"Delicately balanced on a razor edge of mutual toleration": Rowan Marlow, Saint or ?

[CreativeGreen]

Apologies if the quotation isn't quite right there: no Forests to hand.

Inspired by a post on another thread, I need to talk about the Marlows. Is Rowan spectacularly awful, and Lois an Unsangered heroine? Is Giles ghastly? (I think yes). What's your Marlow Family Liking List?

(I will be posting and running for now but I have many thoughts and wanted to start the thread while I remembered to)

@bookworm14 great minds! I have Wall of Words by the way.

Interesting interview with Tim Kennemore here from 1982! booksforkeeps.co.uk/article/a-name-to-note-tim-kennemore/

That Books for Keeps article is as interesting for what it doesn’t say as what it does. She’s clearly very publicity averse, much like AF in fact.

and the radio (“I’m addicted to Capital.”) (Tim Kennemore)

This really shows in WoW. Bill Maloney and his 'cuddly breakfast show' on Radio Thames is 100% bang on for commercial radio of the era. It makes me nostalgic for our local station which launched in 1982 - so natch we listened to it non-stop (🎼Wiltshire Radio, W.R. with more to say ...🎼and here's an oldie from The Beatles ... )

Yes, I loved Wall of Words and still have a copy. There is some discussion on the old Trennels forum (now archived) that AF was something of a mentor to Tim Kennemore - that TK wrote to AF, and that AF recommended TK's first book to a publisher. However, I can't find anything independent to substantiate that, and this 1982 articles from Books for Keeps tells a different story of how TK got published: https://booksforkeeps.co.uk/article/a-name-to-note-tim-kennemore

Yes, very striking! I don't know if AF recognised it but Autumn Term has several recognisable plot devices from E.Smith. Who is enjoyable and psychologically thoughtful tho much more glancingly than AF. Well worth a read. Some are on Kindle.

Val Forrest in the Fifth is my favourite Evelyn Smith - available on Kindle.

She does a great job with the kind of people who make you squirm - like Antonia Forest there.

Yes, me! They are available for Kindle too. A good read, if not as comforting as the Chalet School or quite as different as AF. Jenny Overton sounds interesting, @pollyhemlock.

I certainly hope so! Mrs B and Doris are leaving Trennels around the same time the Marlows are, which seems to be in time to get a considerable amount of the children's party, which ends at seven, and are given a lift home by them for around two, and Mrs B is up in time to have made a big cooked breakfast for the hunters at seven am!

I think I just get a bit impatient with Doris in particular being presented as semi-comic Faithful Retainer in Peter's Room. Whatever about her lack of desire to make something professional of her considerable dress-designing and -making talent, the 'I went to London once for the day and didn't like it' and 'I sometimes see dresses in the papers the fish comes in' and wearing stuff that her cousin, who is in service in Bristol, passes on from her employer once she's finished it with it herself thing feels a bit comic stereotype.

It always really rankles with me when Karen is telling Ginty and Nicola about the Brontes, and she says 'they had a Tabby - their Mrs Bertie - and a Doris called Martha'. Just one of those little moments that feels unintentionally revealing.

On another note, did anyone ever have Jean Ure's A Bottle Cherry Angel? The main character borrows a book called 'Summer Term by Antonia Forest' which she likes because it's about school and sisters not always getting on. For years I thought that book must really exist, if only I could find it somewhere.

Also PR is referenced in Jacqueline Wilson's Waiting for the Sky to Fall, as a book in which 'intelligent and articulate teenagers create a fantasy world'. I love these little connections.

On another note, did anyone ever have Jean Ure's A Bottle Cherry Angel? The main character borrows a book called 'Summer Term by Antonia Forest' which she likes because it's about school and sisters not always getting on. For years I thought that book must really exist, if only I could find it somewhere.

Yes, loved this one (although don’t remember the AF reference!). Jean Ure is brilliant in general, particularly Hi There Supermouse, Nicola Mimosa, the Dancing Dreams series and the (heartbreaking) Play Nimrod For Him. Interestingly she seems to have reinvented herself in recent years as a Jacqueline Wilson clone - my daughter read a later book of hers which had a JW endorsement on the front and seemed to ape her style quite a bit. A shame as her early books are very original.

Jacqueline Wilson used to be great in the Waiting For the Sky to Fall era, it's a shame (from my point of view) she moved away from YA to children.