School for Skylarks

by Sam Angus

It is 1939. When Lyla is evacuated from her home in London to her Great-Aunt’s enormous house in the West Country, she expects to be lonely. She has never been to school nor had any friends, and her parents have been at the centre of a scandal. But with the house being used to accommodate an entire school of evacuated schoolgirls, there's no time to think about her old life. Soon there is a horse in a first-floor bedroom and a ferret in Lyla’s sock drawer, hordes of schoolgirls have overrun the house, and Lyla finds out that friends come in all shapes and sizes.

Genres: Middle Grade, School Stories, Adventure, Historical Fiction, War, School

320 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 27, 2017

About the author

Sam Angus is a bestselling and award-winning author of historical adventure novels for children of nine and over. Her novels, required reading for schools across the United Kingdom, deal lightly with some of the bleakest moments of British and Colonial history. Her books include Soldier Dog, Captain, A Horse Called Hero, The House on Hummingbird Island and School for Skylarks.

Sam Angus was born in Italy, and grew up in France, and spent much of her childhood moving from home to home and country to country, but most of her early childhood was spent in Franco's Spain. She went to more than ten different schools and was the naughtiest girl in all of them. She then went on to read English at Trinity College Cambridge, where she secretly kept a dog in her college rooms. After Cambridge she went to Central St Martins to study fashion then taught A Level English Literature for many years, before becoming a full-time writer. She lives between London and Exmoor and has five children, several horses and a handsome, stubborn West Highland terrier.

Sam Angus's books have been longlisted and shortlisted several times for the CILIP Carnegie Medal. Soldier Dog was longlisted in 2013, Captain in 2015 and The House on Hummingbird Island for 2017. She has also won or been shortlisted for many local and national awards including the North East Book Award, The Sussex Coast Amazing Book Award, the East Lothian Libraries’ Lennox Author Award, the James Reckitt Children’s Book Award, the Hillingdon Book of the Year, and the Bath and Somerset Centurion Award, amongst others, the Cheshire Book Award.

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was attracted to the premise of this book -- a girl is evacuated to her aunt's enormous house at the beginning of the war, and then becomes a member of a school housed there by the government -- but found the whimsical quality of many elements of the story distracting in their improbability. Although WWII frames the story, it doesn't feel very grounded in historical reality (no evidence of rationing, for example). 2.5 rounded up.

[Kirsti · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very odd kind of book, and not really what I was expecting. At times I wasn't even sure if this was real life or some kind of magic land, but I guess that was the point. Lyla is like a Peter Pan type character; she hasn't had to grow up. This isn't entirely clear at first, because it's only when years later she is still doing the same things that you realize she is kind of stuck? and that Ada is stuck too, but that isn't revealed until the final part, as well as her reasoning for it.

For all the weirdness and crazy parts, I did enjoy this. It was a little outside my spectrum though, and I think even children might either question the oddness or miss the emotional build up. Definitely different though, if that's what you're looking for in a book. Three stars.

[Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four stars, because I honestly could not put it down, but. But. The closer we got to the ending the more fortuitous it all became, and the more obvious the wish-fulfilment aspect was. I too was the "sad, strange, weird" loner in my school, and there was no "we love you" accolade from all. Cat's patient mothering of Lyla is out of place--they are the same age (11 or so to 16), and yet she acts like she's in her 30s, and she is supposedly the "normal", well-rounded one who fits in?
I couldn't really mark this as a children's book, because of the weighty themes involved; it was more like something written for adults using kids as characters. The farther the story goes the scrappier the narration gets, which I found annoying, and some of the details get away from the author: one minute Aunt Ada's famous roses had "long been uprooted to make way for the vegetable gardens" and the next the gardener fills the church with them. Stuff like that.
Lyla is so self-absorbed as to seem mentally unbalanced. Perhaps she was.
Oh for a young person's story without emotional damage as the central motif. At least there was no "magic woo-woo."

[Daisy May Johnson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I almost put this aside. I'd been attracted by the details and the premise, but the first half of it just broke me. The pacing was strange and I was desperate for something more to happen, then what was happening. The second half, however, started to work through into some massively interesting spaces. As a whole, however, things never quite worked for me nor reached the heights that I wanted them to reach. It's a complex book this, bubbling full of potential that never quite manages to coalesce.

