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Signpost to Switzerland
Camilla's father sends her to Switzerland for the summer to get her away from an unsuitable boy. She is supposed to stay with his friends, the Dettelmanns, and help run their hotel. Naturally, she is very unhappy about this and is determined to have a miserable time. Is it possible she will meet a young man who can change her mind about all of these things?
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1962
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 8, 2025
Definitely not a favorite MEA but I still always enjoy them. Camilla is a hard pill to swallow until late in the book. 😅 There is a surprisingly poignant bit towards the end that made me think I’d have rather had Anna and/or Lisa as the protagonists. MEA is brilliant with Swiss settings. She clearly knew the country well and delighted in it.
January 22, 2022
I went into this one expecting a rough go. I had been warned that the protagonist, Camilla Lingard, was wretched. And wretched she was. But I loved it!
It's ANOTHER book set in Kandersteg, and with the Dettelmann family again (as met in Three Go to Switzerland and briefly in Swiss School). And (alright, some **SPOILERS** follow) also to Stresa in Italy (like in Drina Dances in Switzerland and Milan (like MOST of her Swiss books! I mean, I get it - I live in Switzerland and have been to Milan half a dozen times at least! Comes with the territory, in a way!). Camilla also travels up to the Jungfraujoch (less common in her books), and to Interlaken (again, ALL of the Swiss books go through there, I think!).
In Kandersteg, the Blausee and the Oeschinensee are visited, again, and the Bluemlisalp is mentioned an awful lot (as usual), and the Dettelmann's chalet up on Hoeh (featured more prominently in Three Go to Switzerland), and the Gasterntal... and even Goeppenstein and the small villages of Kippel and Blatten above it (even I haven't been there - that's pretty darn remote!).
But Camilla also goes up with the cable car to the foot of the Gemmi Pass (one of my absolute favourite hikes!), though sadly she doesn't do the full route. This the only book where that is mentioned, to my knowledge (I still haven't read the rather rare "Adventures in Switzerland", but of course I mean to!). There are also many detailed descriptions of the alpine flowers, and more than just the usual gentians and alpenroses. I appreciated this - they are lovely!
In this book (again, **SPOILERS**!) she also visits Zermatt, and Sion. And funnily enough, despite this being written in 1962, they are depicted EXACTLY as they are today (pandemic aside!) - there are crowds at Zermatt, and way too many Americans. But it's still gorgeous and worthwhile and you should absolutely skip the Gornergrat and choose an "easy" hike instead (be forewarned - what the Swiss consider an 'easy walk' will come as something of a shock the first time!).
And SION! Wonderful, wonderful Sion! Again, as described - very few tourists, and almost none of them English speaking. I have hiked up to the castles, but I did not even know of this "Son et Lumiere", and I think I need to try to see if it is still performed. (Oh, Sion is gorgeous! Put it on your itinerary! And Brig - the prettiest stopover you'll ever have!).
Alright - enough about the scenery (it's why I read MEA, can you tell?) and onto the nitty-gritty. This book is NOT perfect. It's predictable, it's cheesy, it has some romance that I find equal parts suspect and nauseating, and Camilla is a complete and total little b*tch for a good chunk of it. At its core, it is a coming-of-age sort of story. But there are nuances here that surprised me - I haven't found any of Mabel Esther Allan's books to be anything other than light and superficial reading, so I was pleasantly surprised by what follows.
Enter Lisa. Plain, perhaps even slightly unattractive Lisa Dettelmann. A good egg, like her prettier older sister Anna, with a good many graces and virtues that Camilla patently lacks. Likeable, dependable, and very much a 'wallpaper' sort of character. She and Anna take turns moving the plot along, and they really blend into the background, Lisa most of all. Lisa shocks Camilla by stating that she'd like to train to be a teacher (Camilla doesn't understand why anyone would want to work, ever), and reflecting that perhaps a good career would be especially important if she doesn't marry (Camilla stupidly says, "Everyone marries!", and then gets to wondering if she is correct in this). Lisa points out that maybe she'd not be able to win a man of her liking, and it could be that she would find another that she could love, maybe, in time, and in the meantime she'd have a worthy vocation and young minds to enlighten, etc.
