Do you like school stories from the early/mid 20th century?
I love Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers and St Clares series, and Elinor M. Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School books.
I know they’re not particularly literary or challenging, and they’re really middle class and often (Chalet School especially) implausible, but I just find them to be really fun! I suppose it’s my inner child coming out 
Are there any other similar books (preferably series) that are good?
There’s the Trebizon series which I believe to be similar to the Malory Towers/St Clares books although they’re by a different author. I have never read them though, I was more of an Enid Blyton girl (and the Chalet School books as well! Weird and wonderful though they were).
If you really want some top-hole slang together with old-fashioned attitudes that you definitely can’t express nowadays, you could try the Billy Bunter series by Frank Richards and the Bessie Bunter series by a series of authors writing under the pseudonym Hilda Richards.
The Jennings books are also hilarious. Or at least, they were when I was ten – haven’t read them since. I think the author was Anthony Buckeridge, but I’m dredging my memory for this. This is a boys’ school rather than a girls’ one though, as are the Billy Bunter books.
Moving away from school stories but in keeping with the general theme of essentially good-natured children getting up to mischief (and feeding into our pseudo-nostalgia for a more innocent time), if you haven’t read What Katy Did then I think you would like it. There are a couple more in the series too, although she is older in those.
Enid Blyton also wrote the Famous Five which are classic. I am sure you must have read them already, but in case you haven’t, with 21 books in the series you can’t go wrong.
Her other series that I remember as being good were: the XXX of Adventure (Castle, Island etc) with Jack, Dinah, Mary-Ann and Philip and a parrot named Kiki, and the Secret XXX (Castle, Island etc) with Jack, Mike, Peggy and Norah. There was also a series which I think was along the lines of The XXX Mystery, where the kids were Roger, Dinah, Barney and Snubby. (I see a lot of repetition in my names, perhaps I’ve got some mixed up.) None of them are school series though, they all take place during the holidays, and they’re all based on a group of kids foiling criminal plots rather than kids interacting with one other like the typical school story tends to be (with The Secret Island being a notable exception and very sweet).
You might also like to try some Penelope Lively, although these are one-shots (and again, the only interaction is between a small group of friends, with perhaps a sibling too) they’re quite good for characterisation and nostalgia. And E Nesbit, although again, it’s siblings rather than classfuls of children.
Enid Blyton book review: The Island of adventure and the castle of adventure.
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The Famous Five – Complete Series – 5-DVD Box Set ( The Famous 5 ) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - Denmark ] $35.99 Denmark released, PAL/Region 2 DVD: it WILL NOT play on standard US DVD player. You need multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view it in USA/Canada: LANGUAGES: English ( Dolby Digital 2.0 ), Danish ( Subtitles ), Finnish ( Subtitles ), Norwegian ( Subtitles ), Swedish ( Subtitles ), SPECIAL FEATURES: Box Set, Interactive Menu, Multi-DVD Set, Scene Access, SYNOPSIS: Three of the children, Julian, Di… |
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The Forgotten Garden: A Novel $7.89 Amazon Best of the Month, April 2009: Like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beloved classic The Secret Garden, Kate Morton’s The Forgotten Garden takes root in your imagination and grows into something enchanting–from a little girl with no memories left alone on a ship to Australia, to a fog-soaked London river bend where orphans comfort themselves with stories of Jack the Ripper, to a Corni… |
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The Island of Adventure (Adventure Series) $3.99 Enid Blyton’s classic adventure series is fantastically repackaged for a new generation of readers. For Philip, Dinah, Lucy-Ann and Jack, the holiday in Cornwall is everything they’d hoped for—until they begin to realize that something very sinister is taking place on the mysterious Isle of Gloom. But they’re not prepared for the dangerous adventure that awaits them in the abandoned copper… |
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The Castle of Adventure (Adventure Series) $3.84 What is the secret of the old castle on the hill, and why are the locals so afraid of it? When flashing lights are seen in a distant tower, Philip, Dinah, Lucy-Ann, and Jack decide to investigate—and discover a very sinister plot concealed within its hidden rooms and gloomy underground passages…. |