How the snooty Thelka learns her lesson

When I found a copy of The Exploits of the Chalet Girls in the British Council library, I was thrilled. I’d read the first one The School at Chalet a year ago and liked it so much, I decided to read all the others ( and they’re many , around 60 !) . This book looked exciting and it came just on time – one day before we left for our beach holiday on the Konkan coast.


So there I was, on a hammock near our MTDC cottage on the beach and reading it ..even though the school is nowhere near a beach ! It is quite the opposite; in the mountains near Salzburg in Austria ( where Mozart was born) . The chalet school was started by Madge Bettany who was told by the doctors that her younger sister Joey needed to be in the healthy air of the mountains to get well. What better way than to start a school. Money for Madge , and a lovely place for Joey to grow up in.


So the Chalet school began. With interesting subjects like French and German taught on different days. The students have fun, they walk everywhere , sometimes they climb mountains, sometimes they go to the forest opposite their school. And there’s always something eventful happening .


In The Exploits the eventful thing is the arrival of a pampered Prussian girl called Thelka. She’s snooty and she uses bad language. By the end of the book Thelka is, as you can guess, well behaved ..but how she gets to this is what is interesting. Besides Thelka and her tantrums, there’s a lot of other action too. The naughty fifth formers are always upto something .They’re chemistry lab explosions, clocks being broken and other interesting tricks . So if you like school stories like St. Claires and Mallory Towers , be sure to read this one !

posted by Aleya Dutta Choudhury