warning of hellish punishments' (good thing she listened to all those sermons aimed at the young folk and their naughty ways!) but decides she's fine with it. Not only does she recognise he's gay, but Walter tells her that his younger sister guessed, though he doesn't know how, confronted him with it, and when he didn't deny quickly enough, told their father and then ran off with a French knight! (The enemy, remember?) (Nope, none of this makes any sense to me either.) Both Walter and protag. are now clearly in love with Luke.

Walter and our intrepid heroine find the Summoner's black(mail) book, in which he's recorded the wrongdoings of many - mostly those high up in the church, of course - and they're oddly modern clerical abuse style: 'children in charitable institutions were mentioned in connection with clerics and judges.' But there are nuns, prostitutes, animals... 'And of course boys.' Anyway, armed with this, they find a way to save Chaucer - thereby saving innocent Luke - from the Summoner by convincing Richard not to go to the French king if they deliver him a triumphant entry to London. Which they do by re-blackmailing all these bla

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Beswitched is a recently-published book by Kate Saunders, and I saw several recommendations for it which made it clear that it was a have-to-get-hold-of, for the History Project if nothing else. The premise was fantastic: time swap with the present-day protagonist ending up in a boarding school in 1935. That I didn't love it as much as others have is partly for purely personal reasons - it hit some of my weird buttons - but also caused a bunch of Thoughts about the conventions of (the original) school stories and the ones that are followed or abandoned in this modern version. Definitely a winner for the History Project.

I'm not a big reader of school stories, but have read quite a few over the years; enough that I've a sense of conventions but would love the input of those on my flist who are real experts. And those who aren't too, of course!



Why yes, I *do* want people to read behind the cut, even if they're not interested in a review of the book!

Those are roughly the three main conventions (-ish) of the school story that really struck me when reading Beswitched. Starting with the first, it seemed that Saunders had taken the rather typical storyline of a girl or girls whose characters are improved through being in a boarding school and exaggerated it to quite an extreme. I had real trouble in the beginning because Flora was such a spoiled brat I wasn't sure I could stand to read it unless she changed quickly. Even her mother says "you've had it pretty easy up to now" ... "we've run the house around you" and that "you're rather used to getting your own way". Nothing wrong with a protagonist who starts off with a lot to learn, but in this case there are three main characters who are only children (of somewhat older parents in at least two cases) and so almost as a matter of course, are spoiled by those parents.* Flora learns how she's behaved in the past at home (er, that'd be the future but HER past) through observing one of these other girls and the way she treats her parents and other girls.

But there's more than just the several occasions on which Flora 'wondered uneasily' about her own behaviour. The nice older girl Virginia, who's only ever seen being kind and compassionate, shares her experience after explaining why she might not have had measles before she was 17 as being because she'd spent most of her time around grown-ups. "Flora, as the only child of ancient parents, was interested." This is what Virginia says:

"Not at all. [in response to 'Were you lonely?'] I liked being one of the adults. But my father didn't like it. He said that before my mother launched me into society, I needed to learn to be a real girl."

"But you are a real girl! What did you need to learn?"

"Just about everything - how to take a joke, how to make friends, how to share things. I was furious at first, but now I see that he was right. Before I came to St Win's, I was a pampered little madam and I thought I was at the centre of the universe."

Flora wonders uneasily (again) if she was a pampered little madam before accidentally ending up at St Win's. My feeling is that while the "learning to be a real girl" [ugh] might happen a lot in school stories, the importance of being in boarding school is not always quite so insistent, and often so much accepted that personal growth through school experience will happen to some degree if necessary that it wouldn't even be flagged. So this is a convention that's followed, but perhaps slightly different in a more self-conscious highlighting of the convention.

Yes/no? Also, I wondered whether the stories in which this happens quite frequently - or the series, rather - might often have the wise head-mistress - generally in the background and seemingly uninvolved in the girls' lives, but actually acutely aware of each girls' character and experience. Or substitute an equally wise teacher or even teachers. The ideal

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