Book Review: Best Friends at School
Feb. 14th, 2022 04:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerAfter MUCH TRAVAIL - that is to say, having to email the ILL office TWO WHOLE TIMES to convince them that Best Friends at School a) exists, and b) is a different book than Best Friends - I have received Best Friends at School!
Fortunately it is a delight, well worth a little travail. In previous books, all-American Suzie and French Co Co met, became best friends, matchmade their parents, and are now sisters! (“You mean stepsisters,” one of their new classmates says rather witheringly. Co Co airily replies, “It is not important.”) In this book, their newly-wed parents are off to Japan for an engineering project, so Suzie and Co Co are going to Laurel Crest boarding school!
I love boarding school stories and this is a classic boarding school story, with the overriding importance of finding one’s place at school and becoming a good Laurel Crest girl. (Just as the fantasy of romance novels is that everyone has a perfect match, the fantasy of boarding school stories is that everyone has a perfect niche at boarding school.)
Suzie and Co Co shake into place rather quickly, but their new best friend Puanani, a hulu dancer from Hawaii, struggles to fit in with the school discipline. She is a warm, generous girl, always eager to share the papaya and coconuts that her cousin Bill the airline pilot brings her from Hawaii, and she’s both smart and disciplined when she wants to be: she’s training to be a professional hulu dancer, and her dedication is compared to that of the other special athletic students, like an Olympic skier. But she can’t see the point in working at her studies or following the school rules.
She’s also very homesick for Hawaii. Co Co, who is often homesick for France, is filled with sympathy and at first tries to coddle Puanani out of it. She spends so much time with Puanani that Suzie becomes jealous, convinced that Co Co likes Puanani more than she likes Suzie - a really good depiction of friendship jealousy, I thought.
At last, however, when Puanani threatens to go home one too many times, Co Co realizes that coddling Puanani will not help her settle down at Laurel Crest. She recalls a French saying, which means, “who loves well, also chastises,” and decides that aiding and abetting Puanani in neglecting her homework is not the mark of a good Laurel Crest Girl.
Puanani comes to realize that a dancer must be self-disciplined not only in dance practice, but in other aspects of her life. But realizing this is one thing, actually changing her behavior is another, and the stress eventually proves too much for Puanani: she runs away, goes swimming in a cold pond (she’s missing swimming!), and gets pneumonia! (WOULD it be a boarding school book if someone didn’t run away from school and almost die?)
Everyone rallies to support her. In fact, the whole school loves her so much that they contact Cousin Bill and Puanani’s mother the famous dancer Aolani, and enlist their aid in turning the school’s Thanksgiving feast into a Hawaiian luau to honor Puanani! (At the luau, we discover that Cousin Bill has gotten engaged to the girls’ favorite teacher, Miss Blain. It wouldn’t be a Best Friends book without an engagement!)
Bard clearly did a ton of research on the Hawaiian elements. You can see this in the book itself: not only is Puanani a dancer, but she teaches the girls Hawaiian words that enter the school slang - just as Co Co, in an earlier book, taught her day school classmates French words that they added to their vocabularies.
Bard also mentions the research in the acknowledgments: “Most of the friends who helped me with this book live in Hawaii and they know how much I wanted it to be right. But Miss Clare G. Murdoch of the Library of Hawaii read it for me and corrected it so there wouldn’t be any mistakes. Aren’t librarians the best friends in the whole wide world? I think so too.”
Fortunately it is a delight, well worth a little travail. In previous books, all-American Suzie and French Co Co met, became best friends, matchmade their parents, and are now sisters! (“You mean stepsisters,” one of their new classmates says rather witheringly. Co Co airily replies, “It is not important.”) In this book, their newly-wed parents are off to Japan for an engineering project, so Suzie and Co Co are going to Laurel Crest boarding school!
I love boarding school stories and this is a classic boarding school story, with the overriding importance of finding one’s place at school and becoming a good Laurel Crest girl. (Just as the fantasy of romance novels is that everyone has a perfect match, the fantasy of boarding school stories is that everyone has a perfect niche at boarding school.)
Suzie and Co Co shake into place rather quickly, but their new best friend Puanani, a hulu dancer from Hawaii, struggles to fit in with the school discipline. She is a warm, generous girl, always eager to share the papaya and coconuts that her cousin Bill the airline pilot brings her from Hawaii, and she’s both smart and disciplined when she wants to be: she’s training to be a professional hulu dancer, and her dedication is compared to that of the other special athletic students, like an Olympic skier. But she can’t see the point in working at her studies or following the school rules.
She’s also very homesick for Hawaii. Co Co, who is often homesick for France, is filled with sympathy and at first tries to coddle Puanani out of it. She spends so much time with Puanani that Suzie becomes jealous, convinced that Co Co likes Puanani more than she likes Suzie - a really good depiction of friendship jealousy, I thought.
At last, however, when Puanani threatens to go home one too many times, Co Co realizes that coddling Puanani will not help her settle down at Laurel Crest. She recalls a French saying, which means, “who loves well, also chastises,” and decides that aiding and abetting Puanani in neglecting her homework is not the mark of a good Laurel Crest Girl.
Puanani comes to realize that a dancer must be self-disciplined not only in dance practice, but in other aspects of her life. But realizing this is one thing, actually changing her behavior is another, and the stress eventually proves too much for Puanani: she runs away, goes swimming in a cold pond (she’s missing swimming!), and gets pneumonia! (WOULD it be a boarding school book if someone didn’t run away from school and almost die?)
Everyone rallies to support her. In fact, the whole school loves her so much that they contact Cousin Bill and Puanani’s mother the famous dancer Aolani, and enlist their aid in turning the school’s Thanksgiving feast into a Hawaiian luau to honor Puanani! (At the luau, we discover that Cousin Bill has gotten engaged to the girls’ favorite teacher, Miss Blain. It wouldn’t be a Best Friends book without an engagement!)
Bard clearly did a ton of research on the Hawaiian elements. You can see this in the book itself: not only is Puanani a dancer, but she teaches the girls Hawaiian words that enter the school slang - just as Co Co, in an earlier book, taught her day school classmates French words that they added to their vocabularies.
Bard also mentions the research in the acknowledgments: “Most of the friends who helped me with this book live in Hawaii and they know how much I wanted it to be right. But Miss Clare G. Murdoch of the Library of Hawaii read it for me and corrected it so there wouldn’t be any mistakes. Aren’t librarians the best friends in the whole wide world? I think so too.”
no subject
Date: 2022-02-14 09:34 pm (UTC)ETA--back to Best Friends at School: I'm also charmed by all the details of a friendship-and-boarding-school story as enumerated by you (who would know!), especially the running-away-and-near-fatal-illness and the engagement.
And YES, librarians are the best friends in the world ^_^
no subject
Date: 2022-02-14 10:57 pm (UTC)I think the engagements are special to the Best Friends series (each of the three books ends with two of the adult characters pairing off!) but the running away (often accompanied by near-fatal illness, although SOMETIMES there is just near-fatal illness on its own...) is definitely a boarding school staple!
no subject
Date: 2022-02-14 09:36 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2022-02-15 05:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-15 02:28 pm (UTC)It's a relatively minor part of the book, so I didn't mention it in the review, but I was fascinated by the book's treatment of How Girls Should Relate to Boys. Suzie and Co Co have a nerdy friend, Debby, who become VERY popular with the boys because they can Talk Science with her.
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Date: 2022-02-15 10:37 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2022-02-27 12:42 pm (UTC)