Thursday, March 30, 2017

Girls of Canby Hall #23 But She's So Cute and #24 Princess Who?

In Girls of Canby Hall #23, But She's So Cute, Penny Vanderark is completely helpless.  Toby catches on that Penny is pretending to be helpless, so she doesn't trust her.  Meanwhile, Jane decides to go on a date with Cary instead of spending the evening with Andy and Toby at an event that is very important to them.

On page 27, the reader learns that "[m]ost of the girls at Canby Hall wore very little makeup."  An entire school full of teenage girls, and most of them wore little makeup?  Are you kidding me?  If so, Canby Hall is a very strange place.

I did not make a note as to exactly what I thought of this book, but I believe that I did not like it very much.  With all long series, the stories generally get weaker towards the end.

In Girls of Canby Hall #24, Princess Who?, Princess Allegra of Montavia comes to Canby Hall for a visit so that she can decide whether to return as a student next year.  Allegra falls in love with Randy, much to Toby's distress.  Allegra devises a plot so that she can briefly lose her bodyguards and spend time alone with Randy.  When Allegra disappears for real, her schemes might have backfired.

Princess Allegra might have sounded like an okay name in the 1980s, but now, Allegra is an allergy medication.

This is another weak book that I did not enjoy very much.

Most of the cover art in this series is inaccurate, not depicting scenes that actually happen.  When the cover art does depict an actual scene, the scene is depicted wrong.  The two books pictured in this post serve as good examples.

1 comment:

A said...

Long series do get worse as time goes on.

As to the covers not matching the contents, I have a theory about that. I have the impression, with this series especially, that the illustrator just was given the description of what the characters looked like and was told to make a bunch of paintings. I'm not sure if the authors were told to write a book surrounding the painting, or vaguely similar to the paintings, or the authors wrote a story and grabbed a painting that vaguely resembled that story.

The whole cover not matching the story bothered me. I know the old saying, "Don't judge a book by it's cover", but there has to be some expectation that the cover slightly has something to do with the content of the book.