trennels | Spring Term: A review

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fanfiction

Spring Term: A review

1. Cover. The picture isn't bad, I suppose. Very reminiscent of the 1980's covers, featuring Ginty, Ann and a bed exactly like the ones we had at my boarding school. The text on the cover looks like it was done with MS Paint. Dreadful. It says 'Antonia Forest's Kingscote SPRING TERM' near the top and 'Sally Hayward' in smaller letters near the bottom.

2. Length. It feels longer than AF's school books (though I haven't actually checked the page counts) and it definitely needed stronger editing to tighten it up.

3. Plot. Is a mix of all AF's story elements thrown together. I don't think there's actually one new idea in the whole book. In no particular order we have: Nicola in a singing competition; Lawrie in a play with Tim directing it; Edwin with some discoveries about the farm log; Patrick and Nicola hawking together; Ginty doing something really stupid and intrusive and then getting all aggrieved when she is found out; Lawrie having to go into a B form; and the rest.

4. Characterisation. I think this is where Hayward is weakest. All her characters sound like Nicola. Now, I like Nicola, but she is not Miranda or Lawrie. She's certainly not Ann or Ginty. And so on. I didn't get any of the depth of characterisation which makes AF's writing so incredible. I didn't learn anything new about any of the characters, mostly because they don't learn anything new about themselves.

5. Prose. Is mostly okay. There are times when I longed for AF's beautiful, clear, precise use of language, but Hayward's writing is more than serviceable for the most part.

6. Setting. Is around the time of Run Away Home, rather than contemporary. Hayward explains that this was in large part for plot reasons, so that she could use letters rather than texts/emails etc. Meh.

My verdict:

It's moderately good fanfiction. It's not the best AF fic I've read, but it's far from being the worst. What it's not, in my view, is worth paying actual money for when you can read excellent fanfic online for free. I know GGBP have previously published Chalet School fic, but I hope that they are not tempted to publish any more AF fic.

Oh, I forgot to say. It's not safe to read if you have any kind of aversion to italics or exclamation marks which are liberally spread through the whole book.

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I have to totally disagree with some of your points.
1. I liked the cover precisely because it was reminiscent of the eighties covers.
2. This didn't seem any longer to me than the original school books. I'm going to count pages now.
3,4,5, Good fan-fic/ continuation novels are written as a homage to the original author, you can choose whether to read them or not as you please. They are supposed to be good pastiche, not startling originality. If there were anything "new" or different to do with plot or character in the book the author would rightly be accused of making the characters do things that the original author would never have intended or approved of. I have a couple of niggles with the plot, but on the whole I found it satisfying that there was nothing in the book that hadn't been pointed to in the canon, and that all the characters' actions felt true to what we know of them.
6. What is your complaint with the setting? All of AF's books up to Thuggery Affair were set in the same post-war setting, before she then jumped to the 60s for TA; RMF and Cricket Term could be any setting as they're so family/school orientated; and Attic Term and RAH were contemporary to the time of writing. In my opinion the least successful of the Marlow books are the ones that jumped into the future (TA, AT and RAH) - I think the Marlows in the mid- eighties stretch my suspension of disbelief and I don't think even AF could have brought them into 2011.

Now for my niggles. Would a school really suspend a pupil for reading another pupil's letter, especially when it was between family members?
Does the author know how much ponies cost? If Lawrie hadn't paid Nicola for the half of the Idiot Boy that she swapped for the Folio, how did Nicola have enough savings left to buy another pony? And Peter couldn't have just given Lawrie his half for a record token! I'm sure the Marlow parents would have insisted on Lawrie paying both of them back from her own Savings Bonds or whatever it was that they had.

My points were mostly observations not complaints.

But I do think that if you are going to publish a book and sell it to people, it will be held to higher standards than online fanfic. As a book, I think this is weak.

I have lurked off and on in this community but am now moved to join, having just read Spring Term.

I don't think the cover is much cop, to be honest. It is quite reminiscent of the 80s covers as you say but it's not great drawing.