I thought this was all just a plot device to get shallow and spoiled Camilla to think about a) having a vocation, and b) considering marriage as an option, or at least not as a certainty. We discover later (**SPOILER!**) that her boyfriend has become engaged to his ex, and her world is thrown into greater turmoil. I'll touch on this in a moment, but sticking with Lisa, whose inner life I completely dismissed immediately following this discussion, we find late in the novel that she was, in fact, truly in love with someone, and that someone is now in love with (and soon to be engaged to) the beautiful Camilla. And her heart silently breaks, and she smiles, cheerfully, and no one ever knows. And later, she's all smiles and cheerfulness, and seems to accept that she could never have had this person, and such is her lot in life.
Honestly, I almost shed a tear. This was TRAGIC, and she smiled though her heart was breaking, and you never see her cry.... I was completely shocked. In just a few words, almost an afterthought, you see Camilla's happily ever after ruining a life's dream of Lisa, who doesn't let it show. Here is heroism.
In a similar vein, there is (light) suicidal ideation in this story, as Camilla falls into utter despair at times. And Anna explains that "everyone feels like that, sometimes". Camilla is shocked and relieved to hear this. There's quite a lot of sympathy and understanding for awful, awful Camilla - and YET, weirdly, there is also the Hungarian refugee Ilona, employed at the Hotel Fisistock, whose parents were killed as they tried to escape their country, leaving the 16 year old daughter orphaned in Italy. She had found a job and a place to stay in Switzerland, but was prone to moodiness and episodes of severe depression: ILONA GETS ZERO SYMPATHY. None. None at all. This I found hard to swallow.
Let's compare the circs for a moment: Ilona, who is stateless, orphaned, no doubt traumatized beyond repair, and is SIXTEEN, is trying to manage, alone, in a foreign country and foreign language, to survive the horrors she has known and the awful uncertainty and displacement of her future. She apparently has infrequent but recurrent, inconvenient lapses of 'hysteria' and bouts of major depressive episodes.
On the otherhand, we have remarkably pretty, completely spoiled and excessively lazy Camilla, forced into exile by her father for a couple of months at a hotel in Kandersteg to learn to stop getting up at 10AM and frittering her life away. She's beautiful, she has some wit (but no ambition), and she's an absolute pill. True, you can feel sorry for her, too. She is a fish out of water, and a naive one at that. But how does SHE get more sympathy and leeway and forgiveness than Ilona?! This just pissed me right off. It felt like discriminatory thing, as if a Hungarian refugee was worth less than a pretty b*tch from Kensington. One has suffered more than anyone could imagine or should like to, and the other has never suffered anything at all. Grrr. Ilona goes into hysterics after witnessing a fire and a subsequent cardiac arrest of another character, and is told she'll have to deal with it, and is thought badly of for withdrawing and needing to rest in bed with a "terrible headache" that people seem to doubt the existence of. Camilla, however, frequently throws temper tantrums over comparatively minor things, and causes no end of worry and problems for ALL of the Dettelmanns, sometimes intentionally. But let's keep feeling sorry for the pretty one who is having such a hard time adapting. And that refugee needs to get back to work, pronto...?!?!?
Something was very, very off here.
I won't go into the romantic side of things, because you can tell from the first moment he arrives in the story who he will play and how the story arc will go. It's that predictable and revolting. Pretty girl is absolute b*tch to everyone, but she's soooooooo pretty, and somehow he's madly in love with her anyway. Sigh. Men.
Interestingly, Camilla's mother is exactly the same sort of character - John, her father, is "absolutely devoted" to her, but disagrees with "many of the deeper points" of life - she's a vapid, shallow socialite who likes to shop and doesn't do anything useful!!! But she was PRETTY, and that seems to be all that matters.
Lisa Dettelmann knew this. Did Mabel Esther Allan, too? Is it true? Probably at least partly! But most people are not extremely beautiful, and most of us find love in spite of mediocre physical traits (because it's NOT all about that, is it?! Attracting someone in the first place, okay, I get that a pretty face would make that easier! But that's not everything, and beauty does not last!) - it really makes me wonder about MEA's mindset, and not for the first time. I just get the awful feeling that there was real self-loathing in there, somewhere. And I wish that weren't the case at all.