[Helen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adored this book.
I loved how we see everything from Lyra point of view, as adults we can see what is happening and we can see the mistakes she make.
I will be reading more from this author.

[Selan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was pleasantly surprised by this book. It started out rather boring, then gradually became a little more interesting...but by the time we reached the last quarter of the book, it really got pretty good. I'm glad I continued reading to the end.

To start off, this book is about our 11-year old protagonist Lyla. It's the Second World War and she's been evacuated to the countryside to live with her Aunt Ada - an aunt who is rather loopy and does all sorts of zany things. She's quite eccentric, in fact - talks in a very unique fashion, summons her horse indoors to dinner, gives her niece a ferret to cheer her up (the ferret is called Bucket, btw).

Hang on a sec. Lyla? This sounds familiar. Remember Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, with a very similar female protagonist called...Lyra. Her personality is pretty much the same.

...except that Lyra is a lot more awesome, and Lyla mopes about her aunt's house and complains that her dad cheated on her mum, and that she wants to go home. Yeah. But she's like 11, so she's probably going to be like that for a while.

The first third of the book is bloody boring.

Seriously. She's just moping around in this giant mansion by herself and complaining about her parents. I almost fell asleep reading it.

A little later, one of Lyla's "Escape Plans" to get out of here and return to London where her mother will presumably help her, involves writing a letter to the Ministry of Defence and trying to persuade them to send their soldiers up to this mansion.

What do they get? An army of schoolgirls. An entire school of them moves into the mansion, and strangely enough Aunt Ada is FINE with that, and Lyla has to enroll in this school and take classes with everyone else.

Honestly, I'm amazed anyone at the Ministry of Defence actually believed this letter written by an 11-year old girl. But I digress.

The next part of the book is a bit interesting...but not that much, because I'm just relieved that our protagonist gets to INTERACT with someone. A few characters are introduced, but seriously only one of them matters. Maybe two. One of them is written to be some kind of bully...except not really, because all she does is say slightly unpleasant things sometimes. That's about it.

The last part of the book, however, makes it almost worth the wait. Lyla has been writing to her mother during the war. She's been writing everyday and has received no reply at all, not even on her birthday. Her father, however, has been writing to her pretty frequently.

Unfortunately, she's of the opinion that her dad cheated on her mum and left her (due to her mum's words) and refuses to read any of her dad's letters. She continues to wait every day for any reply from her mum.

Except for one day when she DOES start getting letters from her mum...but at this point, you can tell that something's wrong, because she should be over the moon about it, and instead she's just fairly happy about it. I've read enough teenage fiction at this point to know that it's not going to end happily.

I could go on about this book further, but I will say that all that boring stuff in the beginning makes it worthwhile when you reach the climax at the end.

There are, however, some parts of the book which bothered me. Namely...this book takes place over five years.

Are you shitting me? FIVE YEARS?

She acts exactly the same as when she's 11, as she does when she's 16! For goodness' sake! Put in some character progression or something! I mean, sure, she matures a bit, but people change quite a bit between those two ages. It felt like barely one year had passed! I get that the author was trying to maintain continuity about how long the war lasted...but still.

Another thing was that the chapters were ridiculously short.

I found several chapters which were less than two pages long. I blinked and the chapter was over. It was like one scene. I finished 50 pages within 10 minutes, and that barely covers any of the book at all. I mean, come on! i felt like it was for much younger readers because of this (especially with the larger font), but the chapters could be a little bit longer than that.

The writing style, too...You know how the first Harry Potter book has this kind of quirky humour about it? Something about it which just makes you smile? Sassy, even. I felt like the author was TRYING to do that here. He wasn't doing a very good job, though. I didn't really smile at how hard he was trying to do humour. It just fell flat, in my opinion.

There's also a scene right near the end of the book where one of the characters starts dying and it comes out of nowhere.

Lyla leaves for three days. When she comes back, the character has suffered multiple strokes and is on her deathbed. The next several chapters (did I mention they're so goddamn short?) go on about how she dies and stuff. Which is a bit sad, since I care a little about the character, but I'm still recovering from reading about Lyla's parents.

in short, the emotional and evocative part of the book was about the protagonist's relationships with her parents. The war setting felt like it was just in the background. Sure, Lyla's dad is off fighting in the war, and he writes letters to her every day which she just turns into paper aeroplanes and chucks in the rose bush, but...I don't know, it's more about relationships here. There's a few nods to the war effort, I guess.