Overall I agree with

jackmerlin below that publishing it as continuation fic rather means that the SH is bound to have to make it slightly conservative in plot & character developement - I don't think much in the way of startling originality would be a very good idea. I love the way that fanfic has the flexibility to be utterly out of canon and to explore character development that the original author didn't think of / wouldn't have anticipated / possibly even would have been outraged by(!) but I don't think that is what would be appropriate for continuation novels.

I think that when I started the book I would have agreed more with your overall comments, but from at least half-way I found myself utterly gripped, couldn't put it down, laughed out loud at several bits, and when I finally finished I felt like I'd read an actual AF book that mostly gave me what I wanted.

There is some fanservice, particularly for Nick/Patrick shippers of course, and I think Ginty gets stomped on pretty hard. I don't mind those aspect personally but I do think those aspects are more fannish and less AFish.

How could a continuation novel be set in 2011? At some stage, if Ginty were mentioned, one would have to refer to the events of The Attic Term - and the idea of her having to use the secretary's phone the previous term is ridiculous in an age of texting, FB etc. In re-reading the series, I find The Attic Term to be the most dated after The Thuggery Affair because of the technological shift. The rapidity of technological change is an aspect many contemporary series authors struggle with, and I don't think it would work well for the Marlows. Has there been any fan fic that has the Marlows with iPads updating Twitter?

I mainly enjoyed it. As rosathome says, Sally H isn't up to AF's standard as a writer, but who is? (Not to mention that anyone who wrote *that* well would probably be off writing their own stuff, not fanfiction. But just here and there a phrase made me smile and think of AF.

My main criticism was that there seemed to be so much stuffed into the plot. I'm not sure there was a character in canon who didn't get a mention. Of course, the compulsion to explain how everything worked out for everyone is understandable in writing this kind of follow-on: AF had the luxury of knowing that she could pick up on a theme or a character in the next book. The inclusion of Selby, for example, was completely wasted - it could have been used to throw an interesting sidelight on someone's character, but wasn't.

I was happy with the early 80s setting: as jackmerlin says, I just can't see the Marlows, or even Kingscote, in 2011; and the contortions to bring mobiles/emails/the internet into the frame would have been much more jarring. AF might have been able to do it, but we'd've cut AF more slack!

The other thing that struck me was the slightly different take on the religious elements. It's striking, in canon, that none of the young characters, with the two notable exceptions of Ann and Patrick, believe in god. Nicola is interested in religion/catholicism, but not a believer, and all the rest have a cheerful unbelief. I found it very hard to believe in Lawrie telling Ann that she should have prayed for guidance, or in Nicola thinking that God might be nearer than she'd ever thought.

But overall, a good solid B.

I think there's some nitpicking in the OP's reading of it - if ros was expecting something indistinguishable from what AF wrote, she was bound to be disappointed. For me, well worth the money, and I would certainly buy the next in the series (hopes?)

As the OP says, there isn't much entirely new, EXCEPT FOR Ginty's troubles - she's always wriggled out of difficulty before.

There are some great laugh-out-loud lines in there as well. I especially liked Chas's comment about Patrick and Nicola having lots of children together, and P&N's reaction.

There are huge differences between this and the original fanfic, no longer available online. I'm very sorry to lose Cory Corey, and although Broomhill in the original was absolutely too bad to be true, it's a great shame to lose all the Patrick angst that goes with it. And the ending to that fanfic was beautiful. My commiserations to all who didn't get to read it - I'm no publisher, but frankly the two are so different that I don't really see why the fanfic has to be withdrawn. Maybe the "deleted scenes" could be republished?

(As for the price of the pony, it's not way out. Nicola's windfall brought in £79 and a few shillings, if memory serves; that would be worth £2250 or so in 2011 prices, which is plenty to buy a pony.)

Anonymous at 2011-11-04 11.05 am was me, forgot to log in, sorry.

Yes, but Nicola had already used it to buy her half of the Idiot Boy, which she later swapped for Lawrie's First Folio facsimile. I have a suspicion that Sally H forgot this.

