I bought this last week from the fabulous Book Depository , which not only posts books to Australia from Britain free of charge, but sends them airmail too. I got my books in a week. How can this be sustainable? Anyway, long may it – and the mighty Aussie dollar – last.

However, I was really disappointed in this book. I really enjoyed the first book in the series, Secrets at St Jude's: New Girl, which I read when I was in England earlier this year. That had a good mix of traditional school story elements/formula in a contemporary setting. ( Cut for spoilers )

They haven't made their way out here, so I'd been waiting a while to buy and read three contemporary school stories published in the UK over the past  12 months: Secrets at St Jude's: New Girl by Carmen Read, Class by Jane Beaton, and Jinxed by Sara Lawrence.  Were they worth the wait? Read on ...

( Secrets at St Jude's )
( Class ) 
( Jinxed )

Because I'm working on the second Cotterford book, I spent some time earlier this week reading a couple of second books in school story series. I chose two of the more recent series, Anne Digby's Second Term at Trebizon (1979) and Harriet Martyn's Jenny and the New Headmistress (1984).  I also started reading DFB's Captain at Springdale (1932), not because it's a second book, but because it's the only Springdale I have and I'd never read it. So I thought it would be useful to read in terms of going cold into a series I'd never read before.  Except I found I did know a few of the characters, courtesy of Dimsie (who also appears in this book).

Second Term at Trebizon contains lots of hockey, music and bickering. And lots of clues as to why Tish is behaving strangely and what Nicola Hodges is up to.  I wonder if Anne Digby ever wrote adult detective stories, like Ruby Ferguson did? She'd have been good at them! I like Digby's characters but the stories are way too short. I like Balcombe Hall more than Trebizon, because although it's a very posh school, the characters seem more real and much more like some of the kids I was at school with. Wanting to leave at 16, taking no crap from the teachers, saying the food was &*#@ ...

But oh, what a difference it would have made to the inhabitants of Trebizon and Balcombe Hall if they'd been born a little later and enjoyed the benefits of modern technology.  At Trebizon, a quick Google on 'Hodges Road Haulage' would have saved Rebecca from having to ask awkward questions of the prefects (and it might have revealed impending disaster for Sue's father and saved a lot of bickering too). At Balcombe Hall, a mobile phone would have prevented Ariel from being kidnapped, or at least got her saved more quickly. And poor Mrs Vaux, deprived not only of the still in-the-future mobile but seemingly of even a landline in her flat at Balcombe Hall – she and her guests, locked in by Sylvia and co., only get out because the Admiral signals for help from the window!

On the first page of Captain at Springdale, Peggy Willoughby arrives at school and needs to go to the post office so she can buy stamps to send a postcard to tell her mother she's arrived safely. It struck me that 50 years on, with no mobiles and most likely no landline access except in emergencies at school, Rebecca and Jenny probably communicated with their parents in exactly the same way. What an incredible difference just 20 years has made in all our lives. No wonder fantasy is the preferred genre for authors in terms of writing for children and young adults – because the real world changes so fast that technology you write about in 2009 could well be completely outmoded by 2011 ...