It's ANOTHER book set in Kandersteg, and with the Dettelmann family again (as met in Three Go to Switzerland and briefly in Swiss School). And (alright, some **SPOILERS** follow) also to Stresa in Italy (like in Drina Dances in Switzerland and Milan (like MOST of her Swiss books! I mean, I get it - I live in Switzerland and have been to Milan half a dozen times at least! Comes with the territory, in a way!). Camilla also travels up to the Jungfraujoch (less common in her books), and to Interlaken (again, ALL of the Swiss books go through there, I think!).
In Kandersteg, the Blausee and the Oeschinensee are visited, again, and the Bluemlisalp is mentioned an awful lot (as usual), and the Dettelmann's chalet up on Hoeh (featured more prominently in Three Go to Switzerland), and the Gasterntal... and even Goeppenstein and the small villages of Kippel and Blatten above it (even I haven't been there - that's pretty darn remote!).
But Camilla also goes up with the cable car to the foot of the Gemmi Pass (one of my absolute favourite hikes!), though sadly she doesn't do the full route. This the only book where that is mentioned, to my knowledge (I still haven't read the rather rare "Adventures in Switzerland", but of course I mean to!). There are also many detailed descriptions of the alpine flowers, and more than just the usual gentians and alpenroses. I appreciated this - they are lovely!
In this book (again, **SPOILERS**!) she also visits Zermatt, and Sion. And funnily enough, despite this being written in 1962, they are depicted EXACTLY as they are today (pandemic aside!) - there are crowds at Zermatt, and way too many Americans. But it's still gorgeous and worthwhile and you should absolutely skip the Gornergrat and choose an "easy" hike instead (be forewarned - what the Swiss consider an 'easy walk' will come as something of a shock the first time!).
And SION! Wonderful, wonderful Sion! Again, as described - very few tourists, and almost none of them English speaking. I have hiked up to the castles, but I did not even know of this "Son et Lumiere", and I think I need to try to see if it is still performed. (Oh, Sion is gorgeous! Put it on your itinerary! And Brig - the prettiest stopover you'll ever have!).
Alright - enough about the scenery (it's why I read MEA, can you tell?) and onto the nitty-gritty. This book is NOT perfect. It's predictable, it's cheesy, it has some romance that I find equal parts suspect and nauseating, and Camilla is a complete and total little b*tch for a good chunk of it. At its core, it is a coming-of-age sort of story. But there are nuances here that surprised me - I haven't found any of Mabel Esther Allan's books to be anything other than light and superficial reading, so I was pleasantly surprised by what follows.
Enter Lisa. Plain, perhaps even slightly unattractive Lisa Dettelmann. A good egg, like her prettier older sister Anna, with a good many graces and virtues that Camilla patently lacks. Likeable, dependable, and very much a 'wallpaper' sort of character. She and Anna take turns moving the plot along, and they really blend into the background, Lisa most of all. Lisa shocks Camilla by stating that she'd like to train to be a teacher (Camilla doesn't understand why anyone would want to work, ever), and reflecting that perhaps a good career would be especially important if she doesn't marry (Camilla stupidly says, "Everyone marries!", and then gets to wondering if she is correct in this). Lisa points out that maybe she'd not be able to win a man of her liking, and it could be that she would find another that she could love, maybe, in time, and in the meantime she'd have a worthy vocation and young minds to enlighten, etc.
I thought this was all just a plot device to get shallow and spoiled Camilla to think about a) having a vocation, and b) considering marriage as an option, or at least not as a certainty. We discover later (**SPOILER!**) that her boyfriend has become engaged to his ex, and her world is thrown into greater turmoil. I'll touch on this in a moment, but sticking with Lisa, whose inner life I completely dismissed immediately following this discussion, we find late in the novel that she was, in fact, truly in love with someone, and that someone is now in love with (and soon to be engaged to) the beautiful Camilla. And her heart silently breaks, and she smiles, cheerfully, and no one ever knows. And later, she's all smiles and cheerfulness, and seems to accept that she could never have had this person, and such is her lot in life.
Honestly, I almost shed a tear. This was TRAGIC, and she smiled though her heart was breaking, and you never see her cry.... I was completely shocked. In just a few words, almost an afterthought, you see Camilla's happily ever after ruining a life's dream of Lisa, who doesn't let it show. Here is heroism.
