The Naughtiest Girl: Here's The Naughtiest Girl: Book 4
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By Enid Blyton
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2 reviews
In Enid Blyton’s highly popular school series, Elizabeth Allen is at boarding school. She’s tried being the naughtiest pupil there, but now she’s got a new challenge…
In book four, there’s a new boy in Elizabeth’s class. He’s sulky and grumpy and he’ll do anything to show Elizabeth up. She means to keep her temper, but it’s not so easy for someone who was once the naughtiest girl in the school…
Between 1940 and 1952, Enid Blyton wrote four novels about Naughtiest Girl, Elizabeth Allen. Books 5-10 are authorised sequels of the series written by Anne Digby in 1999.
Bonus material: A rare, complete serial story about a very special school. An interview with Enid Blyton about her school days. Enid Blyton’s experiences as a teacher. A timeline of the author’s life. Photos from Enid Blyton’s younger days. TweetReviews
The main characters were John, Elizabeth and Patrick. I really liked them all.
Enid Blyton has a gift for creating unlikeable characters - such as Patrick - who nevertheless have a full internal life and point of view, and then narrating that point of view with detail and zest. Often her unlikeable characters are jealous, feeling excluded or insecure. She also has a knack for creating likeable main characters whose shortcomings are subtle and encourage discussion in the real world
- things such as having a strong view about how things should be, and enforcing those on others with a rather cheerfully-bullying attitude. It's often been said - by myself included - that Blyton doesn't write children as much as adults in children's bodies, but perhaps this learning curve of empathetic give-and-take is in fact a somewhat accurate depiction of childhood traits and lessons in getting along. While I wouldn't recommend the approaches that lead to problems ultimately being solved in her stories as things to be emulated in real life, this book is a short, fun romp through a school spat that ultimately sees the characters uniting and resolving their differences. While plot drives Blyton's books, she creates vivid evocations of scenery and the general 'mood' of surroundings and of the day, in a few brush strokes, that elevate her writing from superficial to literary.