Mod note - comments are getting deleted to remove spam, not because of any attempt to stop the very interesting discussion of Sally Hayward's book. There seems to have been an uptick in spam over the whole Livejournal site this week.

Edited 2011-11-04 11:18 (UTC)

Didn't she cash her savings certificates to buy The Idiot? It was certainly suggested. Patrick wrote to her (in End of Term, I think, on the same day as she was left out of the netball team) to suggest she spend her windfall on a horse - Catkin, I think, which ended up with Ginty - but I'm fairly sure that Mrs. Marlow mentioned savings certificates, and that they'd had almost that much in interest, when they bought The Idiot in (I think) Ready Made Family.

Oh-oh. That does ring a bell. I'll check my copy of RMF later. (OTOH, she might have stashed her windfall in Savings Certificates anyway.)

Just checked RMF very quickly. I didn't see any mention of exactly where Nicola's money came from. There's an early discussion where Mrs M suggests Peter and Lawrie cash in some of their Savings Certs to buy the Idiot. Then later on Nicola and Peter agree to go halves but don't talk about accessing the money and finally Nicola heads over to Patrick's to pick him (TIB, not Patrick) up "with her mother's cheque to Mr Merrick in her pocket." Unless anything comes up later on, in which case I didn't spot it (I should be working!)

By the way, the price they paid was 50 guineas between them.

(Not yet read it.) I can sort of see Nicola thinking God might be nearer than she'd ever thought - in the right moment, totally unsentimental - because Nicola has got this introspective, interested streak in religion, and I can see her, in a moment, being moved and _thinking_ it - consciously. But not conventionally, not romantically, and certainly not as something that would be natural to think.

Whereas Lawrie's main belief, as I recall, is in the power of Them.

Yes, Selby could have been usefully used to make Patrick jealous, seeing Nicola getting on well with another boy.
One of the bits I loved about this book was Peter's description of his father arriving home to a house full of strange children - I thought this section very close to the 'real thing'.
I wasn't sure about the mention of their father sailing off to the Falklands war at the end, mainly because I thought that if the Falklands were going to be brought into it, we should have seen the Marlow girls worrying about it and talking about it at school. It would have been too major a thing to be happening in all their lives to be mentioned only in passing.

I liked the book version much better than the original online one. I didn't feel Patrick in the first version rang true at all. I skim-read the book when it arived, then next day started to read it again properly. I enjoyed it very much, I particularly liked Nick's singing lessons, nice to see Karen and Rowan on friendly terms again, and the shopping scene with the Dodds was great - loved Fob and Patrick enjoying each other's silence!

Hope Sally will do a sequel!

If that pupil had previously received a Conduct Mark, then yes, I think the suspension is believable.

I wasn't hoping for wildly outrageous innovation. I was hoping for something more than a pastiche of previous AF plots.

AF managed with the references to the Blitz in her later-set novels.

Rowan in End of Term talks about sometimes believing and sometimes not.

I agree that all the characters seemed to have been stuffed in just for the sake of being there. One of the things that works well in AF's books is the focus on different characters in each story. There's even a whole book without Nicola.

She didn't wriggle out terribly well in Attic Term, getting a Conduct Mark.

I know, I was always bound to be disappointed with the prose. I had higher hopes for the plot. I still feel that for the money, I'm entitled to have higher expectations than I would for something online.

You think she was bothered about a conduct mark? She got one snotty letter from her mother, one miserable night in the san, and that was it. She didn't lose any friends, she didn't fall out with family - Nicola's attitude to Ginty wasn't the least bit altered by being dropped in it - and I doubt she had any prefectly ambitions. Life went on exactly as before.

As for the money, it can't be the first time in life you've lost £12. And put it on ebay, you'll get some of it back.

She lost Patrick.

Fair point. I probably forgot that because she didn't actually know she'd lost him, in Attic Term which was the last book she appeared in.

I felt desperately sorry for Ginty by the end of this book. If Patrick had done the decent thing and ended it cleanly either by letter or phone she would have known where she stood and not read the letter. Typical Patrick.

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Spring Term: A review

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Nicola's windfall

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