Antonia Forest Fans ...

[TarquinGyrfalcon]

Calling all Antonia Forest Fans.

Why do you love AF books? And what/who is your favourite books/scene/character?

I think for me it is the fact the characters are quite self aware or their weaknesses are so well written by AF that I can identify with so many of their failings and feelings.

I've just reread The Marlows and the Traitor and Peter's shame at the boat thing resonates with me. The fact that he can barely bring himself to think about it but he can't out it out of his mind.

My favourite character changes all the time - I have a soft spot for Rowan - I would have loved to see what happened to her when Giles returned to claim Trennels in later years.

Love these books.
My favourite characters are Rowan, Nicola and I do like Patrick.
Never liked the “home” ones as much as school but maybe I need to read them again.
Don’t understand why they haven’t been reprinted.

I'm currently rereading all the home books as I know them much less than school ones. One I was excited to realise I'd never read at all (Run Away Home). I find them harder to get into than the school books but very rewarding once I do. Now I have twins of my own I'm finding the Nicola/Laurie relationship particularly interesting.

Hi AF fans

Do you all own much loved old copies or are any back in print? Last time I looked, I found Autumn Term, but didn't read it, knowing how frustrating it would be to read, enjoy then...No more.
I'd enjoy them even more in kindle or similar!

I've bought copies of all of them through Girls Gone By Publishers as they were re-released, apart from the school stories that were available second-hand (in very battered and falling-apart copies!) I think even the GGBP editions are hard to get hold of now though, second hand, but I think they re-release them again at times.

I have a set of old copies - DH tracked them down for me as a Christmas present years ago. I've also doubled up and got some of the reprints that GGBP have reissued. They currently have End of Term and Peter's Room available.

I did contact GGBP and ask if there was any chance of them being issues as ebooks but sadly the answer was no,

Huge Forest fan here! She is an unrecognised genius. I love her because her characters are real, complex, recognisable people. Lois Sanger and Tim in particular are both fascinating.

Lucy Mangan called her "Jane Austen for children".

There is fanfic..........

I love some of the fanfic(although I wasn't keen on Spring Term) - there is a great crossover piece where Rowan Marlow and Roger Walker (Swallows and Amazons) end up together

I read a very good short fanfic about Miranda and Jan Scott meeting again as adults, but I can’t remember where I found it or what it’s called.

Try Archive of Our Own, Trennels

Was anyone on here around on Trennels for the great ‘Was Pam Marlow unreasonable and unfair to liquidate the family tiara and spend the proceeds on a well-bred pony for one child and an exquisite hunter for herself?’ debate? Got very heated, that one.

I remember that debate!
To be fair PM does seem to have a very laidback and non planned relationship with money.

I do think it’s unfair that Peter and Lawrie have to buy the Idiot Boy whole Ginty just gets Catkin

Badger Books currently have End of Term in stock, as well as the Sally Hayward continuation.
www.badgerbooks.co.uk

I remember that one too! The lurching fortunes of the Marlows are the only real betrayal that AF only ever planned one book at a time, I think, but coming up with in-world explanations is more fun.

I felt it was more unfair that Lawrie basically whinges her way into getting the Idiot Boy without paying for it.
It's fair enough doing swapsies for cigarette cards, but Mrs M should have put a foot down and told Lawrie that was too much and she would have to pay them back the money.

Does anyone else struggle with accepting that all the Marlow children are fair-haired? (In fact, I can't remember if Peter's hair colour is ever mentioned, but all the girls are described as blonde.) Giles and Ginty, OK, but surely Karen and Rowan have dark hair, and in my head Nicola is definitely dark too, so Lawrie must be. Sorry, AF, you got it wrong!

Well, their general blonde and blue-eyedness is mentioned right at the very beginning of Autumn Term, which was the first one I read, so no. I took it for granted! Though I will say that I don;t have a very strong sense of what any of them look like, apart from being blonde and blue-eyed, basically 'nice-looking' according to Mrs Merrick, and apparently tending to thinness.

