Summer Term at Malory Towers

Summer Term at Malory Towers by Pamela Cox is a boarding-school story for 9 year olds in the Malory Towers series, and it is the one where a cousin turns up and ruins everything.

What happens

Felicity Rivers and her friend Susan are going back for the summer term, which Felicity thinks is the best term of the lot. Picnics. Swimming. Tennis, which she is determined to be picked for this year.

They are third formers now, and this is the eighth book, so the pleasure of it is partly just walking back in and finding everyone where you left them. June and Freddie with new tricks. Steady Pam. Nora saying she is hungry enough to eat a horse.

Not everyone is there, though. Julie hasn't arrived, and Julie is never late, because Julie has a horse called Jack in the school stables and she fusses over him dreadfully.

Then a long, expensive American car comes up the drive and out steps a tall girl with beautifully arranged blonde curls.

Her name is Esme. She is Lucy's cousin, back in England after four years away, and from the moment she appears Lucy goes cold. Sulky, moody, rude to her own family, and not able to explain why.

Esme doesn't help herself. She comes down to class in lipstick and mascara and gets sent off to scrub it. She refuses to run for a tennis ball and says gee, keep your hair on, it's only a game, which is absolutely the wrong thing to say to June. By teatime Amy and Bonnie have adopted her and promised to make an English rose of her.

It all sounds like small stuff, and for a while it is. Then Julie's horse is stolen. Money starts disappearing as well. The term everyone was looking forward to turns into something a good deal harder.

Something to be ready for. A good chunk of this book is a girl being frozen out. Esme is laughed at for her accent, told she looks plain without her make-up, called hopeless in front of the whole tennis court, and sneered at by her own cousin for no reason anyone can see. It is well done and it isn't cruel for the sake of it. But if your reader is going through anything like that at school, some of these scenes will land close to home.

What to read next

If they want the term before this one, New Term at Malory Towers has the same girls a year younger, with Felicity's older sister Darrell packing up and leaving for good.