The Abbey Girls go Back to School
Elsie J. Oxenham
Hardcover
(Collins, Aug. 16, 1949)
Book #11 in the Abbey Girls series. Cecily, the president of the Hamlet Club, arranges for Joan, Jen, Joy, and Jack to accompany her to an intensive folk-dancing school for a month. There they meet characters who you may remember from other books, like Tazy Kingston and Karen Wilson from the Swiss series, and Tormentil Grant from the Torment series. They each work hard and play hard together, enjoying learning about the dances and getting to know each other and their teachers better. They each struggle against their personalities and grow into wiser and more mature young women through the experience, and you can see some of what each of them will be as adult women. There is a lot of time and writing spent describing specific elements of the folk dances and the details of many of the lessons, so if you are new to the series and haven't yet read enough about the dancing and music to have a bit of a grasp on it, you might find those parts hard going. I found it was almost a dance school for me to read this book! I certainly understood a lot of the dances mentioned in other Abbey books a lot better after reading this one.