I think I struggle with who's straight-haired and who is curly, and who wears their hair short and who long which I think we're only told once, in that same passage. I think Ann is one of the curly ones, isn' she there's the bit in End of Term where she's combing her hair with difficulty after she washes it, and Nicola thinks she should wear it loose to play Mary in the Minster.

Though I've always found it slightly odd that at the beginning of Run Away Home (I think) Nicola registers Giles across a station platform and before she recognises him as her brother, thinks that he's 'fairly gorgeous'.

Damn it, saw this thread title and thought it was going to be about a new reprint of all her books .

OK

The Kingscote books were the first boarding school books I read that actually rang true. The characters are fully rounded with strengths and - sometimes pretty huge - weaknesses and yet I was captivated by all of them, even the ones I disliked.

I am obsessed with books about big families, and the Marlow dynamics are among the most fascinating of any I have read.

The Christmas play at Wade Minster is one of the most festive things ever written, along with the Christmas carols at the manor house in The Dark Is Rising. I have to reread it every December .

I was always Team Nicola, I think because she was a singer, like me (but also because hers is the point of view in the Kingscote books). Love Rowan as well, and I longed for a big brother like Peter (or a boyfriend like Patrick ).

As you can see from my username, I am a big fan of these books. I love the way she uses the school story format to really go deeply into schoolgirl dynamics and friendships. Nicola's sudden realisation that Tim preferred Lawrie to her, the shift from really disliking Miranda to becoming her closest friend, the imbalance in the friendship between Nicola and Esther, and Ginny feeling a bit lost in her friendship group when Monica isn't around, all ring so true.

I also think most of us have known a Marie Dobson in our childhood and AF manages to give her a certain pathos, so that even though you understand why the girls don't like her, you also feel dreadfully sorry for Marie.

I agree that it is much easier to imagine these characters as grown ups than, for instance, Darrell or Sally from Malory Towers. They're complete people with distinct assets and flaws and very individual personalities. Likewise, the teachers are very real. They're not the perfect paragons or nasty pieces of work of so many school stories. They're just ordinary people with ordinary failings. Miss Cromwell, in particular, is a brilliant creation.

I went to a concert of Christmas music last night where the choir sang an arrangement of Walter de la Mare's poem Before Dawn, which Miranda sets to the tune of Linden Lea in The Attic Term.

Bloodybridget I bet that was lovely.

I've done the Kipling poem Eddi's Service as my classes part in the school Christmas performance before now. And this week I have the whole school singing 'Once in Royal David's City' to close the carol service ... and yes, I have used the line 'try and sing it as if you were there'!

Yes, in my book Karens all have dark hair. But it would have been strange to have only one brunette out of eight children..

I think a heroine/hero has to have 'a redeeming fault' to make them more appealing in a way a goodie goodie isn't. eg Darrell Rivers of Malory Towers loses her temper, tsk tsk!

But it's not a token "fault" that AF's nice characters have. All the characters are complex, and have a mixture of good and bad, but also characteristics that can be good in some ways and bad in others.

Take Lawrie for example: she's self-centred and I'm never quite sure whether she's a "good" character or a "bad". You don't often in children's books get that confusion.
The same characteristics that can make a character good in one book, may make them bad in another.

Nicola, who is definitely meant to be good, can be quite nasty to someone she doesn't like, and doesn't always play by the "schoolgirls' honour", as Enid Blyton would say.

And in The Marlows and the Traitor the villain, Foley is in a lot of ways a more likable and charismatic character - Nicola clearly respects him even while not liking what he's doing, than the secret service man Anquetil. Anquetil also makes mistakes and we also see adults in authority being uncertain, and also annoyed by each other - again not a common thing in children's books.

And the internal dialogue you get from Nicola, feeling that their sentiments round Marie's death are hypocritical because they didn't like her, the shock when she realises Tim likes Lawrie more than her, her thoughts about Patrick and Ginty, and her realisation in The Ready Made Family the danger Rose was in, all are far beyond most books.
Plus the anti-Jewish undercurrent round Miranda still is in play today, and not just in schools. That was a brave thing to include.

Clearly Mrs Marlow had a fling with Mr Merrick?