Reader, I finished it!

As I near the end of my first working week back in the school routine, I have just finished reading Eva Ibbotson's A Song for Summer. Quite appropriate timing, as the hot, sunny weather we have been blessed with this year is about to break. Tomorrow will be ten degrees cooler, and we are officially into Autumn already.

Eva Ibbotson as she appeared in The Telegraph article

I am not quite sure what to make of this book. It's an enjoyable read, but it tries to straddle both camps of adult and teenage fiction, and ends up being neither. Originally written as an adult novel, I read in a Telegraph article that it had been adapted later on for the teen market. Therein lies the problem I think.

It has what one would expect from an Ibbotson novel. There are echoes of her own nomadic life, lots of snapshots of Vienna and references to the kind of intellectual circles that both her parents moved in. Her mother knew Berthold Brecht, who gets a mention in the play. As a child she was surrounded by intelligent, independent-minded, strong women, who were perhaps the blueprint for the heroine's mother and her two aunts, all heavily involved with the Suffragette movement, and running an alternative home in central London. Ellen Carr, the heroine in question, is expected to be a blue-stocking herself, but she has a passion for cooking, and latent gifts for home-making. She takes off on an adventure as a housemistress at an unconventional Austrian school, where there is much scope for the author to indulge her trademark love of the zany. The school is populated by a band of eccentrics of all temperaments and nationalities, where the children run wild as do the teachers! Were this present day England, Ofsted would be sure to shut it down immediately, but this is Austria just before the war, where there are other more pressing concerns on the horizon.

It is against this backdrop that Ibbotson sets her love story, for that is essentially what this book is. There's a predictability about some of it, and an unbelievability about other bits of it, especially the character of the hapless Kendrick.

Nevertheless, it's a good read with a feisty, beautiful heroine, but with her love interest prone to rolling about on a swan-shaped bed with an operatic diva from time to time, it's not exactly suitable for primary aged kids!