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Tucker Twins #1
At Boarding School With the Tucker Twins
"There are no jollier girls in boarding school fiction than Dum and Dee Tucker. The room-mate of such a lively pair has an endless variety of surprising experiences - as Page Allison will tell you."
- GenresYoung AdultFiction
313 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1915
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
February 22, 2013
Nell Speed is one of my favourite US "girlsown" authors, and I rather think the Tucker Twins series is my favourite of her sets of books.
Despite the name, the series isn't really about the Tucker twins (Caroline and Virginia, nicknamed Dum and Dee, collectively the Tweedles); it's about their friend, Page Allison (who is also the narrator). Well, okay, it's also about the twins. And their father. And various friends, acquaintances, and hangers-on. Mostly it's about the friendship between Page and the twins.
In this opening book, Page (aged 15) is heading off to boarding school for the first time, having spent her life up to now at home in rural Virginia with her doctor father and black cook/nurse. She has almost no experience of other girls, but is working on the principle that the world is full of friends to make, so she isn't shy at all. She meets the Tucker twins and their father (mostly known as Zebedee) on the way, as well as another girl, Annie Pore, who is dressed poorly and appears not to be well-off. Friendships are instantly formed, and...
Well, the story follows a fairly typical path for an early 20th-century US school story. There is the snobby bitchy rich girl who tries to make trouble, and the conveniently local boys' school to provide companionship of the opposite sex, and the various minor rule-breakings, and the happy holidays (in this case involving a deer-hunting trip from Page's home and a dance at the Country Club in Richmond), and so on.
What really makes the book (and the series) for me is Page's narrative voice. She has all these little snarky asides that are just so fun. Like this one in the very first paragraph: "I have noticed that whatever age you happen to be seems to be the age in which hardships are the most difficult to bear."
Of course, the book is not perfect. The main problem it has is the depiction of the black characters, which though sympathetic for the time the book was written, is rather cringeworthy to a modern reader.
Still, I find the good points (especially the humour, which is always sympathetic, never nasty) of this book outweigh the bad.
Despite the name, the series isn't really about the Tucker twins (Caroline and Virginia, nicknamed Dum and Dee, collectively the Tweedles); it's about their friend, Page Allison (who is also the narrator). Well, okay, it's also about the twins. And their father. And various friends, acquaintances, and hangers-on. Mostly it's about the friendship between Page and the twins.
In this opening book, Page (aged 15) is heading off to boarding school for the first time, having spent her life up to now at home in rural Virginia with her doctor father and black cook/nurse. She has almost no experience of other girls, but is working on the principle that the world is full of friends to make, so she isn't shy at all. She meets the Tucker twins and their father (mostly known as Zebedee) on the way, as well as another girl, Annie Pore, who is dressed poorly and appears not to be well-off. Friendships are instantly formed, and...
Well, the story follows a fairly typical path for an early 20th-century US school story. There is the snobby bitchy rich girl who tries to make trouble, and the conveniently local boys' school to provide companionship of the opposite sex, and the various minor rule-breakings, and the happy holidays (in this case involving a deer-hunting trip from Page's home and a dance at the Country Club in Richmond), and so on.
What really makes the book (and the series) for me is Page's narrative voice. She has all these little snarky asides that are just so fun. Like this one in the very first paragraph: "I have noticed that whatever age you happen to be seems to be the age in which hardships are the most difficult to bear."
Of course, the book is not perfect. The main problem it has is the depiction of the black characters, which though sympathetic for the time the book was written, is rather cringeworthy to a modern reader.
Still, I find the good points (especially the humour, which is always sympathetic, never nasty) of this book outweigh the bad.
February 22, 2013
This is the first in a 6 book series published between 1915 and 1924. Nominally it's a boarding school series, but actually only two of the books are set at school. Our heroine is 15 year-old Page Allison, a doctor's daughter, raised in a rural Virginia community where she has no companionship with girls her own age. On her way to school for the first time, she meets the Tucker family, a set of twins nicknamed Dee and Dum who will be her best friends, and their startlingly young and sprightly widowed father. I'll just get what I like about this book out of the way: for a book from this period, the first person narration and breezily humorous tone are refreshing. I read my first Tucker Twin book about 20 years ago, and all this time I had a generally positive feeling about the series (with some reservations which I'll detail below) and looked forward to rereading them when I completed my collection. So I was quite surprised by how much I disliked this book on its second reading.
I think that part of my problem is that I'm approaching this book as a reader and collector of school stories. This is a genre with a far stronger tradition in the UK than in the USA, and in so many ways this book epitomizes everything that I find unsatisfactory about American boarding school stories of this era. My three main annoyances:
1. As in so many vintage American school stories, the school exists as a device for bringing the characters together, and then is completely side-lined as the books veer off into long accounts of the characters socializing, especially during the vacations. This is frustrating for me, as what attracts me about girls' school stories is the closed feminine world, a place apart from everyday life, with its own rules and codes, where friendships and small incidents have more intensity than they would otherwise, and where the ways a girl defines herself and contributes the community as a whole are matters of great import, and a source of personal growth and empowerment. In this book as in so many others of its sort, there is none of that; no sense of place, and very little sense of the tenor of the girls' lives at school.
2. The girls in American school stories tend to be far more boy conscious than their British counterparts. That consciousness is probably a more accurate reflection of a teenage girl's psyche, but still I find it obtrusive and uninteresting -- in series books, the boys that the girls socialize with are always such jolly wholesome fellows: Yawn. Further to this, so many authors seem to feel that it is their duty to signal early and often who the main character will eventually marry, and this book is no exception. Nell Speed does this so vigorously that I hardly feel it necessary to put in a spoiler warning that . In many ways, this ties in with point number 1, above. When the girls are first at school we are treated to a chapter of letters home, but are these letters about their new environment? No indeed! The twins write to their father about how fond they are of Page. He replies to them detailing how well he thinks of their new friend. Page writes her dad letters about the kindness and youthful zest for life displayed by her room-mates' father. Then all of them meet up for Christmas vacation, which seems to take up the greater part of the book. Upon their return, one of the twins falls into a fit of the blues and plans to run away -- this provides the perfect excuse for Mr. Tucker to come visit the girls at school for scenes of more socializing with his daughters' friend.