In a similar vein, there is (light) suicidal ideation in this story, as Camilla falls into utter despair at times. And Anna explains that "everyone feels like that, sometimes". Camilla is shocked and relieved to hear this. There's quite a lot of sympathy and understanding for awful, awful Camilla - and YET, weirdly, there is also the Hungarian refugee Ilona, employed at the Hotel Fisistock, whose parents were killed as they tried to escape their country, leaving the 16 year old daughter orphaned in Italy. She had found a job and a place to stay in Switzerland, but was prone to moodiness and episodes of severe depression: ILONA GETS ZERO SYMPATHY. None. None at all. This I found hard to swallow.
Let's compare the circs for a moment: Ilona, who is stateless, orphaned, no doubt traumatized beyond repair, and is SIXTEEN, is trying to manage, alone, in a foreign country and foreign language, to survive the horrors she has known and the awful uncertainty and displacement of her future. She apparently has infrequent but recurrent, inconvenient lapses of 'hysteria' and bouts of major depressive episodes.
On the otherhand, we have remarkably pretty, completely spoiled and excessively lazy Camilla, forced into exile by her father for a couple of months at a hotel in Kandersteg to learn to stop getting up at 10AM and frittering her life away. She's beautiful, she has some wit (but no ambition), and she's an absolute pill. True, you can feel sorry for her, too. She is a fish out of water, and a naive one at that. But how does SHE get more sympathy and leeway and forgiveness than Ilona?! This just pissed me right off. It felt like discriminatory thing, as if a Hungarian refugee was worth less than a pretty b*tch from Kensington. One has suffered more than anyone could imagine or should like to, and the other has never suffered anything at all. Grrr. Ilona goes into hysterics after witnessing a fire and a subsequent cardiac arrest of another character, and is told she'll have to deal with it, and is thought badly of for withdrawing and needing to rest in bed with a "terrible headache" that people seem to doubt the existence of. Camilla, however, frequently throws temper tantrums over comparatively minor things, and causes no end of worry and problems for ALL of the Dettelmanns, sometimes intentionally. But let's keep feeling sorry for the pretty one who is having such a hard time adapting. And that refugee needs to get back to work, pronto...?!?!?
Something was very, very off here.
I won't go into the romantic side of things, because you can tell from the first moment he arrives in the story who he will play and how the story arc will go. It's that predictable and revolting. Pretty girl is absolute b*tch to everyone, but she's soooooooo pretty, and somehow he's madly in love with her anyway. Sigh. Men.
Interestingly, Camilla's mother is exactly the same sort of character - John, her father, is "absolutely devoted" to her, but disagrees with "many of the deeper points" of life - she's a vapid, shallow socialite who likes to shop and doesn't do anything useful!!! But she was PRETTY, and that seems to be all that matters.
Lisa Dettelmann knew this. Did Mabel Esther Allan, too? Is it true? Probably at least partly! But most people are not extremely beautiful, and most of us find love in spite of mediocre physical traits (because it's NOT all about that, is it?! Attracting someone in the first place, okay, I get that a pretty face would make that easier! But that's not everything, and beauty does not last!) - it really makes me wonder about MEA's mindset, and not for the first time. I just get the awful feeling that there was real self-loathing in there, somewhere. And I wish that weren't the case at all.
June 25, 2021
I love Mabel Esther Allan's books! This one was no exception. It's about a 17 year-old self-centered English girl, Camilla, with an unsuitable playboy boyfriend and a father who is concerned with how she's turning out. So he sends her to his friends, the Dettelmanns, who own and run a hotel in Switzerland, for the summer hoping that living with the down-to-earth family will straighten her out. At first Camilla is resentful, rude, and mean but slowly she grows up. My favorite thing was the description of the scenery. I visited many of the places in Switzerland, and Lake Maggiore in Italy too, that Camilla visited. I took that same trip on the Gornergrat train to Zermatt. I also visited the beautiful island of Isola in Lake Maggiore.
November 18, 2025
At seventeen, Camilla has left school, but has made no plans for her future. So her father suggests she visit friends of his in Switzerland, who run a hotel at Kandersteg. Reluctantly she agrees. But upon arrival, rather than trying to get to know the Dettelmann family, Camilla instead goes on excursions with Rufus and Rowena, an English brother and sister she met on the train. But when an emergency occurs at the hotel, Camilla pitches in, and is surprised to discover how much she enjoys it. She also discovers a talent for languages. Before the summer is over, Camilla has found where her future lies. Very enjoyable coming-of-age novel.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews