Alice-Miranda At School

Jacqueline Harvey's Alice-Miranda At School is a sunny boarding school story for 9 year olds about a tiny girl who arrives a year early and decides to fix everything.

What happens

Alice-Miranda Highton-Smith-Kennington-Jones is seven and a quarter. She rang the school herself to ask if she could start. On her first day it's her parents who are sobbing at the gate, while she skips off inside telling Mummy to "try to be brave".

Winchesterfield-Downsfordvale Academy for Proper Young Ladies has everything. A lake, stables, a library, a maze. But Alice-Miranda can't shake the feeling that something is missing.

The headmistress, Miss Grimm, never leaves her study. The rules include "Homesickness will not be tolerated" and "Head lice are banned". And there isn't a single flower anywhere, because Miss Grimm doesn't like them.

So Alice-Miranda gets to work. She finds Cook crying in the kitchen and, within a day, has packed her off to America to see her grandchildren (on the family plane, naturally). She makes the gardener a cup of tea and asks her mum to send over a team to plant flowers. Nobody asks Miss Grimm first. You can imagine how that goes down.

Then the other girls arrive, including Alethea Goldsworthy, who throws bottles out of her limousine because her chauffeur forgot the mineral water. Alice-Miranda simply climbs in beside her and offers to help.

Reading it is a bit like watching a very polite little whirlwind. Alice-Miranda is kind to everyone, remembers everyone's name and is never, ever rude. The grown-ups hardly know what's hit them. Cook smiles for the first time in years and the gardener finds himself laughing.

It's very posh (helicopters, eggs Benedict for breakfast and a teddy called Brummel) and that's part of the joke. There's nothing here to worry about, and underneath the fun there's a mystery about what has gone so wrong with Miss Grimm.

What to read next

If your reader loves a boarding school story, or a heroine who is relentlessly nice to people who don't deserve it, this is a treat. And if they fall for Alice-Miranda, A Little Princess would make a lovely next step. Sara Crewe is seven too, very rich and sent to a London school run by a cold, unfriendly headmistress.