And then there's a point where her auntie starts smuggling Monopoly boards to the prisoners captured by the Germans.

I don't even know how that could possibly work out.

Anyway, I've rambled on too long about this book now. It starts off rather slow, but it picks up towards the middle and ultimately has a satisfactory conclusion. A character gets killed off, but it made virtually no difference to me, except that the author seemed to fill several chapters with everyone mourning for her.

Also, Lyla's mum is a piece of shit, and her dad is cool, and her aunt is loopy, and I still don't believe 5 years passed through the entire book. Initially I would have given it 2/5, but I'll raise that to a 3/5.

[Book Gannet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sam Angus is one of those authors I’d heard of, but never read. All the Michael Morpurgo comparisons sort of put me off because War Horse had such a big impact on me as a child, I couldn’t see how another author could compare.

I was wrong. So wrong. And although I can see where the Morpurgo comparisons came from, this book filled me with all the best Eva Ibbotson feelings – and that is an excellent thing.

Because this is an excellent book, fun at times, absurd at others and utterly, utterly heartbreaking. In some ways I think there’s a hint of Toy Story 3 about it, in that it might hit adults harder than children, simply because of nostalgia and memories and everything that gets bound up inside when you look back at school days from a distance.

Because unlike almost every other book about boarding school, Lyla struggles. Badly. She’s an unusual girl, barely educated, immature in some ways, rather too old in others. Her childhood thus far has been largely devoted to attending on her socialite mother, who doesn’t believe in schools or caring for her daughter or anything much except enjoying herself in London. But Lyla loves her. She is devoted to her mother, which makes it all the more painful when her father drags her off to Devon away from the dangers of war. Despite several escape attempts, Lyla gives into one of her impulsive moments and that’s how an entire school ends up on Great-Aunt Ada’s doorstep, invading everything.

There was so much to love about this book. Admittedly, Lyla herself is not entirely loveable. She’s rude, angry, self-absorbed and half-wild, at times, but I felt for her deeply because she so badly wants to fit in without knowing where to even start. And she is kind to Bucket, her ferret, and does regret her worst mistakes. Luckily for her, Great-Aunt Ada is wonderful. Everyone should have a great aunt like her. There’s also Solomon, the most unusual butler, and Cat, the greatest friend ever.

The story stretches out across the course of the Second World War, full of history, growing pains and the awful things girls can do to other girls. There were times when my heart hurt for Lyla, but then there were others where I couldn’t stop grinning. Ada is marvellous, and the letter planes were both wonderful and heartbreaking. The scene with Lyla in the tree really did feel as though it broke my heart, and yet I couldn’t stop laughing at the lesson in the kitchen.

And that’s the wonderful thing about this book. Even if, at the start, I didn’t like Lyla and wasn’t sure where this was going or how it would turn out, somehow it reached inside me and pulled out so many emotions. It’s a beautiful, heart breaking, joyful smile of a read and Sam Angus has a huge new fan in me.

(ARC provided by the publisher via NetGalley.)

[Kathryn Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's lots of great ingredients and a nice turn of phrase, but this never quite comes together.

A pet... not hate, but 'thing I notice', in a lot of current children's fiction is the over-chronicling of the protagonist's reactions, particularly at the beginnings of novels. In what I think is a bid to get readers to connect to a character, the author makes sure to tell us three or four times a page how the heroine is feeling about what she's looking at. And it does the opposite, I think, making the character feel inconsistent and manic and hard to relate to since one second she's bemoaning her fate, the next delighted by some whimsical sight...

I think the instinct is to make character's journey central, but we end up missing the 'climate' of the character because there's too much attention on passing weather. When every feeling is mentioned, everything has the same weight and we're unable to see the important stuff or spot what to keep our eye on very clearly. I wish such authors would relax and have confidence that we don't need to be told all the time what a character is feeling to be able to understand it.

