Lauren Brooke -
The Chestnut Hill Series
1 The New Class, 2006
2 Making Strides, 2006
3 Heart of Gold, 2006
4 Playing for Keeps, 2007
5 Team Spirit (USA: The Scheme Team), 2007
6 All or Nothing, 2007
7 A Time to Remember, 2008
8 Chasing Dreams, 2008
9 Helping Hands, 2009
10 Racing Hearts, 2009
11 A Chance to Shine, 2009
12 Far and Away, 2010
Chestnut Hill 4: Playing for Keeps
Scholastic -
Rating:
Chestnut Hill is a different series by "Lauren Brooke" based at a girls' boarding
school in America. Its heroines are a quartet of girls: Lani, Malory, Dylan and Honey,
and the series follows them through the school. In this story, Lani is under threat
of having to leave the school as her poor report has made her parents think she's
riding at the expense of her school work.
Heartland meets teenage fantasies of struggling
against the world; Chestnut Hill addresses fantasies of a different sort. This series
is really Sex and the City for young girls and horses: friends, shopping, relationships
and ponies. What matters in this book is the girl's relationships with each other;
their riding, oh, and labels. I am not exactly au fait with every hip label so it
took a while before it dawned on me that Heatherette was a brand and not a colour.
Some of the labelling serves to reinforce the character stereotypes: the snobby (there
had to be one, didn't there) villain has, of course, all the right labels, but the
other characters do their bit to uphold American commerce too. There is so much mention
of labels that I did begin to wonder if there was a bit of product placement going
on. Here's a particularly blatant example:
"Who has a phone?" Lani demanded. Several
options were immediately pulled out of pockets and offered. She picked Tanisha's
brand-
Maybe this is here to reinforce the fantasy: these girls are of course wish fulfilment
of the highest order. They go to an incredibly cool school where you ride, get to
meet cool boys (not ones that live in the town, of course -
It's also interesting to see how conventions are changing in school
stories. In Enid Blyton et al, the girl turning up in the tussore silk shirt with
specially tailored uniform is A Bad Thing, whose heart is not in the right place,
and who needs the tempering influence of The School. In Chestnut Hill they'd ask
her who her tailor was and plan a shopping expedition.
This boarding school is quite
something: I imagine, in my cynical way, that it came about because of the popularity
of Harry Potter, set of course, in a boarding school (though Chestnut Hill is blessedly
short of fantasy). There have been a few attempts at combining school and ponies,
of which the best known is probably Mary Gervaise's G for Georgia series, to which
girls can take their own ponies.
The big difference between Mary Gervaise and the
Lauren Brooke series is the amount of pony content. Mary Gervaise, as Sue Sims says
in The Encyclopaedia of Girls' School Stories, was much happier writing school stories,
and so the pony content of her books, though there, lacks the fine detail and the
emphasis that the fan of the pony story would expect. No such problem with Chestnut
Hill. Although it is stressed throughout the story that Lani must concentrate on
her work, the actual time spent in the classroom is absolutely minimal. The only
teacher who says anything meaningful is the riding instructor. Even the Head, with
whom Lani's parents hold a pivotal meeting to decide her future at the school, doesn't
appear. Her comments are reported by Lani's father. Not quite Miss Annersley of the
Chalet School, ever-
One thing that puzzled me is that lack of intelligent
writing about the ponies: I don't mean that what's said is wrong; but that the ponies
do not emerge as characters. The stated aim of the series is:
"... this time we'll get to know the same ponies over the entire series. Although there were regular equine characters at Heartland, like Sundance and later Spindleberry, most of Amy's time was spent meeting new ponies, dealing with their issues, and returning them happily to their owners. In Chestnut Hill, we'll be able to watch the central characters forge relationships with ponies that become very special to them, even if they don't own them. If you ride at a riding stables, you'll know it's hard not to have a favorite pony. It will be great to see the main characters getting to know which ponies are their favorites, and developing their riding skills through the semesters."
It is very easy in pony stories to make the ponies vehicles, and for them not to
emerge successfully as real, live ponies. Even after reading about Colorado, the
pony Lani rides, I don't know much about him. I know he's a buckskin; good at Western
disciplines and can be difficult, but I don't have any sense of him emerging as a
real live pony. There's none of the little bits of detail that make say Don Stanford's
horses in The Horsemasters emerge as characters, and that's a shame.
Chestnut Hill
doesn't push the boundaries of either the school story or the pony story: it is probably
the most horsy school yet created, but challenging boundaries is not what this series
is about. It's about selling books by ticking yet more boxes. The books are reasonable
reads; the plots are adequate and the characters not completely cardboard. I never
thought I'd say this, but I prefer Heartland. At least with that series there was
something to raise a bit of passion, even if what I felt wasn't quite what the authors
intended. Chestnut Hill, though, left me rather bored. It's a comfortable and conventional
gallop through the juvenile reaches of American commerce.