3. Many American children's books from the early 20th century make me uncomfortable because of the depiction of black characters. Nell Speed's characters tend to be Southern and to have "mammies", so unfortunate racial attitudes are often particularly glaring in her books. I'm not inclined to to describe specifically what I found distasteful here, but there was plenty. Sometimes I wonder why I am drawn to books of this era at all, but perhaps that's a question to explore another time.
Actual rating: 1.5
I think that part of my problem is that I'm approaching this book as a reader and collector of school stories. This is a genre with a far stronger tradition in the UK than in the USA, and in so many ways this book epitomizes everything that I find unsatisfactory about American boarding school stories of this era. My three main annoyances:
1. As in so many vintage American school stories, the school exists as a device for bringing the characters together, and then is completely side-lined as the books veer off into long accounts of the characters socializing, especially during the vacations. This is frustrating for me, as what attracts me about girls' school stories is the closed feminine world, a place apart from everyday life, with its own rules and codes, where friendships and small incidents have more intensity than they would otherwise, and where the ways a girl defines herself and contributes the community as a whole are matters of great import, and a source of personal growth and empowerment. In this book as in so many others of its sort, there is none of that; no sense of place, and very little sense of the tenor of the girls' lives at school.
2. The girls in American school stories tend to be far more boy conscious than their British counterparts. That consciousness is probably a more accurate reflection of a teenage girl's psyche, but still I find it obtrusive and uninteresting -- in series books, the boys that the girls socialize with are always such jolly wholesome fellows: Yawn. Further to this, so many authors seem to feel that it is their duty to signal early and often who the main character will eventually marry, and this book is no exception. Nell Speed does this so vigorously that I hardly feel it necessary to put in a spoiler warning that . In many ways, this ties in with point number 1, above. When the girls are first at school we are treated to a chapter of letters home, but are these letters about their new environment? No indeed! The twins write to their father about how fond they are of Page. He replies to them detailing how well he thinks of their new friend. Page writes her dad letters about the kindness and youthful zest for life displayed by her room-mates' father. Then all of them meet up for Christmas vacation, which seems to take up the greater part of the book. Upon their return, one of the twins falls into a fit of the blues and plans to run away -- this provides the perfect excuse for Mr. Tucker to come visit the girls at school for scenes of more socializing with his daughters' friend.
3. Many American children's books from the early 20th century make me uncomfortable because of the depiction of black characters. Nell Speed's characters tend to be Southern and to have "mammies", so unfortunate racial attitudes are often particularly glaring in her books. I'm not inclined to to describe specifically what I found distasteful here, but there was plenty. Sometimes I wonder why I am drawn to books of this era at all, but perhaps that's a question to explore another time.
Actual rating: 1.5
August 30, 2016
Thanks to Gutenberg for this boarding-school story. An okay sort of read for an exhausted day after a night of very little sleep. Not for the politically correct, as the African American characters are all figures of fun; the women are all fat and loaded with children, the men all wiry. A Virginia belle goes to boarding school and narrates her encounters with other girls, having been raised at home on a farm (plantation?) by her widowed father and a "mammy". Her two new besties (twins known as Dum and Dee, or "Tweedles") are also motherless, but they were raised in the town by their father and a housekeeper. The three roommates "adopt" yet another motherless girl (!) who is named of all things Annie Pore because she actually is. And yet all is forgiven because her parents are both English and members of the minor nobility.
I enjoyed the adventures, even though Page, a total non-entity upon her arrival at school as just another new girl, is treated with far too much deference by the staff and narrates like the older woman the authoress was. She has no failings, no temper, no faults to overcome, unless it's making with the sweetness and light every time she opens her mouth, à la Anne Shirley. Her letters to other people's parents made me want to shake her more than once. I also doubted that the staff would refer to the twins as Dum and Dee instead of using their names. The book is chopped off short with an invitation to the reader to check out the next in the series.
I enjoyed the adventures, even though Page, a total non-entity upon her arrival at school as just another new girl, is treated with far too much deference by the staff and narrates like the older woman the authoress was. She has no failings, no temper, no faults to overcome, unless it's making with the sweetness and light every time she opens her mouth, à la Anne Shirley. Her letters to other people's parents made me want to shake her more than once. I also doubted that the staff would refer to the twins as Dum and Dee instead of using their names. The book is chopped off short with an invitation to the reader to check out the next in the series.
August 1, 2025
It’s too bad I can’t rate this story higher - we have a surprisingly snarky MC, genuinely funny put downs of the inevitable Mean Girl character, and charming turn of the century boarding school details. But what we also have is pervasive and truly gross casual racism sprinkled throughout with a heavy hand. And while I understand this book is a product of its time and place, so am I and it was difficult to get through some of the shockingly horrible passages. Cannot recommend.
May 18, 2017
Some interesting points but not one to re-read.
Typical of its genre but the girls do not ring true and the style is not as well-written as that of the "Katy" series of Susan Coolidge
Typical of its genre but the girls do not ring true and the style is not as well-written as that of the "Katy" series of Susan Coolidge
Want to Read
March 13, 2017Read this book for free through Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/36018/...
February 3, 2015
Interesting view since it was written over 100 years ago characters charming
March 4, 2019
Enjoyable vintage with the mischievous Tucker Twins
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews