Children’s books reviews: Escaping the ominous Tall Man into boarding school and museum tales

A selection of books for younger readers that transports them to a different time, space, and to the mysteries of the National Museum

Above from left: Sheena Wilkinson, author of ‘First Term at Fernside’; Mary Cathleen Brown, author of ‘The Tall Man’, and author of ‘The Great Discovery’, Peter Donnelly.

First Term at Fernside by Sheena Wilkinson (O’Brien, €9.99) 

“As the train squealed into the station at Queen’s Quay, Robin pulled her case and her precious hockey stick down from the luggage rack and grinned at Babs and the others in her carriage.” 

Hurrah! Off we go girls, back to boarding school, all jolly-hockey-sticks and midnight feasts in the dorms; lower fourths and upper fifths; perfect prefects and menacing matrons; as if Naughtiest Girl Elizabeth Allen was back in a gymslip and Darrell Rivers had never left Malory Towers.

Except this isn’t Enid Blyton or Elinor M Brent-Dyer and there is no classism, no racism, no sexism, and most definitely no political incorrectness. 

This isn’t a Cornwall clifftop or the Austrian Tyrol but 1920s Belfast, where beside the Lagan the genteel, ivy-clad Fernside school for girls is welcoming its pupils back for the new term.

The generations of readers who grew up devouring a diet of boarding-school stories populated by mean mam’zelles and stuck-up siblings are well aware how dated these books are, both in language and subject matter, but what to do?

Pass the cherished, dog-eared books down to children and grandchildren with the caveat that the abhorrent xenophobia and elitism therein must be understood in its inter- and post-war context? 

Steer well clear of such stories and deprive children of the enjoyment to be had by escaping to a world where strong female characters lead the way and snobs and bullies can expect to get their come-uppance? 

Or sanitise and modernise the stories until the soul of the originals is crushed by the PC sterilisation process?

Perhaps Sheena Wilkinson has devised a better solution: A boarding-school setting; same time period, different place; minus the offensive references, but with the requisite cast of good-egg, rotten-apple, and wayward characters all learning life lessons and independence in a parent-free zone.

The first issue faced here by central character Robin is the unwelcome arrival of her new-girl cousin Linnet, a free spirit who seems to have been enrolled minus social filters and basic school survival skills.

Robin is too busy aiming for a place on the school netball team to babysit Linnet. 

She is also navigating relationships with fellow classmates including the holier-than-thou Evangeline and spiteful Gillian, whose back-story is surely waiting to be told in a future sequel.

School rules must be broken, naturally, and there’s an enticing whiff of danger when the puppy of one of the day pupils disappears, prompting a daring schoolgirl rescue mission amid fears of animal cruelty or neglect.

Friendships, rivalries, triumphs, and disappointments, with a fresh touch, a diverse roll-call of characters, and a hint of mystery to boot. 

Belfast-born Wilkinson, a self-proclaimed Malory Towers and St Clare’s devotee and author of a PhD thesis on school stories for girls, has ticked all the right boxes.

The Tall Man by Mary Cathleen Brown (Everything With Words, €11.20) 

No one in their right minds would want to take up residence in the Tall Man’s abandoned house. 

“Freakishly tall and freakishly bad”, the Tall Man is long gone, believed to have fallen from an attic window 200 years ago, yet he still casts a long shadow over the town of Forkhead.

Tom has no choice about his new home, however. His mother, barely functioning as she and Tom flee following the break-up of a relationship, is falling into a black hole of depression and cannot feed or supervise the boy, leaving him to explore house, new school, and neighbourhood alone.

Echoing their gloom, the Tall Man’s house is impenetrably dark, no ceilings visible in some of its monstrous rooms, its cliff-like stairs so high that Tom has to clamber up each half-metre step using hands and knees. 

Its cupboards have no back walls, no shelves or floors. “Black space. Without the stars. Huge enough to lose a world in. Or a mind.” 

Yet Tom has an inexplicable sense of having been here before. Something of the past lingers in the building, and when he hears a voice coming from the cellar, he refuses to believe it emanates from the kitchen’s grumbling old fridge.

The voice is that of a boy, pleading with a rat to find the key to his leg-iron, but when Tom peers into the cellar, it appears to be empty. 

Tom gradually becomes convinced that the boy is trapped in time, a prisoner of the Tall Man, and in his attempts to help him, Tom crosses back from ‘Now’ to ‘Then’.

The Tall Man’s malevolent haunting presence in the house grows stronger, with Tom facing danger in both past and present as time blurs and it becomes impossible to distinguish between reality and nightmare, each equally terrifying.

There is no safe haven either at school, where new boy Tom falls foul of some particularly unpleasant bullies who run an extortion racket based on use of the school drinking-water fountain and set him up to take the blame for their further misdeeds.

A bleak loneliness pervades this debut novel from Donegal native Mary Cathleen Brown, Tom’s courage in the face of all mental and physical adversity being the light in a very dark world.

Readers are left constantly disorientated by the novel’s ever-shifting movements through time and childhood perception, making it more suited to older teens than the nine-plus age bracket for which it is recommended. 

For those of us who love a good scare, though, this is superbly spine-chilling stuff.

The Great Discovery by Peter Donnelly (Gill Books, €16.99) 

Mr Gray, the man in charge of the ‘Dead Zoo’, otherwise known as the National Museum of Ireland, is not feeling particularly colourful this Monday morning.

He has a very long list of things to do before the imminent reopening of the museum and has not yet found anything new and spectacular to exhibit.

When he receives a call from a woman who has spotted a “strange old thing” in her back garden, he zooms off to investigate, just as fast as his antiquated car will carry him.

What has been unearthed by the woman’s dog is an enormous, ginormous bone. But who, or what, did it belong to? An elephant, a rhinoceros? How can Mr Gray possibly tell from just one bone?

Soon though, the dog discovers more bones, a huge and growing heap of them being transported to the museum for identification.

The latest picture book from The President’s Glasses author-illustrator Peter Donnelly keeps the mystery of the bones going, right until its mega-sized surprise conclusion, this colourful sequel to The Dead Zoo once again shining a light on real exhibits in the National Museum.