Third Year at Malory Towers

Enid Blyton's Third Year at Malory Towers is a boarding school story for 9 year olds, and this time the new girl turns up wearing lipstick.

What happens

Darrell Rivers is packing her trunk. Her little sister Felicity is hanging about wishing she were going too (she gets to come in September, and she is counting). Darrell's best friend Sally can't travel down with her this term because she's stuck in quarantine for mumps.

So there's a spare seat in the car. Which is how the Rivers end up collecting Zerelda Brass.

Zerelda is American, nearly sixteen, and staying with her English grandmother for the year. Everyone waits for her in the drive. Then she comes down the stairs looking like somebody out of the films, with a great roll of brassy gold hair piled up and curls over her shoulders.

Darrell can't believe it's her. She looks about twenty.

Zerelda will not wear the school hat. She calls Darrell honey and tells her to spill the beans. And when Darrell finally gets going on her favourite subject in the world, which is Malory Towers, Zerelda falls fast asleep beside her in the back seat.

Darrell decides not to say another word to her for the rest of the journey. Honestly, who could blame her?

That's the whole flavour of it. Nobody is fighting a villain. What matters is who is being annoying, who is showing off, and whether you can hold your temper when someone treats your favourite thing as boring.

There's a lot of that this term. Mavis has a magnificent singing voice and will not stop telling people about the career she's going to have. Gwendoline is going to fall for Zerelda the second she sees her, which everyone predicts and nobody can stop. And another new girl is arriving tomorrow, Wilhelmina, who has seven brothers and is already being called Bill.

Later the story turns on Bill's horse, Thunder, and whether he pulls through an illness. That's where the tears come, if your reader is the sort who minds much more about an animal than about a person. Something to know before it arrives rather than after.

It is book three, and while you could start here, the friendships have three terms of history behind them. Gwendoline in particular makes far more sense if you have watched her from the beginning.

What to read next

Which is what First Term at Malory Towers is for. Darrell in her brand new brown and orange uniform, twelve years old, worrying about whether she'll make any friends at all, and finding out that a temper she can't hold is going to be her real problem.