I bring it up with this book because I think it speaks to what lets this book down, which is that it contains a lot of elements and ideas but fails to really impart a sense of why we should be paying attention. It's all equally-weighted weather.

The middle third of the novel loses all sense of overall momentum, which is potentially fine - we've arrived by then at a very unusual situation full of potential for entertainment via episodic stories and vignettes from within that stasis. But everything is too vaguely drawn for that to work most of the time. I never formed a clear feel of the environment of the house, the feel of school routine, the characters of the girls, the pecularities of how Ada's world interacted with the school's, particularly as it pertained to Lyla herself.

[Allison M · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars for this enchanting, moving children’s book.

I selected this novel hoping for an enjoyable story set in a school. School for Skylarks delivers on this but also on so much more, making it an exceptionally rewarding read. World War II in all its ramifications is explored: the evacuation of children; commandeering of accommodation; the war effort including knitting, nursing and aid parcels; shortages and hardships; and soldiers’ experiences of warfare – all this is mentioned in the book, not in any text-book manner but as part of a rich, authentic story. Other themes include loneliness, friendship, divorce, growing up and growing old, and running away from and facing up to trouble.

Again, please don’t think that these themes are set out in a dry or formulaic fashion. It is part of the fabric of the wonderful story of Lyla Spence, whom we meet at the age of eleven when she is left at the home of her eccentric, superb Great-Aunt Ada. The wonderful household at Furlongs, including a butler with a wooden leg, a stuffed armadillo and a ferret called Bucket, are soon joined by Garden Hill School for Girls (thanks to Lyla’s backfiring machinations). The school scenes are beautifully drawn, with Lyla experiencing some of the common ups and downs of school life, including trying to make friends and being ostracised, and we also read magical scenes of how Violet the horse comes to live on the first floor of the house, and of how the girls are taught to mark their teachers for their enthusiasm and skills.

Lyla is a furious, infuriating, engaging character and I hope to meet her again. I will seek out more novels by Sam Angus, and I will recommend School for Skylarks to all.

I received this ebook free from NetGalley and Macmillan Children’s Books.

[Imi Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

[Contains spoilers]

"'Dreaming deepens the soul,' Great Aunt Ada began fiercely, her eyes fixing on each girl in turn. 'Dreaming is how you discover what sort of person you want to be. If you don't dream, hmmm, you'll end up being quite the wrong sort of person for you, d'you see?'"

It's been a while since I finished a book in tears. Dear Great Aunt Ada! Her character made me laugh and I so wished she was my relation and when she died it felt like I'd lost a loved one. It was interesting to watch Lyla grow as a character, develop a friendship and begin to love her father and understand the danger he was in fighting abroad. I felt I knew Furlongs inside out as well as Violet, Little Gibson and Old Alfred. I think I've found a new favourite author and I'd definitely recommend this book - historical fiction that brings history to life through magical storytelling.

[Roz Radmore · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quirky and unusual story set in 1939 . War has begun and Lyla has been evacuated from London . She has been sent to stay with eccentric Great Aunt Ida who owns a huge old mansion in the country .Lyla expects to be lonely , but then she has never met any children before or attended school . There is a mystery surrounding her estranged parents too .
Then an entire school is evacuated to the old house and Lyla might finally have the chance to make a friend
A thoroughly enjoyable story which shows that friends may come in many guises .

[Clare · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the loveliest book I've read all year. Recommended for anyone nine plus.

[Christina Reid · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a beautiful, beautiful book. It destroyed me, yet I couldn't recommend it enough.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written, has now become one of my top ten favourite books of all time

[Charlotte · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found the pyschological distress and failer to cope with reality that the main character experienced unbelivable, but it was a poingnat and very readable story that moved me lots with its ending.

[Alicia · Rating 1 out of 5]

OMG worst book ever

[Moldy xxxx · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing, sad but beautiful 😍 loved the story line 👏

[Maddison ღ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this for school so I didn't have much choice but to read it. To be honest, I hardly remember what it was about and what actually happened but it must have been good to of gotten a rating of 4 stars. I do not have much else to say about it, as I have forgotten the plot and storyline

[Rachel Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very touching story about a girl who simply doesn't know everything about the world and is so confused about the world. Lyla is such a curious little girl and she is very funny to read about.