Friday, February 11, 2011

Grace Harlowe's Problem

Grace Harlowe's Problem was published in 1916 by Altemus.  This book is a thousand times more interesting than Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus.

The first four chapters have a lot of filler material as well as some reminiscing.  A couple of pages are devoted to a chance encounter with Madge Morton of another Altemus series, the Madge Morton series.  Grace and her friends discuss Madge's life and adventures, and of course this occurs in hope of getting the reader to buy the Madge Morton books.

Near the end of Chapter 4, the plot finally begins with the introduction of the newest member of Harlowe House, a girl named Jean Brent.  Jean seems to be hiding something.  Of course Jean refuses to tell Grace the truth, but Grace learns that Jean has a bunch of expensive clothes that she wishes to sell in order to pay for her expenses.  Grace refuses to allow Jean to sell her clothing.

Later, Jean secretly sells her clothing to some of the wealthy Overton students.  Grace is extremely upset when she learns of the sale and worries about how it will make her look.  Around the same time, the dean, Miss Wilder, takes a leave of absence due to bad health.  A Miss Wharton takes over the position as dean and seems to hate Grace from the first moment she sees her.

None of this bodes well.  The news of Jean's clothing sale gets out, and Miss Wharton threatens Jean with expulsion and Grace with losing her position at Harlowe House.

I find it amazing what a big deal is made over the sale of a girl's clothing.  Gasp!  It is so shocking.  How could Jean commit such a horrible deed?!  What a huge scandal...

Running parallel to Grace's problems at Overton is Grace's conflict with Tom Gray.  Tom wants Grace to marry him, and Grace steadfastly refuses over and over again.  Tom decides to leave for South America, no doubt because of his grief over Grace's refusal.  It's odd how Grace then, finally, seems to miss Tom... Gee, I wonder where this is going...  I bet I can never guess.

I read this book in one day, so needless to say, I enjoyed it much better than the previous book in the series.

1 comment:

beautifulshell said...

I like Madge Morton a lot (faster moving, since it's only 4 books). I think the cross-promotion is kind of cool. There's another book where the Meadowbrook Girls show up, I think, or one of the guys in the Overland Riders books is related to one of them. Or something like that.