Review: "Summer's Ending" by Helen McClelland

Summer's Ending by Helen McClelland
Published 2006
★★★

Something of a curiosity, this: Summer's Ending is a classic 1930s school story...except published in 2006. It makes some sense, as the author did a bunch of work related to the Chalet School books (this has a very similar feel). It's a little modernized, but not all that much. We have two girls (11 and 13) sent from Malaysia, where their white British family lives, to London to join their older sister in a convent boarding school (their older brother being at a boys' school nearby). The girls aren't quite so squeaky-clean as in the Chalet School (the early books of which were written in the 20s and 30s), but they're still fundamentally Good; similarly, the school isn't quite so hyperintensely rules-based (the nuns are honestly in some ways more understanding than the relatively liberal, often untrained teachers of the Chalet School), but it's still...well, a 1930s boarding school run by nuns. Jean (the eleven-year-old) talks back and breaks rules and whatnot, but if you've read the Chalet School books, you can think of her as Grizel: a little rough around the edges, but fundamentally, you know. Good. (As in the Chalet School books, though, everyone assumes that the only valid/acceptable/up-to-standard education is an English education. So that's fun.)

Now. There be spoilers. This book was published almost twenty years ago and I don't think all that many people are seeking it out these days, but hear ye, hear ye, spoilers abound in the rest of this review.

In many ways what interests me most is the plot point of the children all being sent off to England. I know it was a thing at the time, but Christina and Roderick (the older children, twins) have not been "home" to Malaysia in years; their parents have come to visit, but between cost and the amount of time it would take them to return, the twins have not been back. Christina is a virtual stranger to Jean and Maggy; Roderick, off at his own school, is an unknown entity.

Obviously kids generally fly the nest at some point, whether that's for university or something else. Obviously children still leave home at young ages, for all sorts of reasons, and it's a long time before they go home, again for all sorts of reasons. I myself left (except, I went one town over, not miles and miles and miles away) for boarding school when I was fifteen, and though I have trouble imagining being away for five years or more at a time, I know it was done.

But there are two tremendous losses in this book: one midway through, which the characters struggle to make sense of for much of the rest of the book, and one mentioned in the sort of epilogue, with one of the sisters narrating some of what has happened since. (That is: one character dies during the course of the book, and we find out later that another character died in World War II.) And, my gosh. It is honestly more realistic than everyone living happily ever after, but you have to think that parents losing a child so far away—a child they have only seen maybe once a year since he was a very young child—would be questioning every decision they'd made about where to live and how to educate their children.

Anyway, things to think about. I'm not sure what made me shelve this one, once upon a time (more than a decade passed between me shelving it and me actually reading it!), but I suppose now I can move on to other things.