The new girls from The Hawthorns are arriving, and Silverside's established boarders are outraged. When Avelyn Watson steps into her dormitory, she finds herself caught between loyalists who remember the old rivalry and girls simply trying to survive their first term in a new place. The dormitory where she's meant to belong has become a battlefield of whispered alliances and pointed silences. Angela Brazil, the undisputed queen of girls' school stories, captures that particular adolescent torture of wanting desperately to fit in while the world insists you don't belong. What begins as a war over tradition and territory becomes something more tender: the discovery that loyalty can be earned, not inherited, and that the girls we resist are often the ones who understand us best. For readers who loved Enid Blyton, who remember the agonies of school hierarchies, who know that the people who annoy us most often become indispensable.
